Marketing Expert Helps Authors Translate their Personal Stories into Bestsellers

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Full Interview:

Transcription:

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Steve Kidd Teaser 00:00

And you want people to know and trust you. Basics, going back to what we were talking about before, right? One of the very key foundational parts of selling is we buy from people that we know and trust.

So if we've all heard you can't judge a book by its cover, but the truth of the matter is we do judge books by their cover. And the same thing becomes true with your words.

Intro 00:23

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:50

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Steve Kidd. Steve, excited to have you on the show.

Steve Kidd 00:58

So glad to be here with you. Thanks for inviting me.

Gresham Harkless 01:00

Yes. Absolutely. Well, thank you for doing all the awesome things that you're doing. It makes it a lot easier. And, of course, before we get into some of those awesome things, I want to read a little bit more about Steve so you can hear about some of those awesome things he's he's been working on.

And Steve has worked with over four thousand people to write, publish, and market their books to best seller. His clients have included billionaires, Olympic athletes, doctors, lawyers, and world renowned inspirational speakers.

The books he has helped his clients create and market have impacted millions around the world. And Steve has run a marketing company for over 36 years and has been in Internet marketing for 29 years and has been doing book marketing for 16 years.

And I was reading a little bit more about Steve preparing for this. I heard that he's a 3rd generation minister, which I thought was pretty cool. And I thought he had a really cool story about how he got started with all the awesome work that he does.

He has a phenomenal radio show, which we got a little bit of a sneak peek of with all the awesome things he's doing. But I think one of the things that stuck out to me more than anything else is I don't know if you heard the book Outliers, but you had to put ten thousand hours to be great at anything. He's put 10,000 hours +++.

So, Steve, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

Steve Kidd 02:10

I am so ready. And in fact, it's actually February, so we are now officially at 37 years that I've been working in marketing. So I love it.

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Gresham Harkless 02:18

Happy thirty seven years then. Absolutely. Well, perfect. Well, let's celebrate from here. But I guess before we celebrate, let's rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started with a call your CEO story.

Steve Kidd 02:29

Well, I love telling this story because it's pretty cool. So way back when I was five years old yeah.

The story does go back actually that far. I'm 57 for people who wanna do the math, okay? My parents had bought my older brothers. I'm the youngest of three.

My parents had bought my older brothers some greeting cards and holiday napkins to sell to be able to raise some money. We were pastor's kids, and you learned pretty early on that if you want to be able to afford to be a minister, you need to do other things to be able to actually have money.

And my brothers went out knocking on doors, door to door and stuff like that and very quickly discovered that they didn't really want to be salespeople. Both of them ended up working doing cutting grass and stuff like that.

And they're a little bit older than me, so they're old enough to be allowed to use lawnmowers and stuff. But here I was, little five year old, I'm like, can I sell them? You know, and I can only imagine in my mom's mind just like, yeah. Sure.

She packed me up a little bag of them, and I went door to door. My brother was actually telling me the other day, they kept telling me, we've already gone to that house. Don't bother them. Yeah. But I, of course, knew no boundaries.

I went up there, and, of course, then I would come back out of the house with a sale where they had told them they weren't interested. The long story short, I ended up that day coming back with an empty bag and a pocket full of money, and I've really actually been in sales ever since.

Gresham Harkless 03:58

Nice. Absolutely love that. I don't know if that's the persistence or the naivete or combination of both that led that to happen.

Steve Kidd 04:05

Yeah. Well, the power of cuteness. I mean, at some point in your life, you have to actually learn sales skills because the cuteness wears off, and then people really actually want you to sell to them

Gresham Harkless 04:15

Yeah.

Steve Kidd 04:16

Versus just being sorry for you like you do. Every time the Girl Scouts come to your door with cookies, and you're hungry anyway.

Gresham Harkless 04:22

Yeah, absolutely. Or yeah. That's a good marketing strategy as well to our business model maybe is being able to have cute kids to be able to sell those things too. That's an option.

Steve Kidd 04:31

Gotta figure out how to adopt doing books for people and their marketing, having a cute little kid. Businesses and stuff and be like, hi. You need to have a – I'll work on that. Bestseller.

Gresham Harkless 04:42

There you go. There you go. Well, no. I absolutely love that and love how everything got started, and you just ran from that ran with that, I should say. And it sounds like you've been able to understand the importance of sales and marketing to just build upon that.

So was it like that consistency that happened throughout your life where you're always doing some type of sales and marketing, and then you're like, hey. I need to go ahead and start a business?

Steve Kidd 05:05

Well, I've been self employed literally my whole life. I was working, for a sales company in high school, came out, and was a Sales Manager by the age of 19.

And it wasn't very long thereafter. We're talking 1987, so I was two years out of high school, and, I had an opportunity for one thing that people it was literally a radio station that was looking for equipment for their station, and I made some contacts.

And from that, I ended up with a little, shared office space one room shared office space in a company, and we've been going ever since. And one way or another, selling their marketing stuff.

Gresham Harkless 05:46

Nice. I love that. So, I know you touched on a little bit about one of those things that has evolved and changed, which is being able to help people to write books. And I know that's what you do.

Could you take us through a little bit more on, like, how you do that? How you make that impact and serve clients you work with.

Steve Kidd 06:01

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So I love working with people who their number one objection is I don't have the time. Everything's time versus money. You could especially these days with YouTube, you could probably spend your time and learn how to do just about anything.

Now just because you could learn how to be a doctor, please don't go out and operate on people. Most things you could learn to do it. You could become very, very wildly successful at it. But when you're already busy, when you're getting it done in the world a friend of mine actually wrote a book. It's called Stop Doing What You Suck At. I love the title because it's so pointed.

And that's really the key is so I can use something like Zoom. We all know and are used to Zoom. And I can get on with a CEO, a business leader, a thought leader, whoever that might be. And I can just get them talking and interview them and pull all of their information out of them.

Back when back in the 2007, 2008 when I was originally doing this, we would take recordings of keynote speeches and turn those into books. Now we can actually just have them talk about it and help turn that into books. And then now right now, we are beginning to get some things with AI.

I will tell you there's never gonna be a time when AI is just gonna take over. I've seen some of those things. You want it to still sound like you. You don't want people to read AI's book and then come to you being this keynote speaker someplace, and you're like –

Gresham Harkless 07:31

Who are you?

Steve Kidd 07:31

This guy doesn't talk anything like that. So it is important to have it in your voice, but it can come in and it could say, hey, did you consider this kind of thing?

And so there's some even some cool stuff right now that we're on the cusp of that are, you know, still coming in and helping us do the same thing, but hopefully do it in an even better way.

Gresham Harkless 07:50

Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's the beautiful thing of being able to not do either or but do both and better. And I think if you're able to find that combination of tools like AI or whatever technologies there might be, it could it provides a really great opportunity.

But I really love what you said about, I often forget I often say and people forget that we forget about the human aspect of business and how that comes out, I imagine, in the books and the things that you're saying. So being able to realize that the book is sounds like an echo of who you are, and if it's not written in a way that is an echo of who you are, then again, it just creates that misalignment.

Steve Kidd 08:21

Yes. It really does. And you want people to know and trust you. Basics, going back to what we were talking about before, right? One of the very key foundational parts of selling is we buy from people that we know and trust.

So if we've all heard you can't judge a book by its cover, but the truth of the matter is we do judge books by their cover. And the same thing becomes true with your words. That's where, I always shy away from saying what we do is ghostwriting.

I do have folks that identify themselves as ghostwriters that are on my staff, but I work really hard with them because the difference with a ghostwriter is they're gonna come in and put their personality into the things they got from you.

And what we really wanna do is capture your words and bring that out onto paper. And we may need to do some things to make it literal literate radically.

Gresham Harkless 09:16

Yeah. Let me ask you this. I was gonna ask you a little bit more for what I call our secret sauce. It could be for yourself, the business, our combination of both, and it makes you unique.

But I almost wonder if your ability to I'm gonna use the word translate for people to help them to be able to showcase who they are, understand the sales part. Do you think the ability to be able to bring all those things together is part of your secret sauce?

Steve Kidd 09:37

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, I like to say, I don't understand why God gives each of us gifts that he does. All of us have our different gifts and talents. The interview is one that I've really held on to myself because it is something that is uniquely something I could do.

It's not that I can't teach you how to do an interview and get out the basic things, but there is a whole lot of intuition and empathy that comes into it when I'm interviewing a person that I can really be able to help them dive deeper into it. I love the quote. It's actually on my website.

Cheryl said, finally, for the first time, I can see my voice. People have been telling me for years I need to write a book, but I never could really wrap my head around it. And now I see and understand what my voice is and what I need to say. And those are the kind of things I love bringing to the table for people.

Gresham Harkless 10:27

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or even a habit that you have, but with something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Steve Kidd 10:38

One of the things I like to do, and it's not that I'm opposed to bookmarks, but when I see something that I want to follow-up more on, I will open another tab for it. And a lot of people do that. But also what I do is I will pull that tab out so you can have multiple instances of Chrome.

Right now, I probably have fifteen instances of Chrome. And each of them then has tabs. And so I try to keep them organized so all of them are things that I'm researching about book marketing just as an example. I'll keep all of those in one instance of Chrome, and then there are multiple tabs.

But even then, if I can get that article and you really do want it, I'm not talking about the one that you skim through it and then toss it aside, but you really wanna go deeper with it, hopping that tab out and then putting it into its own instance of Chrome and putting it down there is a really great way to keep that where you can get to it easily.

Because if you just bookmark it, bookmarks aren't as easy as they used to be, and it's really easy. Especially the more you bookmark things, the further buried you get, and then you can talk about all the things you have to do to organize your bookmarks. But when doing that and then you can read it, and then you can just you pull up that tab, you read it, you go through it, save whatever you need to out of it, and then you can close that out.

But it's a really good way to be able to keep the things that need to be present in front of you, really quickly and easily at your hands. And then I also use that secondarily for the things that I know I need every day. I have those already open. So when I come to my computer or the rare incidences that my computer gets turned off, when I turn on my computer, that's the very first things that come up is I'm going to use these different things every single day.

I'm gonna be on that tab once to twenty five thousand times a day. So I just leave it open rather than having to have to go through all the time of typing that in or finding the bookmark or any of those kind of things. That's at least how my brain works.

Gresham Harkless 12:39

Yeah. I love it. So what would you consider to be a little bit more of what I like to call a CEO nugget? This could be like a word of wisdom or piece of advice, something you might tell to to five year old Steve, or potentially you might tell to your favorite business client.

Steve Kidd 12:52

I love the phrase. I can't take credit for it. It came from, Lily Anderson who I worked with. Lily Anderson Brown. She got married since I was working with her. Lily had a statement that always stuck with me. And it's this, people don't care how much until they know how much you care.

You can get just about anybody to do just about anything in your business when they understand the why. And that starts by them knowing that you truly care about who they are as an individual, and then you take the time to explain to them why that's important, both to you as well as to the company.

Gresham Harkless 13:29

Yeah. I absolutely love that. I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So Steve, what does CEO means to you?

Steve Kidd 13:39

I've been thinking about that one a lot. And the first thing that came to my mind when I very first thought about it was an old friend of mine used to always say, first level of management is learning how to manage yourself.

And it's about really being the chief executive of you. So that's where it starts. But more specifically, to answer your question, that one just keeps running through my head. More specifically to answer your question, the CEO really needs to be the person who doesn't just have a vision, but makes that vision so that it inspires other people.

Because and all too often, and I'm guilty of it too because I'm a high creative. We have in our head these amazing things, but we don't take that other step of using that to inspire the people that are in with us to see how amazing that is and buy into what's doing. And that's, to me, that's really the heart and soul of what makes a good CEO.

Gresham Harkless 14:36

Yeah. I absolutely love that. Steve, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more.

So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best we will get out of you. Listen to your radio show and find out all the awesome things that you're working on.

Steve Kidd 14:53

So, of course, my radio show is called Driving Entrepreneur. We just passed our nine year anniversary. You can go to wehelpyouthrive.com and hear literally every episode that's ever existed.

To connect with me, the easiest thing to do is just simply go to ongoingwealthguide.com. I've got a free gift there for you. It does have included in it my hour and 10-minute write your bestseller in one hour workshop that is part of one of those five steps that are in there.

And what I wanna do is show you that it doesn't matter what the bank account says today. If you have a system, you can always have the ability to generate the kind of wealth that really matters, and that's the kind of wealth to do the things you're meant to do in this world. And so that ongoingwealthguide.com is yours for free, and I even did something special for your folks.

When they get to the thank you page of that, there's a little link there, and you can actually book to have fifteen free minutes to talk to me about anything you want to in your marketing or your book or any of those kind of things.

Gresham Harkless 15:59

Nice. I truly appreciate that. Thank you, Steve. We're gonna have the links and the information in the show notes as well too so that if I can click through, listen to your radio show, of course, be able to take advantage of all the things you've been so kind in terms of, giving them away.

So thank you so much for all the awesome things that you're doing. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Steve Kidd 16:17

Thanks for having me.

Outro 16:18

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Want to level up your business even more? Read blogs, listen to podcasts, and watch videos at CBNation.co. Also, check out our I AM CEO Facebook Group.  This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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