Today on The Book More Show, I'm excited to share my conversation with Scott Beebe, the founder of Business on Purpose. Scott has a rich background in diverse fields, from theology to pharmaceuticals, and now focuses on helping contractors and business owners streamline their operations.
In our discussion, Scott reveals how he built his coaching firm after a pivotal moment in 2015 when he found himself without a job. He shares how he initially started by conducting workshops and quickly found success by focusing on clarity and vision for business owners. His unique approach has grown his client base to over 114 businesses, primarily in the contracting sector.
We also talk about the importance of using specific language that resonates with clients. Scott emphasizes that while it’s vital to niche down, stepping outside that niche occasionally can lead to valuable insights and innovation. He explains how his book, "The Chaos Free Contractor," serves as a conversation starter that connects his coaching philosophy with practical applications for his clients.
I appreciate Scott's focus on providing accessible, actionable advice, and I think you’ll find his insights valuable, especially if you're looking to leverage books as a way to engage your audience.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
I discuss Scott Beebe's diverse career path, which includes telemarketing, pharmaceuticals, and pastoral work, before he founded a successful business coaching firm.
Scott shares how a significant career setback at age 39 led him to focus on liberating business owners from chaos and helping them prioritize what matters most.
The episode explores the importance of expanding perspectives through diverse experiences and the benefits of not being constrained by a niche in client engagement.
Scott and I discuss the value of personal input and creativity in content creation, particularly in an age dominated by AI, and the importance of crafting a well-guided narrative.
The episode delves into innovative strategies for book promotion and distribution, such as using audiobooks as long-form podcasts and incorporating handwritten notes in marketing campaigns.
We examine the concept of value through effort and intent, particularly in the context of books and gifts, and how personal effort enhances perceived worth.
Scott reflects on the writing process and the challenges of deciding what content to include in a book, emphasizing the goal of providing actionable insights without overwhelming the reader.
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TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Stuart: Welcome back to another episode of the Bookmore Show. It's Stuart Bell here and joined today by Scott Beebe. Scott, how are you doing?
Scott: I'm good, Stuart. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Stuart: Real pleasure, real pleasure. It's always nice to put a face to a name and I obviously see most of the books going through the system and the team will reach out with questions and usually chip in on the back cover copy at a minimum. But it's really great to connect with the person behind it and learn a bit more about your story and then share what you're doing with with the audience. Um, why don't we start with your background, then share with everyone who you are and what brought you to uh, what brought you to the call?
Scott: yeah, absolutely so. Uh, it goes way back. I grew up all over the united United States and ended up finishing high school and did university in South Carolina. So I met my wife there. We were married almost 27 years at the time of this recording, so that's a key part of my life and we share three kids together 24, 22 and 20. And so we're at kind of the empty nest staging at this stage and thoroughly enjoying it. It's been a lot of fun. You can see our kids too a lot, which is fun Still have two. Well, one's about to graduate university here in a couple of weeks. We've got one out and one is a rising junior, and so it's our world. But yeah, we met way back in South Carolina and then we like to joke. Usually when I'm speaking I'll start something out like this to say a telemarketer, a drug salesman, a pastor walked into a bar, and then I'll usually say there's no punchline, that's just my first three careers. That.
I did True story and the telemarketer while I was actually in theology school. So it's kind of a unique situation coming out of university, graduated there and then went to theology school for three years, graduated there with a master's degree and then went and sold pharmaceuticals for a little bit, was on staff at a church for a while, started a church for a while, went back to selling drugs legally, as we like to say for a while. We were also heavily involved in some faith based n-governmental work in Nigeria and did that for about 15, 16 years while I was working. Well, when we were starting churches, we were doing that while I was working on Pfizer. We were doing that and they asked if I would leave my Pfizer job and come be an executive director for them full-time.
Small, small, small organization, a little NGO. And so I ended up doing that 13 to 15. And then, at the beginning of 15, I was not a board member at the organization, but I was responsible to the board, and we had eight of our nine board members resigned on one day in February of 2015. And so it led to a sequence of events of me not having work anymore, and it was tough. I was 39, married, three kids and no job. Yeah, like to joke around.
Stuart: It makes it real right.
Scott: Yeah, it kind of stokers you up a little bit. We like to joke that my wife at the time this is not a joke, she was a public school teacher in South Carolina. So our joke, though, was that we were raking in the cash, so nobody needs to worry about us with all the money we were making on that public school salary. That was a Friday, and I had called a couple of buddies that coming Monday. They sort of knew what was going on behind the scenes, and so I told a couple of my buddies. I said, hey, I'm going to start a business coaching firm. And they said, oh wow, super exciting. We, you know, cheer you on so well. I wanted you both to hire me because we both own businesses, and so we put a super basic vision, mission, values workshop together. Both of them hired me to come in and do it Afterwards, never forget. One of them sat down and said this is the most clarity I've ever had in my business. What do we do now?
It was about two weeks after that, and I just made it, stuart. I just made it up around the conference room table and I just said I think we need to start meeting every week. And he said how much and I just threw out a number. And at the time of this recording, I literally just met with him again this morning. We've been meeting together for 10 years and he's still a client and we've been able to very graciously grow this business over the course of 10 years, just turned 10 a month ago and today we're a team of 10, about to be a team of 11. And we work with about 114, 113 clients around the country and we work with business owners and the key leaders between three and 100 employees to do one thing, and we do it really well. And we work with business owners and the key leaders between three and 100 employees to do one thing and we do it really well and that is liberate owners from chaos to make time for the things that matter. So that's how we got here today.
Stuart: It's such an interesting journey, isn't it? If you were to sit there at the beginning of that and plan it out, it probably wouldn't look anything like this, but kind of those little micro decisions and tiny stepping stones, leads us to where we are today.
Scott: That's exactly right. Yeah, it's a fragmented blueprint, as we like to say it.
Stuart: So the businesses you're working with now are they? Is there any strong connection between them? Are they geographically in the same place or similar industries? What kind of brought those 114 people to knock on your door?
Scott: Yeah, so the industry will kind of homogenize who we work with. Their first two clients we worked with were contractors and so that has sort of led over time that you know the word spreads, you start to speak that verbiage, the language we actually do, internal verbiage training as a team now around the contractor world. So about 86% of our clients are contractors or support contractors and then the other 14 are just sort of a contractor or have a lawyer. That's a friend that needs help.
And so they'll reach out. So we've got a smattering of those as well. The beauty of our system is it works for any business owner. But, as you're well aware, the niche of marketing. It does help to kind of niche your message down a little bit. So, we've certainly niched, and the majority of events we do are around contractors.
Stuart: And that's such a great point for people listening. You're not alone in the idea that the business can help many different people and there's always kind of this scarcity when you're trying to suggest to people of being more specific and choosing a single target market, because there's always this fear that, oh well, what about the other person that that message doesn't resonate with. Well, it's not like you're turning those people away, but you've only got so much time and attention to do the outbound focused stuff. So the more specific you make the language, it's almost like you're reading their mind before they even know, because you know the language and the framework and the nuances of that particular industry almost better than they do. In a certain way, have you found that in the outreach type stuff, the fact that it is very contractive, focused, that the language resonates and you were talking now about verbiage, language within the organization, that kind of it puts that resonance at a kind of a different level. It's really kind of getting in their heads.
Scott: Yeah, well, there's a credibility that comes in. When you come into a contractor space and say, hey, let's talk about whip billing, they're like, oh, I don't hear many people talking about this sort of thing. And then to be educated around it to be able to talk about it, to understand. But the other thing that we found is the things that we talk about are the things that are directly connected to the pain that they feel. For us to sit and talk about a variety of subjects is not going to grab the attention of anybody because they don't feel those pains. Those are pretty simplistic for them. But for us to sit around and talk about things like trying to 10 times your cash, like getting clarity, finding and retaining people, like those sorts of things.
We found that business owners in general, we all suffer from basically two problems. I know it's a list of 100 or 1,000, but they fundamentally boil down to two and it's people and money. And so if you took all of the ills that any of the books that come through your system are written about, they're usually written about people or they're written about money, either in that order or depending on the season. We're in an economic time right now where it might be money before people, but regardless, those are the two elements and the two challenges that people tend to sort of gravitate to and need help with.
Stuart: Yeah, it's so funny talking about that specificity of the language. I was just on a marketing marketing call earlier today, kind of a mastermind group I'm part of and someone on there was really talking about the benefits they'd seen. Kind of it's a group of 10-15 marketing people. We're all in it day to day but you still kind of forget about your own stuff and don't kind of take the time necessarily to take that 10 000 foot view that you would with client work.
And someone there was talking about a similar thing in that they had four individual campaigns, so they were talking particularly about Facebook ads, but four individual campaigns.
They were going for the exercise of making sure that all of the funnel further down so they're not just the first stage email responses but all of the next couple of months worth of touch points for that person that they were all consistent around the pain point that the initial campaign was talking about, because quite oftentimes people will run ads or they'll do some outreach or do an email and then people are just dumped in the bucket of everyone else. It is generally applicable to but having that specificity and understanding that we might have 100 messages but the person as they're coming in they're just seeing one at a time, it's, yeah, it's really worthwhile. I imagine the same for you as you, kind of the program that's universally applicable as you're tailoring that in the language and the use cases and the examples and the exercises that you have people do being the credible expert in the contracting space. It just really builds that rapport at such a faster level.
Scott: Yeah and rapport in this world, especially in the contract space, but, frankly, in any industry, the rapport is worth significant weight when you walk in the door, because one of the first questions they're going to ask is hey, do you work with people in our industry? Now here's the truthful response it doesn't matter. But the reality is we like to feel like that you sort of specialize in my thing. Why? It's because we want to be seen and at the end of the day, it kind of comes down to ego and understanding that. So, while that is the case, we had a coach get asked last week. Actually, we have a coach meeting every Monday at 4. And so we go back, just like your marketing meeting that you're talking about.
So we workshop things that we've experienced recently and they got asked by a really unique, specific trade. There's not a lot of these, but it's a unique, very, very specific, high-end trade. And they said hey, how many others like me do you work with? And we always kind of get paralyzed in those situations. We just want to go answer the question instead of going oh, what's the question underneath? What's the? In our business we call it a why drill. So imagine a why, asking the question why? And we're just drilling down.
That's not the issue. The issue is not do we have all this experience with people like you? The issue is usually something at a deeper level than that, and so can I ask why that matters as to who we work with or how many people like you work with? Well, the truth is, the broader the scope of the industry that we work with, the more insight we'll have into your industry, because we're able to get a lot out. So it's actually not helpful for us to only work with this specific type of contractor Now. The more contractor general yeah, that can be helpful, but the reality is it can actually be counterproductive the more isolated you are on just one thing, because you can actually miss out on a scope of other information that can help you be a little bit more creative in those things.
Stuart: Yeah, translating ideas from one industry to another is such a great opportunity because you don't necessarily get bogged down by the specifics and the details and all of the knowledge or the baggage that you bring it into the conversation. Being able to bridge it out is or the edges just get dull.
Scott: You don't. There's no innovation. When you're locked into one channel because you know it works, you just keep doing that thing, versus finding a lot of innovation around that thing when you can start to spread a little bit. Does that mean you ditch the niche? No, you don't do that.
The reality is, though, that, if you can still step outside of that from time to time, there are times that we don't work with an ideal client. You know, our ideal client is 300 to 100 employees, but from time to time I'll do a work. Just yesterday, actually, dr Horton, a huge national home building company with a region of theirs about 80 or 90 people yesterday, and that's outside of our scope they have 600 employees just in that region, and they've got they've got thousands of employees around the country, and yet I'm able to see not only some new innovative ideas, but, at the end of the day, we all kind of have the same problems, and so, when you deal with that, get outside of your niche for just a little bit, just enough to be able to grab some of that uniqueness. It can be a real nice perspective to see.
Stuart: Yeah, it's interesting about the way that we approach the book, similar to your kind of structured approach to the coaching, that framework that you're able to apply. That does become more universally applicable and then you're just dialing in the different, the tactics versus the strategies. The strategies are universally applicable. The tactics will change for each individual use case but, as you're saying, having a broad breadth of experience just gives a more colorful palette to pick from when trying to find that, that technique. It's interesting thinking about the difference in the use case as well, like that kind of specificity of language and building rapport and making people feel seen and heard and almost like you know the question they're going to ask before they ask it. That's more important at the beginning point of the journey when you're going to ask before they ask it. That's more important at the beginning point of the journey when you're talking to the broad number of people and encouraging those who are at the point of wanting to raise their hand and interested, encouraging them, those along, versus once you're actually working with them and then you're trying to expand their boundaries.
I was talking to someone a few weeks ago and they were describing it as um sell people what they want, because people are very vested in what they want but then deliver what they need, because what they need is what they need. It's uh, yeah, it's. That context is is interesting to you to see the difference between those? Um, that kind of brings us to the book conversation, and so obviously you've been doing this for 10 years now. The expertise and the knowledge that you've got pretty robust. You got a good number of clients that work with a lot of experience. What was the thought about bringing that together as a book? Did you have a particular use case in mind, or was it just you definitely wanted to get the information down? Or did you have a particular campaign? What was the kind of seed thought to get the project going?
Scott: Yeah, it's probably a little bit too abstract to be helpful in some cases, but I love books. I think it was Jefferson who said I cannot live, I cannot breathe, without books, and I actually I only read two books, cover to cover, by the time I graduated college and then when I got to theology school, obviously didn't have a choice, and so it put a jet fuel on the necessity of reading. So as I started to do that, I realized wait a second. I, you know, there's a lot of people in this world I'd love to sit down and have lunch with, let alone spend four hours, six hours, eight hours with them. And when you go around and realize, wait a second, when they take time to write a book, they've essentially taken the same stuff they would tell you sitting around a table. Fundamentally, I mean, there might be some darker secrets that they might share if you're sitting on a table one-on-one, but for the most part let's call it 90% of what they would share with you sitting around a table they'll share in a book. And so for the cost of, you know, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, I could sit down. Now I got to spend my time as well, but I could sit down with this person who thinks at a much deeper level around this one issue. And so, you know, over the last few decades I've just loved books, I've so loved books.
And then I started to realize, you know, I am stepping on the door of 50 at this point in my life, which for some is not old, for others is entirely old and for me, you know, it used to be where I couldn't see my 60s. Well, now they're starting to come into view, which means the 70s are not far behind, which means, you know, life ends at some point. And so you think about this idea of legacy and I know it's a little bit morbid, but the truth is, if we can capture our thoughts, man, how exciting would that be if you uncovered a treasure chest and inside was the words of your grandmother or your great-grandmother in this published thing Like that would be extraordinary to be able to see that and just to get insight and to hear their words, to hear what they were thinking at that time. You know that kind of situation in life, whatever time that would have come out.
So I've always had this underlying desire to write a book, more so not the skill and the discipline of writing. The book is super, super helpful, but you guys help with that, because I actually wrote a book before this called Let your Business Burn and I wrote the whole thing top to bottom, ended up hiring an editor. That was not super helpful, but you just it was kind of DIY the whole thing and you learn how to do the process and all the sweat, which makes me appreciate the process that you have all the better. But in doing that, it allows you to be able to get everything that's in your head out. So I would say that the primary motivation was to just get more things in my head out.
It's been about six years since I wrote that first book and what I found was when I wrote the first book, there was a lot of things that have changed over the course of six years. In coaching Because I would coach personally anywhere between 10 and 20 hours a week there's a lot of data input. One of those is one-on-one for one hour, so it's a lot of data input over the course of five or six years. When you do that, you refine your message over and over and over again. Then you start to realize here's the system I thought I had six years ago and now I really have it Now. In five or six more years it'll be even more refined.
And so this one, my first one, was about 240 pages and with contractors no offense to their intellectual capability, but they like shorter books with bigger font, and so I thought it'd be a good time to take a lot of the solid area that we have from a systemic standpoint, get it down into something that's very bite, sizable, and put it in a package that's easily to read. And so then I came across the 90-minute book system and I was like, if this is real, this is going to save me a lot of time, but, more important than that, it's going to discipline myself to put something out that is easy to digest, and I'm pretty guilty of as I'm probably doing right now on the podcast of just fire hydrant information.
Stuart: Right, I'm the same. It comes with the podcast of just just fire, hydrant of information. Right, I'm the same.
Scott: it comes with the passion of wanting to share, right you kind of that's right that's right boundaries actually, I feel like brought me a lot of freedom through this process of being able to get it out. So, yeah, the motivation was to have thoughts sort of bound in a place where maybe people today or decades from today could get access to it if it's helpful.
Stuart: Yeah, such an interesting point.
I would say probably 80% maybe of people, 70% maybe of people who we work with, are really coming from just the lead generation perspective.
It's really a tool to start conversations and then the remaining 30% is somewhere between a complete legacy project and just a personal story through to heading back towards that lead generation piece.
But I think, wherever people sit on that spectrum, this idea that the book, particularly nowadays, back in Jefferson's time or even in the last until 20 years ago maybe, if you wanted to get something out in the world and you were writing a book, the book was probably the be all end, all that. There wasn't much other opportunity for people to go deeper or find out more, whereas now, as you say, attention spans are different now than they were 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago. Attention spans are different, but also the ability to have a lot more information in different mediums is out there. So the idea that, whether a book is for a legacy project or a lead generation project, the fact that it's the conversation starter and then for most of us we've got other places where we can continue that conversation, just makes it far more effective, and the idea of beneficial constraints, as you mentioned, just means that the project is much more likely to get done in a way that is easier to do and easier to consume.
Scott: Yeah. Well, it was super helpful even in the process of going through and having these conversations in preparation for the book is to. I remember distinctly one point saying, hey, I've got all of these articles I can send to you, and Kim was so kind, she said, hey, I appreciate that. But point saying, hey, I've got all of these articles I can send to you, and Kim was so kind, she said, hey, I appreciate that, but it actually won't be helpful. What's more helpful is to get your stream of conscience out and do all these things. And I realized that we have been so guilty that when you own a business, when you run a business, when you're in the business, you're staring at this all day, think about it all night, and so all of these thoughts come together and you go, oh, I've got all of this. And it's like a really bad business owner bringing a box of receipts to their accountant Like, hey, you want to do anything. And I could just go.
hey, that's cool, but this would actually be more helpful. And so beneficial constraints around that. I think it's a good verbiage to be able to use. To go, yeah, that can be helpful, especially somebody who just sort of spins with ideas. To go, hey, we're going to put you in a little bit of a boundary and in that I think you'll find some real clarity that comes out of that.
Stuart: Yeah, it is so much easier. I was on a. I dialed into doing a little bit of competitive research. Yesterday I got an email for another book company and it was the sales letter was kind of all you need is a hundred words and then ai will take care of everything else. But kind of I was half listening to that as doing some other work and the challenge with all of the um, all of the push button solutions or all of the things where you just take a whole load of stuff and dump it somewhere and hope that the somewhere takes care of it. Or, like I said, with the box of receipts to the accountants here's, here's a whole lot, here's a hundred percent of the information. Now it's your problem to refine into something that's separating the data from the information or creating information from data. And the same is true of books.
We've got all of these ideas. Like I say, we've been in business for 10 years. We've got this huge volume of context that we bring to every single thought. Just dumping down someone. It's not helpful. It's either too much or overwhelming or gives them an excuse to get to it later, or it's just too unfocused. It makes sense to us because we can see the finished jigsaw from one individual piece. But this idea that we need to kind of spoon feed people whether it's a teaspoon or a ladle, whatever the right amount is in that moment, they're kind of stepstone them down that conversational journey and not just say, hey, here's everything, go at it yourself. And whether that is manually, doing it in a conversation or or doing it through email, or hoping that ai will just push a button and solve all of those, um, those conversational stepping stones, for us it's, um, who knows what the future holds, but at the moment at least, it's who knows what the future holds, but at the moment at least, it's rarely a one click option for anything. It always depends.
Scott: Yeah, well, and it's. It's uninteresting. This idea of a one click life is uninteresting to me. So if I if I, you know kind of get uncovered that I'm reading somebody who I deeply respect and all of a sudden I found out that they gave 100 words and it turned it into a 150-page manuscript based on what the cloud said for the last 2,000 years, that's not interesting to me. What's interesting to me is understanding your unique framework on this.
Now, I might disagree with parts of it. That's okay, but what it's done is it's stretched my mind. What doesn't stretch my mind? It actually makes me more complacent to think about this. I just got a new bike. My wife got me a bike for my birthday and our 10-year anniversary like our 10-year business anniversary, and all this stuff. So mashed it all together and she got me a bike. It's a mountain bike, came in a big box and it's awesome. I'm super excited about it. Well, what would make me smarter is to actually get the instruction book out, pull the bike out and rigorously go after it. What's going to make me dumber is to go on YouTube, which is what I'm going to end up doing. Go on YouTube and just watch the image and do what the image says, and so that's what that.
That's why I so appreciate books that people actually take the time to take their unique thought process and get it out on paper. However short or long it is, I do not care, but when I get to see it, I get to see it in their own vernacular and in their own packaging. To me, that's the uniqueness of this whole product is how it's not just the raw materials. Raw materials truly are commodities. Now it was just coffee, beans, rice and whatever were the commodities. Well now, data is commodity, knowledge is commodity. What's not a commodity is how we process that into an end product, and that's where books can really be, and I dread the day where Amazon's filled with a bunch of AI-generated nonsense with people's names on it.
But I also think, as human beings, we'll be able to filter through that and start to see really quickly. Yeah, this is uninteresting to me. We'll be able to filter through that and start to see really quickly. Yeah, this is uninteresting to me. What's interesting is the book that I just started yesterday from a Franciscan Catholic who gives a kind of a global worldview, not only critiquing the Catholic church, but also enlightening me to these other areas around religion. That's fascinating to me. There's much of it I may not agree with, but it's still fascinating to me because it expands my mind.
Stuart: It goes back to what we were saying earlier on about rapport. Most of us are in businesses that aren't unique. There's very few of us that are doing we're the only people who are doing this thing. So the difference is a kind of qualitative review. The people who do it poorly, that's known, and you kind of want to avoid those. But for the majority of us who are doing a adequate, very good job, then it's whether someone resonates with you as a business coach. There are other business coaches in south carolina, but the fact that someone resonates with you and the way that you phrase things and the language that you use and the experience that you bring a lot of businesses are surprisingly one-on-one. Even if we think of things in a digital world, there's still a very personal connection for most of us.
Yeah, yeah, well, when we think about the book coming together, now it's, it's, uh, the, the book's complete, it's out there, ready to use. Do you have a idea on ways that you think about using it at the moment? I know this was more of a not quite a legacy project, but definitely not just a lead gen for the sake of lead gen. As you bring it together, you had a clear idea of what you wanted to include, but did you have an idea of how you wanted to use it as well?
Scott: Yeah, we did and we're starting down that road. So with my first book, we actually I did an audio book, I recorded it myself, and I did the same for this one. This one actually didn't take very long. It's really nice, and so we've got it up in all four formats We've got hardback, paperback, kindle and audio book.
And when I go speak, I go speak a fair amount around the country and what we're able to do is get the audio book on a free version. And we found a lot of contractors like to listen to books and so we've got a QR code with it. And so when we go out and speak, a lot of times we'll just give the audio book away, because in it I'll refer to the URL that people can come back. And what I've found is it's like a really long form podcast that people listen to. And the cool thing about the audio book is I can riff on what I've read, or chapters or whatever, and so you can give a little bit more context around certain things that maybe wouldn't fit in the page structure of the book, and so that's been really helpful to be able to do that. And the cool thing about it is we do grab emails every time we give it away so we can see how many of these copies we've given away and we can retarget and go after that. We do a lot of master classes or webinars online. We can do that.
The other thing that we're actually going to roll out here in about three weeks is a simple direct mail campaign with the book, and so we're going to take the book, we're going to go to all of our past client list, which I think are probably 150 or so, and then we're going to go to our vertical over a period of a couple weeks, each and each of our coaches is going to handwrite a note. We're going to take the book, a handwritten note, we're going to have a one-pager that goes in there, and we're going to directly mail. The book costs a couple bucks I think two and a half on Amazon, and then by the time you mail it labor and everything else I think we'll have somewhere between $12 and $15, maybe $10 to $15 in each one going out, and there's something just about receiving. It's just going to be hard to throw once you get it, like you feel bad. I don't like throwing people's stuff when they've given me something physical, and so we think that will be really interesting. And then we'll do a follow-up phone calls and emails to the people that we send those to. So we've got that going out and we'll keep that in. And then we'll probably run a campaign.
We did a live event, had about 250 people there for our 10-year anniversary. We gave the book out to every person there. That was kind of our deadline. I couldn't believe that we got it done, but we had it all done. We had all the copies printed and everything ready to go. We actually had them about a week in advance, which was amazing to be able to send that out. And then the other thing that we're looking to do is actually encouraging our existing contractors to use the book as a book club within their business because it's so short. If the entire business can read it, they'll start to understand how the owner thinks at that point and so we'll give discounted copies for things like that.
Put them at five bucks or something. Just ship out a box of them so that they can do book clubs with them.
Stuart: That's such a great idea, the book club approach, because it really is. We did well, we've done a couple of books in the past for financial advisors, wealth management type people, because one of the big problems that they have is often they'll work with the mother and father figuring the family kind of as they're getting older, doing like the estate planning. But the the pinch point, the pain point, always comes when okay, we've done this planning, this is what we want after we've gone, but now we've got to communicate it to the next generation and actually they might not be happy with this or there might be some bone of contention or they might not understand or it might be a bit of a fractious relationship to begin with anyway. So the legacy books of the parents about their story and their relationship with money and what's important to them was using that as the jumping off point for the conversation. So almost less about the content and more that the content was signposting conversations that they could have. So the book club idea is a fantastic way of having a similar approach. But in the workplace environment you can imagine a scenario where employees might feel like it's a little bit forced or wrote or will get invited to this re-education workshop to talk about someone, but using the book as the framework for jumping off points about conversation, it just kind of neutralizes any of the baggage that people could bring in and use it really as a starting point for the conversation. That's a fantastic approach. Yeah, I like as well the idea that and again, it's something I'm always trying to encourage people to do so I love the fact that we get to talk about it as a real example is the um audio books.
People will often ask about audio books and I'm always and again, slightly personal preference, but always suggesting people do audio companions rather than audio books, because just reading the exact book, okay, that's that, that's fine, but how much value are you really adding?
But an audio companion, which is that adding depth and color to the individual pieces, the fact that you can communicate I'm a slow reader so I definitely listen faster than I read so the fact that you can communicate that much color in the audio companion is fantastic. And then the last point you mentioned about their handwritten notes. I think I've mentioned this on a few podcasts before, but the number of times we've had strategy calls with people where they've got a known audience, so the digital copies are great for that invisible audience because they're cheap and scalable. Because they're cheap and scalable, but the physical copies with a handwritten note as a door opener to then follow up with a phone call, so much more effective because, like I say, people see it as receiving a gift. It's something different. People are conditioned not to throw books away. They'll be on the shelf for years.
Scott: Well, and we can usually feel effort. I can feel if effort has been given towards something, and a lot of times it's. You know, you might get a jar of honey. You look at the jar of honey and go is this a valuable gift? No, it's a jar of honey. Well, when you find out that it's my dear friend Mr Dada, who lives deep in the bush in Nigeria, who had to get that bottle of honey, he actually would harvest that honey himself. He then has to take it to a friend who drives it to another village so that they can put it in and ship it. All of a sudden, the value of that honey. Now you don't even want to eat the honey. So we can feel the effort of things, even though the book itself is paper, it's paper and ink and all that. That. The materials are commodity. It's the effort that people feel around that that we can start to put value towards. And I think that's where the value comes in is to understand the effort that went into that thing yeah, I see that's super interesting.
Stuart: I've never really thought about that as a as an idea before. But the idea that energy never, never my lack of physics is going to come out in this butchered quote, but the idea that energy never, uh, evaporates, it just changes state, so right yeah telegraphing that effort and energy going into the pages and then coming out the other side. It transfers from from uh, from effort into intent or connection. Again Again, I didn't go to theology school, so that's where my this is why the AI generated book I will throw away.
Scott: There's no effort there to get that.
And so you know it's funny when you say, hey, I wrote a book, oh my gosh, you wrote a book. Well, if you just look at the book, it's just paper. It's paper and words. We all write paper and words. But what they're acknowledging is that you took the effort to care enough about getting your ideas out. You put structure to them, you put effort to this so that you can get on the page. So they're not wowed by the thing, they're wowed by the effort that went into the thing.
Stuart: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like you said, that effort and thoughtfulness and the idea that you had something that you really were passionate about sharing enough to go to the extent of getting it down on the dead trees and dead cows you've got is is refined refined more now in the second book than the first book. The examples you've got and the, the things that you want to talk about and include again, you've got a good set and understanding of what that is, because you've been doing it for years. Was there any um pushback or things that you felt you had to leave out or what was that line between? Okay, this book is going to be so many pages.
I want to make sure that it's kind of hitting the mark. There might be some stuff that doesn't get included. I'm always interested to ask people how they make that decision, because I've got a pretty robust way of thinking about it and, as we're doing strategy calls, we'll share that idea with people. But I'm always interested to ask people where was the line and was it difficult to decide what to include and what not to include?
Scott: It was not difficult in so much that I had a guide. If I didn't have a guide it would have been impossible. But having somebody there to pull these things out of me, to put things in Word pictures, help put in Word pictures, and I would come with plenty of pictures. So even as I reviewed the book multiple times, I'd be like, oh, I forgot that that was in there. So there were even things that I forgot were in there, that we were able to get in, which I was happy about. The only thing that would not make it are things that I think we would have known wouldn't make it.
I am a technical guy. I love the details behind how things work, and so my first book a lot of the book was around hey, here's a tool. Okay, now here are the eight steps on how to use the tool. Well, I learned over time that A couple of statistics have and maybe I learned this from you guys. I can't remember where, but I did hear that 48% of adults will not read a book in the next 12 months, and then one I heard was that 55, I think maybe I did pick this up from you all but 55% of the books that are purchased, never get opened, which blows my mind. And so, as I was going through this process, I thought the likelihood of somebody reading every step that I post is so illegitimate. I just don't think that's living in a fair reality at that point. And so I started to remind myself as I was going through and felt the constraint as I was going through reviews, going but don't we need to? And then I would stop and just go no, I think that's good enough, that's good, just go. Nope, I think that's good enough, that's good enough. And so there's a I forget the guy's name, but periodically he'll go through and he'll just say, okay, that's enough for now.
And I felt like, as I was going through the book, trying to sit in the seat of a contractor who's busy, frustrated, they're doing estimating and bidding around their kitchen table at 1130 at night. They don't have time to go into a deep research. What they have time for is to get a little snippet, find some level of insight that can sort of wake them up from this chaos and disorderly induced stupor and go. I need some help. And that's ultimately what we're trying to get to. First book.
We told people all the time hey, you can DIY this if you want to. We literally put the templates in the back and all that. And then we realized, not super helpful. There are people who will DIY it but statistically most won't. And so it's not helpful when you over-deliver, necessarily an information, but when you can put things in to where people go. I don't know what that is, but I need that, that story that you said.
And so, yeah, were there things that we couldn't put in? Yes, but they weren't, things that were missed, things that, quite frankly, felt me, helped me feel a little bit more refreshed, going all right, I did it. I didn't do the water high, the fire hydrant, this time I gave something. And then one of the best pictures I got, when they were all the contractors left our live event. I got a picture in the airplane from one of our owners and he had caught his two guys. One was the director of construction, another was the superintendent. He caught his two guys reading their books on the plane and they got both guys, who do not read a lot, got the entire book read on their flight. They had two connections, but they got the entire book read on the flight. They had two connections, but they got the entire book read on the flight back and I thought that's it, we did it.
Stuart: Yeah, when you think about the job of work. So often people say book and they default in whatever the index card in their head which has book written on the top of it. It's the Amazon storefront or Barnes and Noble, it's the bookshelf of traditional books. And it's such a disservice when we think, okay, that's what we've got to produce, because the job of those books is to entertain or to distract people.
they've got to justify a $20 price by being 300 pages long yeah those two guys that read 100 pages on a flight back home, after a concert, after a conference, when they're in the peak state to start thinking outside the box before they get home.
You can imagine if the book was 300 pages long and they willingly, with all intent and goodwill, meant to read it over the next however many weeks. And then, as soon as the plane touches down, as soon as they get back home, as soon as the kids start asking for something and the wife's got a job for them to do and they need to stick the laundry in and they need to do those estimates, for that they've put on hold for a couple of days, the likelihood that they're going to benefit is out of the window. Yeah, what they've got the opportunity to now do is start the thought conversation with what you were able to provide in the pages and then continue it out of the pages. This isn't a one and done conversation. This is just the first step, the starting point to this kind of active conversation that would continue for whatever period of time afterwards yeah, yeah, and I think the first book I wrote in the way that I would understand it, I spoke.
Scott: I spoke to you the way I wanted to be spoken to. I think this time around I was able to speak to you, the reader, the way the reader wanted to be spoken to, and I think it's. It's one of my managers at Pfizer used to tell us that all the time in relation to disc personalities and understanding a person's personality. So we've got to learn to speak to people the way they wish to be spoken to, and it's super helpful and I think we did it for the most part. You know good stories, real stories, given just enough to where people go. I see it conceptually, but also understanding they're never going to go do it themselves, and so, hey, here's how we can help with that.
Stuart: Yeah, it is one of the biggest things that I like about the process and obviously super biased, because I created the process.
But putting that aside for a moment, one of the biggest things I like is this constant idea that we've got of trying to get people into the idea of don't try and fix something in post.
What we want to do is understand what the job of work is and then outline and create the plan of attack for this particular job of work so that when we can record it and content and capture the content and then edit it to the edit it, but not not ghostwrite it we're making sure that there's no waste in the system.
There isn't some post-production magic that's going to fix all of this. What we want to do is make sure it's fit for purpose right from the start and not just kicking the problem down to yeah, down to future Stuart or future Scott. It's try and make it appropriate up front so that all of the rest of the processes is effective, rather than this idea that a lot of people will approach a project like this let's get that box full of receipts, let's gather as much stuff afterwards and then magically, some future iteration of ourselves will be able to distill it all into something. That's great, but that's where most projects get hung up, because it takes all of the energy to do that first part and then we've got none of the energy for the rest of it.
Scott: That's right.
Stuart: Yeah, I think it's a bit of a meme now that I always wrap up podcasts by kind of looking at the clock in the top corner of my screen here and saying, man, time flies, but it really does every episode. It'd be great if you got time down the road a little bit. We're kind of just in the first quarter now. Where are we april? Uh, if we circle back later in the year and then touch base and give people some feedback on um, how those projects have gone in terms of getting it out there, I think that idea of the handwritten notes I really love the the book club idea is that's the first time that's come up as an idea on the podcast so that as an idea would be really great to circle back. So if you've got time later in the summer maybe it would be really great to have you back on and talk a little bit about how it's going now.
Scott: I so appreciate what you all have built is such a gift, not only, uh, to the to the author's side of it, but to the reader's side of it to be able to distribute ideas, things that need to get out there. I, I think it's such a gift and so, yeah, I'd be delighted.
Stuart: Yeah, I'd be fantastic, and I think everyone listening as well would be super interested as well, because it's great to get the books out there, but it's even better to get them out there and then start getting some feedback and actually see them making a difference. I want to make sure we can share with people where they can learn more about you and what you do, so where's a good place for people to go as they're listening to this?
Scott: Yeah, so our website's a great hub. If you go to businessonpurpose.com, it's businessonpurpose.com, the name of the book is the Chaos Free Contractor and yeah, and probably a great place to go is just businessonpurposecom. Forward slash ask it's what's in the book, and so you could actually hop on with one of our coaches for 15. They reserve spots every week just for people that come in from the book or our ask website and put it out there and so, yeah, if you wanted to hop on and ask any questions, if you're a business owner three to 100 employees that's a great way to start.
Stuart: Fantastic. I'll make sure there's links to that directly in the show notes, as people are listening on podcast players. Just click on the button there on the website, then they can just get straight through to it, and I highly recommend it. I really love the framework that you've got and the the color that you bring to the examples. It really is a great book and well worth reading. Um, I'll make sure there's links directly through to it. And again just want to say thanks for your time, scott. It's really a pleasure to get a chance to talk and dive a little bit deeper and share some of your story with everyone listening thank you, stuart okay, everyone.
Well, thanks again. We will catch you all in the next one.