Don't Let a Weak Personal Brand Hold You Back in 2025 (With Finn Mckenty)

I felt like YouTube is the place for me 130 million views later like now that's a thing I can hang my hat on when you say like I'm a really good maybe a great marketer I don't know what that means I get people to buy opportunity goes to people who are the most visible not necessarily the people who quote unquote deserve it here's how the world works right and you're like y information's almost at the price of zero now you need to build a personal brand because visibility is sort of oxygen for opportunity I did not know that you were Chris from blind until like a year ago oh my God so what have you learned in your experience in terms of like how to get people to buy stuff because everybody wants to know that hey Finn happy to have you on the show your background is really unique and that you spent over 15 years as a designer working with some really big Brands but I think you came to this point in which you thought maybe design wasn't it for you and you very kind of unusually got a degree in business so when we talk about the business of design the design of business I think you're the living EMB body of that like I learned business through my coach and Mentor but you actually went to get a degree in it so there's lots of things I want to get into it with you so for people who don't know who you are can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit of your story about how you got here my name is Finn mckeny everybody probably knows that most people know me from YouTube I have two channels one is called the punk rock NBA where I talk about kind of music history stuff another one is just my name where I talk about sort of like it's twitch highlights just sort of like more fun silly music kind of content um but like you said before or you know I was on I didn't start YouTube until I was 38 so we both started a lot later than most people do um before that I spent my career and I still do like product design and marketing to me there's no distinction between product design and marketing and like it's all the same thing it's like what are we going to make and how do we get people to buy it you know and and so my brain probably thinks about design a little bit differently than most people's does I sort of tricked my way into the agency World um I did some work for like Nike and Nintendo and Red Bull this agency around 2001 or something like that I did terrible work for them I'm sorry I apologize to the to the client uh it was not good work but you know I got my foot in the door the thing I did that probably was the most foundational for me was worked at an agency in Cincinnati called uh Kaleidoscope where I worked on a lot of stuff for Proctor and Gamble like tide for Breeze bounce Swiffer I think that all the Swiffer stuff or at least the majority of Swiffer stuff that's on the market now we we designed um and a lot of stuff for for Breeze as well and so I really learned a lot that's when I switched from design to business because from being exposed to PNG I still think they're the best marketing organization on the planet um I was like oh actually the problems that I'm interested in solving you know really the domain of marketers more so than they are designers and I was in school at the time I started later for reasons we can talk about if you want and I was like I think I should probably switch my major which was scary because I had spent the last you know whatever like almost 10 years like really convinced that I wanted to be a designer but it just sort of became clear to me that like I think I'm a good designer but I'm not great whereas when it comes to like marketing I think I'm like naturally very good at it so I was like well I guess I should take the leap and I did make that switch but I got three I went to school for design at UC for three years and it's University of Cincinnati which was a really good program and and then I finished out the degree in business and so I feel like I got two degrees in one which was awesome even though it took longer and it was more expensive after that I worked at a startup called creative live that a lot of people in your audience are probably familiar with we did online education for Creative people primarily photographers like wedding and portrait photographers but also did a lot of stuff you know with design and Entrepreneurship and stuff like that then I started YouTube and I'm also a partner in a company called urm Academy that does online education for music producers and here we are that was a lot to unpack there so I'm going to try to figure out the timeline here okay and I should say I was a big fan of blind back in the day back when I did some Motion Graphics stuff and I did not know that you were Chris from blind until like a year ago oh my God yeah like I was a fan of blind 20 years ago I've been following your content for probably close to 10 years and I didn't know and so that sort of ties into some of the stuff we'll probably talk about the importance of telling your story and that the stuff that you think is glaringly obvious to your audience is not when you talked about you thinking of yourself as a designer doing product design people use one term for two different meanings are you talking about indust design or digital design both oh so you're going to make it even more confusing for us so Kaleidoscope was an industrial design and Engineering agency so like this were for Wet Jet and dry mop and we did a lot of medical devices and stuff like that when you said you went to school for design at University of Cincinnati and you did three years and you switched Majors was that before you were working or you did that after you started working so I started out self-taught okay and thought like oh I didn't I don't need to go to school for this it's just a piece of paper I can teach myself and I did and I'm okay but you know I just sort of had to be honest with myself I had some other friends that did go to school for design and I saw that they were like getting a lot better than I was at 24 I went back to school and I'm glad I did but you got real world working experience and you probably have a better frame to appreciate the education I mean if you had gone when you were 18 you might have finished your degree and not even thought about business I went to college for one quarter when I was 18 I did not want to be there I didn't pay attention I barely went to any classes so when I went back as an adult yeah I wanted to be there I loved it I went to every like office hours and study session like they had an amazing design Library there with all these like super rare books you know from all these old like you know International style books and stuff like that from the 50s that you can't get anywhere and so I would go to the library and read all those and I took full advantage of that opportunity so were you six years older than everybody else yes how' that make you feel you know it's another it's a little humbling um but it's but I wasn't so old that it was like weird you know 24 and 18 it's not that big of a deal you know um do you know what I mean maybe it felt like it at the time in hindsight it's like basically the same age I went to U Bible school later in life because I didn't know that yeah I was raised Catholic but I didn't do the full bit so I needed to do that and the reason why I went to Bible school later in life was because as a kid I just kept cutting Bible school I just ditched and of course I never completed it only takes a year to like do but I just didn't stick to it so by the time I was doing it I'm like let's see here I'm kind of Junior High almost getting into high school but there're like little kids there right and so I always felt like I'm superior to you cuz you're just a little runt and for the first time I'm like big literally the Big Man on Campus I'm like did you feel that at all like because you had had experience you've worked you're more mature you're older did you feel like you had an edge on the people you know maybe a little bit and I'd been humbled many times in my my you know sort of attempt at a design career I could not get a job anywhere really like I sort of you know I managed to like sneak my way into these agencies and braah blah blah and like it sort of worked but like I was not even sniffing the opportunities that I wanted and I had to sort of admit to myself it's CU I wasn't good enough you know by the time I was there I think my ego like obviously I had some experience and like I don't I I I didn't discount that but my ego was sort of I think um properly in check you know the specific thing that I think I was missing like a lot of self- toop people and I don't want to knock self- toop people because there's some amazing ones but I was missing the fundamentals like I I could do like flashy trendy stuff like that first year in that program you don't touch a computer at all and by the time at the end of the year I was like okay this is like the exactly what I needed maybe I should stop thinking I know everything okay so let's fast forward to the part where you're talking about like you're switching Majors now and you're going to study business that seems like a pretty radical switch I'm curious because I've not gone business school myself what do you see the overlaps in terms of like the Creative Design brain and then what you learned in the business program I don't think there's a lot of overlap in terms of the the brain but there's a lot of overlap in terms of the skills in other words like we've all experienced you know when marketing people run design projects and you know maybe it doesn't go as well as we would like um when designers run businesses that typically also doesn't go the way we would like and if I also have the ability to either do the design myself or better yet work with somebody who's better than me um I can work with those people better than probably 99% of other marketers because you know because I understand their job I think I understand what it is when you say you're not maybe a great designer there are a lot of people who could do better but when you say like I'm a really good maybe a great marketer I don't know what that means so can you define for us what that means to you I get people to buy [ __ ] okay so what have you learned in your experience in terms of like how to get people to buy stuff cuz everybody wants to know that I would say that the things I learned the foundational things I learned from like Proctor and Gamble I still use all the time so for example there's a the the the big Insight here I think is like fundamentally like marketing is applied psychology like if you understand how the human brain works then you sort of understand how to fit into that there's a a term that Proctor and Gamble came up with a framework called ACB or accepted consumer belief which basically is like to understand what people already believe to be true about the category in which you're working and we don't get to decide what people believe what they believe may not necessarily make sense it may not be true and you have to meet people where they're at so for example from doing research uh they found that people um I don't know if they still own Pantene the shampoo brand but they used to um they found that people believe that hair should be nourished which is not actually rational because hair is not living tissue and it can't be nourished and they're not deceptive at all but like the way Pantene worked at the time is it has a lot of silicone in So It Coats your hair and it makes it feel thicker and Fuller and Lusher it makes you feel like it's nourished figure out how your offer can slot into people's existing sort of mental model and fulfill some psychological need at the most basic level help people feel more safe how did they come upon this idea that people believe that your hair needed to be nourished so they would have like PhD anthropologists go into people's houses and watch them do laundry for a week and come out with all these like amazing insights like that about it PNG uh as far as I know is sort of the the the the company that invented a lot of the methods that we use now like ethnographic research and I don't know how they do things now because I haven't worked them with them in a long time but that's how they would do it just lots and like they invest lots and lots and lots of money into you know talking with consumers and just understanding what they do and why they do it so how did they then use this idea that people want their hair to be nourished how did they message that or communicate that we understand that and we we're going to to give you the solution to that idea so there's another um another framework they have called the reason to believe or rtb which is so there's a claim that your product does or service does whatever the reason to believe is the specific objective reason that I should believe your claim is true they also make Bounty paper towels let's pretend that it works like this so the thing they would always do in commercials is like AB comparisons like they show you know Bounty versus the leading brand and they you know wipe something and the Bounty one you know picks up 30% more whatever it is um you go wow okay that looks cool well how does it work the reason to believe is that bounty has patented magic thirst pockets in it you know made with blah blah blah technology here's the accepted consumer belief here is the benefit of the product um and the reason to believe is uh the way the consumer will believe that your product will deliver on that benefit I remember watching a lot of commercials in my youth and I remember seeing a lot of those demos where they wet things and they put something heavy on it and the competitor breaks apart it doesn't it pushes water around instead of absorbing it but even as an as an unsophisticated consumer of marketing messaging I always a little suspicious like I think you cheat these things people may think that you know again that's one of the things you need to understand is like you just figure out through testing these things like is is this a believable claim you know is the is this reason to believe effective you know and that's the sort of thing you find out through all the different methods that they have of testing you know they do all kinds of focus groups you know when you to certain stores they know how you're shopping this aisle they see exactly where your eyes go right so you know they'll test that and get them pical feedback on it and adjust Proctor and Gamble and probably their agency have created very memorable campaigns C this day I haven't bought a paper roll paper towel in some time but I still remember Bounty is the quicker picker upper so it's like a tongue twister something like that and you'll remember these things or that Snicker satisfies I don't know why it does but they've told and i' I've mentioned this to my friend when I'm walking through the grocery store and I'm a little hungry my stomach's grumbling I'm like Snickers I'm like no not Snickers no that's not real food right but it has peanuts it has protein right exactly that's the reason to believe so do you remember anything that you worked on and have a pretty clear road map from the whole the accepted consumer belief was this this was our claim this is the reason to believe so this is the benefit of the proof where you can walk us through it so that we can see it end to end like let's pick one thing no because I was a pawn in that machine but I was so that's an example of like I was there and I learned but this is like this is sort of what leads me to to YouTube is like you know you did good work but can you like just you answer me that question like okay well tell me how you did it you're like well I didn't really do it I was part of the team and I believe that I did good work but can I really say that like this was my thing like no cuz there were 100 people that worked on this you know I was just executing what the creative director gave me so can I really say that that was my like I mean I'm proud of it but it's it's tough you know let me restate the question I don't mean to describe something you've done from beginning to end but one where you can highlight this is what they told us and this is you don't have to be involved in at all I just want to see it from beginning to end because you mentioned the accepted consumer belief for Pantene as nourish your hair but we don't know how it ends then you're telling us a little bit of bounty but we don't know what the accepted consumer belief was I just want to see your understanding of it as it's mapped across anything it could be a case study has doesn't have anything you have to touch on to make a long story short they came to us with some research that said hey we've talked to people and they told us that there like basically we have permission to do something called FaZe sport like we asked them hey would you know would you be interested in fre breze Sport and everyone said yes but we don't really know more than that so could you do some exploratory work to just show us what that might be we had a good relationship with the design manager and the brand manager so I think you know we had a little bit of room to run with this and that was like a natural fit for me because like I I know a lot about sort of you know lifestyle marketing from you know coming up in sort of the skateboarding world and stuff like that I've been around like lots of sports and stuff like that so this was like something I understood very well and so what I wanted to help them understand is like um how something like for Breeze sport like how you would need to change the the brand sort of play in the world of Lifestyle marketing what I I think could credibly say that I helped them understand is the importance of sort of rather than what they would do with any other fre product is just drop it right into Walmart because as they would say they have one and a half customers one is Walmart the other half is everybody else what I wanted them to understand is that in this category you need to start by getting the credibility of the people who are most influential so first that starts with like athletes like hardcore athletes which is a very small number of those people but they have a lot of currency so like if you know somebody you know whatever like let's say you do CrossFit and there's a guy you know your gym that's like uh you know that that competes in the CrossFit games that's the person or girl whatever that's the person you would ask her like hey what shoes should I get and then the next ring out from that would be sort of you know the Walmart consumer they're looking to you right like hey Chris I know like you have a trainer right like what is what kind of shoes does he tell you to get right so this is how it works and you can't just go right to Walmart because if you just go right to Walmart then it it has no credibility I persuaded them to do user research rather than doing it in Cincinnati which is what they wanted to do I persuaded them to do it in San Diego um where people are a lot more active you know a little bit more represent resentative of who we would want to sort of Market this to so and that was really eye opening for them because these are mostly people from like Midwest and so we're talking to people who you know these were like professionals that had you know finance jobs or whatever but they're like yeah I get up every morning at 5:00 and I go surf for an hour before work and they're like wow then we sort of understood um how these people um the role of odor Management in in their lives which it's like really I have no idea if this is what you wanted to talk about but um this is the sort of nuances of like where you're talking about where like design meets marketing we talked to a bunch of these people like there was a personal trainer there was like an MMA fighter um girl that did like yoga was like a I don't know probably 15 people or something like that and we asked all of them like well do you smell they're like do your clothes smell bad when you're working out they're like yeah they smell horrible they're like what do you do about it and they're like nothing I don't care I'm like hm interesting would you use for Bree Sport and they're like yeah that sounds cool like what for I don't know so we're like this is really interesting odor plays a role here but nobody seems to have a problem with it so but what do we do we talk to him a little bit more and found out that odor plays a role at home so they would tell us how they would do all this crazy stuff like people had all these kind of workarounds for that this is a thing that PNG calls compensating Behavior so we sell these compensating behaviors and realized okay the opportunity here is that what we want to do like odor is fine in The Athletic Zone like when people are actually at the gym or on the field it's fine there odor is not fine at home and so the the the role of this product is to prevent the transfer of odors from The Athletic Zone to The Home Zone and so we came up with I think four SKS uh to do that like for example a sachche that you put into a gym bag that would eat up the odor on the way home so that when you open up your gym bag when you get home you don't get like blasted with this disgusting you know wave of vile scent um and I actually did do quite a bit of work uh graphic design work there I sort of helped sketch that up so I don't know if that answers your question oh that was a complicated story to try and figure out okay sorry I don't I I'm going to treat you like a hostile witness now what was the accepted consumer belief for for bre sport I don't remember to be honest with you cuz this was 2009 but the thing that I do remember is like that the the the the Crux of this was like preventing the transfer of those athletic odors okay that's the the that's the Insight that you the benefit yeah that's the we're okay here smelling bad which they shouldn't be but and then we're not okay here smelling bad and athletes realize there's a lot of Funk that travels with them so this is going to create that barrier so that you don't transfer odors so was there like a tagline or some messaging or a campaign that was built to reinforce that message it was there was but it was done by different agencies so um and I don't remember what it was to be honest with you but um um well I mean this is like when you're the thing is I mean you've experienced this I'm sure is like there's five different agencies working on this and I have no [ __ ] idea what the other ones are doing like I never see it unless I see it on TV or something I'm like oh that's what Lor did okay cool that is all true and so I think you're highlighting a problem with large Communications teams across multiple disciplines and then different companies that you said you describe as a pond the the way I usually describe is like we're one tiny gear or Cog in the whole watch right it's like we do our part and somebody the clock maker is orchestrating all this stuff to come together okay but I try to be like the student of advertising and marketing because I want to be able to apply this we got to take a quick break for something really exciting this video is brought to you by us the future are you ready to Kickstart your creative career and build a business doing what you love whether you're just starting out or you're switching careers or starting something new with Decades of experience we can help accelerator is your fast track to building a killer portfolio and Landing those dream clients you'll get training and experience on everything from lead generation and building your networ to closing the sale and project management with over 100 video lessons weekly coaching and personalized feedback from the future team you are never alone an accelerator learn more about the coursework community and coaching you'll get as an accelerator member head to the future.com accelerator take a behind the-scenes tour or try it out risk-free for 30 days with our moneyback guarantee we'll see you inside all right back to the video if I threw a problem at you you could just pretend to like do it cuz you're like I'm a good marketer I could do this let do it okay and my audience is going to know this I'm going to speak very selfishly right now okay I've noticed some some Trends some alarming Trends the trend that I notic is that AI has made educational products information products worth almost nothing so across the board people who sell information products who who did really well I'm not talking about books because books an information product but online digital courses that study at your own pace kind thing I sell these by the way so I'm interested okay this is good we can talk about this a bunch of my buddies are in the same space I'm like oh it's not going well the trend line is moving down it's moving down pretty quick because people wrongfully or not believe that they can just ask chat GPT clot or one of these other programs or software AI things H teach me this thing and it'll just teach you and they think that's better because they spent $20 on that and they get a lot more than just a course so if I am now in this place where we see our core sales go down which is true what do I need to do to tap into some of your marketing prowess whether it's following the ACB rtb program or not what do I need to do to like run a marketing campaign to get more people interested in it well I I'll maybe answer this on the product level um because I think that product and offer level I it starts there so to me the education value chain has four parts um number one is the information delivery number two is um feedback of some kind whether that's you know student to student or um you know or or teacher to student number three is credentials number four is job placement of some kind I don't actually think that AI replaces the first part of that but let's let's say that let's even say that it does for the sake of argument let's say that you know perplexity and chat GPT does the information delivery part well there's still that's one part of the value chain right and um as of now it can't do the other three parts so I would say if all you're offering is the information delivery piece then that's your problem I probably push back on the belief that um that AI is even effective at the information deliv part it's probably okay it's probably it's okay I think here's how I would say about it here's what I'd say say yeah like chat GPT perplexity they're pretty good I would say you can get a solid b or B+ answer out of chat gptm things and if you're okay being a B+ then keep doing that but I don't think you want to be a B+ I think you want to be an a since we're in the same space though let's try to reverse engineer this pretend like we had these cultural anthropologists these researchers with phds what do you think that the the accepted consumer belief is cuz I like this concept very much I'm trying to figure out how I turn this into something so you tell me like I'm surprised to hear that that's even true because I feel like creative people are the ones who I think are the most skeptical of uh of of generative AI so I'm actually surprised to hear that even in your space that that that's true can you tell me more about that well across the board friends that run educational companies like our sales are down you know who I'm talking about Patrick Flynn uh oh yeah Pat Flynn yeah Pat Flyn yeah Pat Flynn released his video information products are dead and he started to chart the the how his sales have died and what he's doing to Pivot he talked about it and I talked to my buddy Daniel Priestley Priestley is like yeah information's almost at the price of zero now or that's the perception and so maybe it's the larger market perception and not maybe into the niche of creative folks and a lot of the products we we sell that make us money aren't necessarily designed for teaching creativity it's teaching business parts right so we just isolate the business fundamentals like pricing strategies negotiations things like that they might find a comparable solution with perplexity GPT or Claude or something like that I would say that there's a a general like so there's a guy named U Michael reporter that has like a a framework called yeah the five forces so like thread of substitutes I would say has increased quite a bit um and rivalry there's more people making courses so like those five forces you know would contribute to like lower profitability in this sector um AI is one of those but I'm not sure that AI is like the primary causal Factor here if it is specifically AI I I would probably talk about it one way if it's just like hey there's a lot of free information out there that's pretty good that's I might talk about it another way say the accepted consumer belief is there's a lot of free information that out there that's pretty good is that okay for ACB it might be something like I don't need to buy a course because the existing free information that's out there is good enough um and and I like I might say something like yeah that's true um however number one it's only free if your time has no value are there some good let's let's talk about YouTube are there some good uh YouTube videos about pricing for creatives like yours absolutely and you're going to spend a whole lot of time separating the wheat from the chaff and if and if you're cool with that like when I was 19 I had way more time than money and if you have more time than money I think you should do that I like to give people options and let them decide right so like say if you have more time than money you should just use all the free stuff let's look at how many videos there are like whatever I'll I'll take the top 20 videos about you know pricing for creatives this is a total of whatever you know 18 hours of content do you want to spend 18 hours sorting through all this and figureing out what's good or bad or would you rather pay me $100 and I'll just give you the good stuff now I've got to prove to you that that's the good stuff but like I I would argue like is 18 hours your time worth more than 100 bucks I hope so okay is that the reason to believe the reason to believe would be like in your case your accomplishments right like you can trust what I say because I did the following things and I've also helped however many students do the following things so the reason to believe is the objetive proof the proof is that like I did the following things and I helped my students do the following things can other people say that I would say there's probably only a handful of people in the world that could make the same claims that you could so basically it is some version of value based pricing because I'm selling your time back to you so if you don't think your time's valuable keep using the free products because that's one challenge with the free information we don't know what's good and what's not good yep some of it's good right but some of it's not and then we probably can make a list of two or three of those problems like okay say it's good but is it actionable this was a helpful exercise and I think you kind mapped it out so is there anything else that we need to do once we identify and talk about this is there an additional step or is that good enough for the marketing campaign well then it gets into the execution the people listening to this that's where you're going to shine is like if you understand that this is sort of the framing like how do we express that to people in a way that you know that that's persuasive to them so if it were a static thing what are the words that's copywriting what are the images that's art Direction and then if it's not static meaning it's a moving thing now we have to get into like what is the script what are the visuals in sights and sounds that we're seeing and that's in the realm of creative folk yep exactly so like for example one way you could do this would be like I said to take the top 20 videos about pricing for you know designers and you know show a list of those like in a playlist and be you know at the bottom it's like total running time 16 hours and 21 minutes you know and then compare that this is like an AB comparison like compare that on the other side to you know Chris's course on pricing for designers you know total running time 52 minutes like which one of like this is an examp example of like education where like more is not really better like do you want a 16 hour course on this like some people do but probably most people like not really this is good and I've worked in advertising inside advertising and adjacent advertising I kind of know what it is like so the strategists and the marketers get together and they figure this kind of nugget out like people believe this this is the problem with this and that's critical because if that brief is wrong creative is screwed and then creative have to take that and then turn it into the quicker picker upper or something like that so they can take complex ideas and turn into like a catchy pneumonic device a heris that you can can absorb just do it is an example of that right or the real thing okay so this is one of those ones where the free information seems pretty good at the front of it but maybe we then reframe it as free is sometimes like noisy and no one likes noise or it's too much clutter it's a mind clutter you know and so maybe that's where the creative part comes in so that's the is that the kind of the the approach and this is the part where I realized the creative part like I'm okay at it but I'm not great at it I'm certainly not as good at it as you are or a lot of other people watching this is this is the part where I learned my role is to just sort of um to pass that on to the creatives and then I'm like you're better at this than I am I trust you I think that what makes me effective in that role is they can tell that I have genuine respect for them because cuz I know their craft like I can see how good you are at this you're [ __ ] good at it you're better at it than I am and I love watching you do your thing so like my job is just to help you do your job the best that you can and I think that's where I shine I like this okay that was really clear so you're a marketing strategist and then you need to bring in copywriters and art directors to do the other part H i' say I'm pretty good at the copyrighting part but okay so you're good at copywriting so that's that's creative to me yeah but like the design piece design okay the visual aspects of it that abber cromie are so [ __ ] good it's insane okay you're dealing with like like illustrators and designers that just it comes out of their Poes right so like in that moment you're like H I think I need to switch my focus here that was very helpful so I'm going to just quickly recap for folks okay I I I don't know too many Industries or services that are out there that isn't feeling some level of competition either because of inflation things are tight interest rates are up or whatever it is or AI or just too many options right now we live in a time of abundance and so you're competing against everybody who wants to do what you want to do so the first thing that you said was let's look at the belief and then you challenged the belief saying that could be one reason but could it be the this other thing and so we need to make sure because otherwise we're building a whole strategy on a false premise Y and in my case you're like maybe it's just like there's just so much free stuff that's out there that's really the problem and AI is just one point of the spear not the whole Spar itself and so then we have to kind of then ninja flip that to say like okay if that's so good what is the potential problem with that and then broadly we can say well if you have a lot of options maybe that means you're going to spend a lot of time and if you have a lot of time that's not a problem so young people have a lot of time and not a lot of money older people have more money than they have time and you would say then your most valuable asset is your time and so would you rather spend money getting it from someone who's credible who's done it before who who can teach you the way and then you can be on your business and go make money so that was the entire way of looking at that problem and I think there's going to be a lot of people who really need to sit down and take note of this and then start to think about how to apply it in their life now I want to go back to something you said earlier because you highlighted a problem I guess I'm surprised too you're like I've known about you here and I've known about you here I didn't know those two people were the same people yes I was I was like what that's Chris from BL like how could that be like if you followed that us at all okay so I'm going to tell you my bubble and then you're going to you're going to burst up bu it's like well from the outside world it's not like that so i' I started a service design company called Blind we made commercials and music videos for 25 plus years and my biggest challenge at that time being in Los Angeles was to make sure I can grow blind beyond my name and me so that I'm not doing all the work we pretty successfully did that MH but often times clients would say where's Chris in this where's Chris what is he doing and we'd have to explain like no why I'm making sure that all the things are getting done but I'm not actually in any of your projects right now so it's shocking to me that if you followed us that you would know because within that sphere of people in the motion design space they would probably think blind and chriso are synonymous I was on the outside looking in you know I I was living in Cincinnati then I'm from Seattle but you know went to school in Cincinnati and so I was just looking at this stuff on the internet I just saw your reels that's all I cared about you know it's like they have a cool reel and I'm going to copy it so that was that's my experience of blind just like I thought your reals were awesome and so did lots of other people for anybody who doesn't know like blind was like very you know like I would say very like hype at that time a lot of people were like copying you guys really top of the food chain back then and like lot for minut we were top 10 I think in the world for a minute the interesting thing is then I think as the future here I am doing my thing I've mentioned blind and talked about the work we used to do so I think then naturally so again that's my the name of the company very often though I knew you did motion design but you didn't say blind at least I mean I didn't watch everything but I watched a lot of it because we would also do case studies we would show things that we're doing and watermarked in all those frames is the word blind and the logo and we would talk about this so that's the message here as as much as you think you've saturated that point there's a good chance a large portion of your audience does even know what the heck so the necessity to tell your origin story or connect relevant points you need to keep doing that over and over again and this is probably why large multi-billion dollar brand friends repeat the message to you over not months or years but decades decades so that when you go to Safeway you're like Snickers really satisfies I know they got me on that I mean think about Gary vaynerchuk I think is the master of this like half the people listening to this could probably rattle off his origin story right now yes he's done enough times now how do you combat when when a creative person hears that it's like God he's just incessant about telling that same story and that same example the same four pieces of advice Hustle do this grind garage sales you know how do you help them overcome that belief like I only do inbound like I don't do any outbounds so everyone that comes to me is already sort of bought into the way that I see the world and the way that like I the way that I do things and sort of like one of my foundational things is like you got to do what works like we don't get to choose the rules of the game we just got to play them so like if you were to think about there's a slider between idealist and realist um which idealist is like the world should be this way and a realist is like here how the world is you just got to adapt I would be far on the realist side and I'm not saying that's better or worse it's just where I am so I choose to work with people who are kind of pragmatic realists who would just be like oh you got to say the same four things over and over again for a year all right let's do it yeah but there are times when that's also you know maybe going to hold you back whereas I would say that I'm not Innovative enough like I'm very good at doing the same thing over and over and over again for [ __ ] years but um there are times when maybe I need to be pushed out of my comfort zone a little bit so you know I think one's not better or worse than the other you just have to recognize where you are and when you need to maybe adapt Finn on that note what are the three or four things that you need to repeat over and over about th let me outline a challenge that I'm having right now so maybe this will help other people um and if you have any advice I'd love to hear it yeah I have done a lot of stuff in my career like obviously the the you know sort of design and marketing stuff like that's one part of it and so one of the reasons one of the things and also like my dad was a corrections officer so I sort of know a lot about that sort of side of things um and so one of the things I've noticed has made me very effective with some of my clients for example there's a woman I work with who like sources products like in China and stuff well I spent a lot of time in China and Korea and Indonesia at abomi like going to factories um and so when I talked to her I was like oh well actually I know a lot about your world and she like okay great let's work together so one of the challenges I have is like how do I communicate all the stuff that I have done so that people will understand that I have pretty deep expertise in their business how do I communicate that without sort of the waters are just like barfing out all the stuff that I've done because that's just sort of super unfocused so I can talk about some of the ways that I'm trying to do that now if you want but that's like a a challenge I'm having right now which is probably very similar to a lot of the challenge a lot of people listening to this have is like man I've done all this different stuff how do I wrap that up into one sort of thing that communicates my value but doesn't overwhelm people there was a campaign that was run by an editorial company editorial meaning like to edit commercials and they would run ads in age and things like that or creativity and their their line was the tagline was always everyone could use a good editor and they would take this really long ass speech and it would delete or cross out all the words and they would then find the most profound thing and it would be funny and interesting like to be or not to be but the rest of it was garbage and that's what a good editor does so I think what it is is that all of us have complicated like a rich tapestry of stories but they're not really all relevant and no one really wants to hear all of them so the way that I teach people and it's a it's a derivation of what Russell Brunson talks about in his secrets that to be an attractive character not physically attractive but to attract people to you there's four things you need right and I kind of modified it slightly so number one is you need a compelling backstory so let's focus just on that okay you need a compelling backstory and the compelling backstory to me has three core components your origin like where were you born who were your parents what did they do your birth order and all that kind of stuff because you said you were raised in Seattle y okay so we know things about Seattle Seattle was the the music epicenter for grunge and a bunch of different things the birthplace of Starbucks it's it's rainy and cloudy so there's things that we know about that and that's not that complicated if you're middle child the firstborn the last one there's things that people know about that and especially if you had a rivalry with an older sibling that forms you and so that's clue as to who you're going to become okay and it's part of your identity that's part of the cultural currency so if I say I'm from South Africa Africa or I'm from uh Vietnam or I'm from India we automatically assume certain things both good and bad and that's just part of your currency this is where it gets interesting some point in your life there's an inciting incident where the world is no longer the same for you something had happened and it's a clue to the person you're going to become so scrub through your timeline and find that point in which you're like I think that was the first time I started to see the world differently and I could not see it the same again what was that point for me um that's when I started doing YouTube so I was 30 ate then really nobody cared about me or knew who I was like I felt very invisible um and that's not a good feeling um especially me getting older I'm like this is not good you know to make a long story short I just sort of I I felt like YouTube is the place for me um because the platform had changed you know I realized it wasn't just stuff for like little kids 130 million views later like now that's a thing I can hang my hat on and I no longer like it's interesting like I feel like the other stuff I've done in my career is actually more interesting and cool but the accepted belief among my audience is that the fact that I built this YouTube channel is actually the most interesting thing about me so I I lean on that this might be your defining moment story but when was the first clue that kind of tension that existed and usually there's the resistance right because people hear this like oh get on YouTube like no I don't want to and they will say I don't know have anything to say I'm not good on camera no one will listen to me and so the inciting incident isn't where you figure it all out but it's like the moment where it starts to become clear and that clue I did did a course with a friend of mine who plays in this band called periphery that some people might know everybody who showed up was a fan of his and they're not really a fit for the course and I was like oh this is a and and I I sort of put the course together for the most part um and I was like oh this is a problem like I don't have an audience to bring to this I'm just relying on other people's audiences to get attention for everything I'm doing and so I was like I need I see what he can bring to the table I see what I can't I need to have what he has this is perfect this is exactly what we want to do all right so we have these stories we put them in a container and we have to look at it through the right lens and the way that I do it is I figure at a very short title usually just two or three words doesn't have to be a complete sentence for you to be able like that's the story I want to tell the first story my origin story is how I went from Saigon to Santa Monica so I can tell you that whole story y number two this story is of the three three names Rudy Brad and Dean there are three people who are not super connected but somehow lead me to discovering that you can be a professional graphic designer Dean was a professional graphic designer that I met while running an errand for Brad to pick up type setting this is in the early 90s right this me kind of figuring out that graphic design could be a field of study and my world changed I didn't know such a thing existed that there were professional creative designers earning a real living I didn't know that either much later yeah you see what I'm saying so that that sets me on a path not the final path and that's my inciting incident the final path is the two JS Jesse and Jose which lead me to my my trip to YouTube so Jesse is my wife she's sitting in class with me she's like this is your magic space babe but the container for this is too small can you play bigger than this than the 12 students and I'm like I don't know what that means until I meet Jose the the second J so that person says hey let's get on YouTube I'm like I don't want to get on YouTube but when I do that whole thing changes my life forever this is what I do now so Saigon to Santa Monica Rudy Brad and Dean and the two J's that's the complete compelling backstory so what you do is when you go out there depending on who you're talking to you're like um you can you can quickly recall those things and it's very easy for you to talk about cuz they're containers for the longer story so in case people are wondering what what the other things are so you have to have a a compelling like collection of stories uh curated so that that you need to have which you have plenty of yeah you have to have uh character flaws because no one likes perfect people right pixars 22 rules of Storytelling we admire characters more for their struggle than we do for their success and the last one is you have to be a correct contrarian you if you say what everybody saying no one's going to listen to you so you have to find out like what conventional wisdom is and you have to find the way that you say it differently and I'll give you an example of that most people say as a teacher as an educator you want to create safe space so that everyone can feel feel seen heard and valued when I teach I say I create unsafe space because I want it to be full of friction and because friction is where the magic happens right but we have to learn to be brave enough to go outside our comfort zone so it's with a wink it's still safe but there might be a moment here or two where you're going to feel a little uncomfortable uh and I stole this from someone else Trevor neon thank you I've always given him credit for this but it's a good one which is uh opportunity goes to people who are the most visible not necessarily the people who quote unquote deserve it and we can all think about a time where that was true of like someone that got promoted when you're like she's not actually good at her job but she's good at making herself visible to exec here's how the world works right and you're like H yep that's how it is and then that opens the door to them like okay well what should I do about it and that's when I can open the door to the other thing which is like well you need to build a personal brand because visibility is sort of oxygen for opportunity get them to buy into that once you've got them to buy into that that opens door to your offer you just sort of lead them there just logically it's like well if you believe all these things then the next step is my offer and they're like cool I'm in as a marketer and as a person who can write well I'm going to suggest you do one thing take whatever your friend Trevor said and turn that into a much more digestible repeatable thing and then that way you don't have to mention him anymore so one one version of this is to say changes work so I don't have to give him credit anymore well like you elevate it you transform it right it's a transformative work like one way of saying that to me and it's a Twist on something very familiar which is it's not what you know it's who knows you which would be able to take that you know your knowledge and your skill only takes you so far but that takes the visibility part in so I'll do that quote Christo like the you got to write your just do it and then everybody understands like wow that was so profound and you create that lightning rod for people to remember right but these things are always a work in progress you know I'm sure like I know you're always refining this stuff yeah usually you see a reaction of the crowd like oh you guys like that okay let me work on that and sometimes in the moment you say it and it Rhymes and or there's a literation you're like who's smart today who think they're smart vitamins today you know all right I did that the big takeaway the thing that I think we everybody needs to figure out is what are the fundamentals of making creative and engaging content about any topic because there there's a very diverse audience who tunes into the podcast yes um I will give you my framework for this um so again it's sort of it's sort of a spin on the uh the ACB which is so what you want to do is it starts like understand that the fundamental to all of this is emotional engagement of some kind and if you can't figure out an angle in which they have emotional engagement here keep working on it until you do so for example like again going back to the fundamental like need for human safety like being comfortable in retirement that might be a thing that people have emotional attachment to so keep working on it keep poking at it until you find an angle on the thing you pick the thing you want to talk about and then find a way to package it such that it's a topic people have emotional engagement to so I'll give you an obvious example of this is like football unpack the existing beliefs that people have about this thing about football so NFL football is better than College uh another one is that they've changed the rules and now the game sucks uh another one is that football is unsafe and nobody should play it these are three beliefs and then under each one of those beliefs your content is either going to validate or challenge that belief so for example we take the belief that NFL is better than college football you could make a video or you know real or whatever it is it's like college football sucks here's why and you say there's no defense and blah blah blah blah blah and like NFL football is the best sport in the world here's why College sucks you could do the opposite and it would still work right you could say like NFL is boring and the guys play it safe I like college because they go for it blah blah blah um either of those would work because we're working with something which people have an emotional engagement to either you know they identify as a a pro football fan or a college football fan generally speaking it's sort of easier to get a lot of Engagement by challenging people's beliefs however if you challenge people's beliefs too much they will probably think you're an [ __ ] um so there's sort of I think of it as a credibility Bank um that every time you validate someone's beliefs you're putting money into that bank I don't know exactly what the number is but let's say it's like 60 or 80% validation of your audience's beliefs so that they understand you know I believe you I trust you we're on the same page here and then so then when you're like okay guys I got to tell you something you may not want to hear but I think you need to hear which is the following then you have currency in the bank to cover that withdrawal okay that makes sense you're talking about things that people really care about but what if I'm in a really boring space you got to keep poking at it until you find a way to make people care about it and there's always a way always always always I'm going to give you an example yep I'm an accountant is it the tax thing sure I mean there's lots lots and lots of different ways I mean it's like I would sort of want to get a little bit of this better sense of like who exactly your clients are entrepreneurs are these like families like yeah entrepreneurs entrepreneurs okay why do people hire you like perhaps um I would say cash flow management is probably a challenge for a lot of our entrepreneurs especially people in the agency World which is we did the work but we're not going to get paid for you know 30 days if we're lucky realistically you know we're going to have to chase this invoice down meanwhile I've got payroll coming in so I would perhaps talk about like that sort of challenge that entrepreneurs have of like you're doing the work business is good but cash flow is tough and you're stressing about making payroll all the time it doesn't have to be this way work with me and I can help you sort of get out of this like monthly stressor that you're experiencing all the time does that make sense yeah it makes a lot of sense okay that was a perfect example and applaud you for doing that so if you're an accountant and you're working with entrepreneurs the the subject of cash flow is kind of boring it's like taxes like okay now what so you're saying find the emotional engagement or the hot button that that triggers people in like oh I feel that that's something people have a lot of emotional attachment to yes making payroll okay that was that was a great example thanks for doing that okay so I think that was very clear high level understanding of this um I'm I'm going to make the assumption that this is what you help people do yep okay so outside of the punk rock stuff that you do and reacting to punk rock and bands that's like a whole different Lane that you're in but the way that you really make money or how how you're an adult is you actually help companies figure out their marketing yeah I would say entrepreneurs like typically solar preneurs because I accept lower budgets like I know I can make more money if I was working with companies I don't want to do it I don't need to do it so I just work with entrepreneurs so I don't have to deal with all that you like to work with entrepreneurs and you help them figure out how to make their boring messaging not so boring and specifically grow on LinkedIn and YouTube do you have a framework to do that I have lots of them and I could explain all of them but it would take us another uh another hour and a half but if you thought the other stuff that I said was smart it's you know similar stuff to that so where where can people go to find out more about some of the stuff that you do you can go to Finn ment.com that's f i nnmc C Ken ty.com or look me up on LinkedIn would probably be the the two best places to do it thanks for hopping on our podcast sharing it I enjoyed hearing your story and I think you gave us some really tangible things to do thanks very much for being a guest on our show today thanks for having me I am Finn mckeny and you are listening to the Future