The Language of the Poor
There is a question that stalls progress, kills momentum, and keeps talented creatives trapped in a loop of inaction. It is the language of the perpetually stuck.
“What if?”
Entrepreneurial philosopher Jim Rohn called it “the language of the poor.” Not because it predicts financial status, but because it predicts a scarcity of action. It’s always framed as a negative. What if it fails? What if they say no? What if I’m not good enough?
For many creatives, this internal monologue is mistaken for intellectual rigor. They call themselves “overthinkers,” wearing the label as a strange badge of honor. As if deep, cerebral contemplation is a virtue in itself.
It is not.
Chris Do is unequivocal on this point. Overthinking is not a superpower. It is a symptom of a deeper issue. “We only overthink when we fear of negative outcomes,” he explains, referencing the work of Erwin McManus, the founder of the Mosaic Church in Los Angeles. “Overthinking is playing out all the negative outcomes in a perpetual loop.”
You never overthink when you are excited. You don’t overthink a vacation or a hobby you love. You just go. The hesitation, the need for more data, the endless analysis: it is all a sophisticated form of procrastination fueled by fear.
The alternative is a fundamentally different operating system, one that defines nearly every successful person Do has ever coached or mentored.
A Bias Toward Action
According to Do, the greatest predictor of future success is not talent, intelligence, or resources. It is something much simpler and far more powerful.
A high bias toward action.
These are the people who leap before they look. The ones who build the plane as they are flying it. “I barely finish my sentence and they're already executing whatever it is that I've said,” Do observes. The instinct is to move, to implement, to test in the real world rather than in the sterile environment of the mind.
This trait is not about recklessness. It is about an implicit trust in the process of iteration. It is the understanding that clarity comes from engagement, not from thought. You cannot steer a parked car.
Interestingly, Do has noticed a pattern among the highest achievers he encounters.
“There is at least some anecdotal coincidence that the people who tend to be the highest achievers have some background in military or police,” he states. “It's because they're trained to put aside their identity for a minute, follow direction, and achieve a result.”
In high stakes environments like boot camp or field operations, survival and success depend on a clear chain of command and immediate execution. There is no room for a debate on the merits of an order. This training builds a powerful mental muscle: the ability to subordinate personal doubt to a trusted system.
This contrasts sharply with the creative who needs to know more.
- “Why does this work?”
- “What evidence do you have?”
- “Why would it work for me?”
Do explains that for this group, “there's no amount of information that will satiate their desire to know more.” The request for more data is a defense mechanism. The real goal is not to gain more knowledge, but to delay the moment of action and the potential for failure.
The Mentor Protocol
Action without direction can be chaos. The key is to channel that energy through a proven framework. This is the role of a mentor, a coach, or a teacher.
The protocol is simple, yet most people get it wrong.
“Pick somebody that you trust, like, and you think has good intentions for you,” Do advises. “Do the things they tell you without modification, as closely to how they've instructed you, first.”
The crucial part of that instruction is “without modification.” Many aspiring creatives believe their situation is unique, that the advice needs to be tailored before it is even tested. This is ego masquerading as logic. “They're like, ‘cool, I'm going to do that,’” Do says, describing a common failure pattern. “I'm going to make four calls, I'm going to say this thing instead. I'm like, that is not how you do it.”
He shares a personal example. When working with a personal trainer, he followed the plan exactly as prescribed. “He said eat this, I eat that. He said measure these, I measured those things. He said move this way, I move that way.” Only after several months of consistent execution did he begin to adapt the routine to his own schedule.
This methodology is a practical application of Shu-Ha-Ri, a concept from Japanese martial arts that describes the stages of learning to mastery.
- Shu (守): The student faithfully follows the teachings of one master. They repeat the forms and techniques exactly as taught, without deviation, building a solid technical foundation.
- Ha (破): The student begins to break from the master’s traditions. They understand the underlying principles and can innovate, integrating knowledge from other masters and sources.
- Ri (離): The student transcends the forms. They are no longer learning from others but from their own practice. They create their own approaches and become a master in their own right.
Most people try to jump straight to Ha or Ri, wanting to modify and innovate before they have mastered the fundamentals. This is a recipe for stagnation. The fastest path to growth is to embrace the Shu stage: find a credible system and execute it flawlessly.
From Theory to Transformation
The result of this mindset shift is not theoretical. It is tangible, life-altering, and measurable in dollars, confidence, and freedom.
Carrie G., after attending a personal branding workshop, described the experience as “truly transformative.” She explains, “Chris has an exceptional ability to guide participants to deep dive within themselves… I unearthed aspects of myself that were challenging yet crucial.” The process wasn’t just about marketing; it tapped into what she calls “unresolved childhood trauma,” treating pain as a “point of power.” This is a far cry from a simple lesson on social media growth. It is about fundamentally re-aligning how you show up in the world, a change that Do explores in What Successful Personal Brands Do Differently.
This internal shift creates external results. Lauren K. landed her first project over $10,000, stating, “I would have never had the confidence to land something like this before.” Accelerator member Michelle landed a $21,000 job from a cold outreach email, three times larger than her previous best. Tumi, another brand strategist, secured a $24,000 agreement with a 50% deposit paid upfront, “no questions asked.”
The theme is clear: confidence is not a prerequisite for action. It is a byproduct of it. Diego, an artist manager, saw a dramatic shift in his effectiveness in just two months. “I'm already three times a better artist manager [and] business owner,” he says. This isn't just about learning new skills; it's about the self-trust that comes from applying them.
Even seasoned professionals find new levels of proficiency. Nadine, an experienced designer, found the Stylescapes course to be a revelation. “Your approach will be a game changer for us as we move forward and remove the guessing out of the client-designer equation,” she wrote. For her, it was about refining a process she thought she had already mastered.
The impact extends beyond single projects. It changes the entire trajectory of a business. Nick, a Futur Pro member, saw his agency’s prices increase by 40% “without a hitch.” More importantly, he “regained time to spend with my family.” This is the ultimate return on investment. As business expert Blair Enns says, every dollar is a thank you note. Nick’s story shows how to earn more of them, a concept Do and Enns dissect in Masterclass In Talking About Budget.
These are not just testimonials. They are data points proving a hypothesis: when you stop overthinking and start doing, your professional world is transformed.
Building Your Design Toolkit
For those ready to move from analysis to action in the field of brand identity design, a clear path is essential. It's not about consuming endless content; it's about a focused curriculum that builds foundational skills in a specific order.
The first step is mastering the craft of visual identity itself. The Brand Identity Design course with James Martin, known online as Made by James, provides a comprehensive, end-to-end walkthrough of a real project. It is a masterclass in the tangible output of design, from initial concepts to final deliverables. Students don't just learn theory; they look over the shoulder of a practicing professional, demystifying the workflow.
But a beautiful logo is not a brand. The visual identity must be built upon a strategic foundation. This is where many designers fall short, focusing on aesthetics without understanding the core business problem. This is a critical error in positioning, a topic Do dives into in Developing a Winning Brand Strategy.
The Brand Strategy Fundamentals course, created by strategist Anneli Hansson, fills this gap. Hansson, a former chief marketing and branding officer based in Stockholm, Sweden, teaches from the agency and client-side perspective. The course provides the strategic language and frameworks needed to move from a pixel-pusher to a strategic partner. It transforms the conversation with clients from one about fonts and colors to one about business objectives and market positioning.
With strategy and identity design skills in place, the next layer is presentation and process. How do you communicate your strategic and creative thinking in a way that builds client trust and eliminates subjective feedback?
- The Perfect Proposal: This toolkit addresses the first critical touchpoint. Do states, “appearances do matter… perception is oftentimes reality.” A proposal that looks and reads professionally immediately positions you at a higher level, allowing you to command higher fees. Many users report adding a zero to their prices and getting an immediate “yes.”
- Stylescapes: This is the bridge between strategy and design. It is a method for pre-visualizing a brand’s world before a single logo is sketched. It aligns the client on a visual direction, saving countless hours of frustrating revisions. “The people who do this swear to us that they'll never do it the old way,” Do says.
- The Style Guide Kit: This addresses the final handoff. It provides a system for documenting a brand identity, ensuring consistency and empowering clients to use the assets correctly. For many designers, it’s an introduction to using programs like InDesign as a system controller rather than just a layout tool.
This curriculum is a system. Each component builds on the last, creating a holistic skill set that allows a designer to control the entire branding process from initial client conversation to final asset delivery.
The Choice Is Simple
The gap between where you are and where you want to be is not a knowledge gap. It is an action gap.
You already have enough information to take the next step. The podcast you just listened to, the video you just watched, the book you just finished—they all contained a piece of the puzzle. The challenge is not in acquiring more pieces, but in putting the ones you have on the table and starting to build.
Will you spend another year gathering intelligence, weighing options, and playing out every negative “what if” scenario?
Or will you find a proven map, trust the guide, and take the first step, even if your hands are shaking?
The choice is between the paralysis of contemplation and the momentum of action.
As Do puts it, it’s not Chris Over-analyze. It’s not Chris Contemplate.
It’s Chris Do.
“Shut up and do it,” he says. “Just do the work. That's what's going to create the results.”
TRANSCRIPT
[Music] w [Music] w [Music] [Music] w [Music] w [Music] all right welcome everybody it's so good to see you what's up say hello in the chat I uh would love to know where you're coming from Chris say hi to the people hey people Ben Burns I noticed when you speak really loud into
that mic you're peeking so oh no know you're fine now but that initial hello almost blew off my eardrums so I'm doing good good to see you Ben and I just want to say hi to every single person it's been a hot minute when I say minute like two and a half three
years since we've done one of these things Live on YouTube and we're we're using streamyard which I don't use often but I know other people do so hopefully everything's going to work today with that a glitch absolutely it's wonderful to see all of you Kia Ora oh we got Puerto Rico we've got
Ethiopia in the house and then amster Dam I see some friendly faces in here Tyler Hoff hello Michael mandragon Charles good to see all of you yeah this is great we'll get started in one minute we're just want to let everybody filter in make sure that they find a home this Montana Lisa
good to see you hey Tim good to see in the chat lots of familiar faces here oh there's I just saw Tim yeah all right let's get started so before we actually dig in I am stoked to be able to share some exciting news with you all so from now today November 22nd
through November 30th not only can you save 25% on nearly everything in our shop but you're also going to get a $30 gift card delivered to your inbox next month so that's any purchase between now and the end of the month and the cool thing about this gift card is that we're going
to wrap it in a nice image something that you can send as a as a gift to someone special in your life or something that you can squirrel away and keep for yourself and use uh you know to to to get that course that you've had your eye on so this is the
fin fin part of our November season of savings now we've had things going on all month long and this is kind of where it all comes together now for those of you who have supported our journey by buying courses resources memberships and more I just want to say thank you from the bottom
of my heart thank you because what we're here in front of you today is to make sure that you know about all the great deals that you can take advantage of and to make sure sure that you know know that we actually do have things that you can buy why we're here is
to help you make a living doing what you love now we do this by giving away as much content as we can for free right here on YouTube and other social platforms but also by putting a ton of effort into creating courses toolkits memberships that are going to help you design and build
the life that you want now having the opportunity to work toward WS the goal of helping a billion people make a living doing what they love is why Chris and I wake up in the morning and we are eternally grateful for this opportunity so thank you and just in case you don't know
who we are my name is Mr Ben Burns I'm a designer by trade and I love making stuff my passion is to help creatives and creative thinkers just like you make a living on your own terms now I coach and teach creatives who are at the beginning of their Journey to Find Traction
in their businesses and the last decade for me has been a wild ride I went from being a Narcotics agent to being a design freelancer to starting my own Studio to then joining the incredible team at blind and now I find myself in the fortunate position to help Chris here take the future
from Vision to reality as the COO now he should need no introduction I mean if you're here you know who he is ladies and gentlemen it is the Charming razor blade the loud introvert himself Mr Chris Dell Chris want to say hello tell the people about you yes yes yes thank you very
much ben you know I I miss our conversations Ben and I miss seeing your face in in real life and also via a virtual live stream like this and thanks for setting up this thing I do want to say a couple of things before I introduce myself number one I'm usually not a
fan of our promotional stuff I just want to tell everybody that I'm usually like uh can we just get back to the teaching part but there's two things I want to say number one is the entire team whoever came up with a lookbook you guys did a great job and I want to
tell you something about like a little personal moment here for me uh when I was a kid during the holidays we'd get this spiegle spiegle catalog and it was like all the stuff that fancy people buy and I would sit there and daydream and just sit there and thumb through the catalog I'm
like one day I'm gonna get this or maybe Cabellas if you're a Cabella person or the best pro shop and they weren't designed that well but what you guys put together with the design team was just having this lookbook first of all it looks super sharp it's a great idea and it's it's
just just reminiscent of the things I went through a childhood so I was going through a little nostalgic feeling so congrats on the entire team Point number two is this if it were up to me and we live in this like beautiful utopian society I would just teach and I would be compensated
for Through The Ether like money would just fall down from the sky so we can continue to do this thing that we do because we love it so much we're so passionate about what it is that we do and unfortunately or fortunately we live in the real world where there's capitalism and so
in order for us to play the infinite game to be able to play this game forever forever yeah forever we need money yeah forever we we need to make a little bit of money here and we look at it like you know what we've given value unrestricted unblocked and I don't do these
like oh uh sign up for this program to learn the rest of the Four Points I just give it and oftentimes the team will say to me uh shouldn't this be a course that people pay for I'm like I don't know it probably should but let's just keep doing this so This Is
Us being very real we're just going to love with you because I already saw one comment it's starting off with a sales pitch it's it's not off to a good start I'm like friends do you know how often we do sales pitches almost never we give you ungated content in our podcast we
interview at our own expense we produce all this stuff to help you have a transformative moment in your life so these are there are a few times in which we do need to do this so you can look at this as a pledge as a drive you get to support us we're not
a nonprofit but we do act like one because sometimes we're not very profitable for you to buy something that you might get some value from but also just to say thank you to us to support us so that Ben myself and the rest of the team who are not named yet but who
make this all possible okay so from that in case you don't know me everybody my name is Christo I'm so happy to see you here I'm grateful for so many things but most of all I'm grateful for your time and attention I know that those DieHard Donuts out there the donation is very
strong you you you people when I see you in the streets you're like yo bro and you yell at me when I'm driving across on a different side of the road you you you tap me on on a train I was Ben this is a funny story I'm on a train from New
York to Jersey and we're going to the Jersey airport and we're packed in there like sardines cuz the marathon had just happened and this is like Tokyo style like we're just jammed in there and it's very uncomfortable super hot about six human sandwiches away from me this guy turns over he goes like
this and the Train's going it's like yo is that Chris no I'm like yes it is and he goes thanks for what you do bro I said Thank you and then everybody else around me like who the hell was this guy that people are yelling across from the subway inside the train and
you know what each and every single day our influence and impact that we make Grows by a little bit I don't take it for granted that every single human being who hits the subscribe on our Channel who in some way a sustaining member someone who just watches thanks us and shares the content
or tells one friend I don't take that for granted but you know what uh hopes and dreams can't be built on gratitude alone it's gratitude with a little a little Shanola is it Shanola Ben I don't know Green bags couple of green bags [Laughter] yeah pull upshock term I I have a I
have a similar story of being recognized except mine starts the the opening shot would be in the men's restroom at the urinals the choice of words needs to be very careful here Ben opening shot in the men's Ural keep going and so uh somebody recognized me there and I was like let's just
wait until we get out there he was like great thumbs up okay Ben I call your urinal story and raise you all in on my own urinal story now if I recall correctly you and I were in Vancouver on a fishing trip and Amy had organized a little Meetup for us and it
was awesome afterwards we went to this Lively bar and then you disappeared in the bathroom came out like Hey I just met this guy he's half drunk and we're talking no swords were crossed but we were talking right yeah okay here's my urinal story I'm meeting up with a friend fan of mine
who is in the comics industry he learns that my my little boy into gaming he said I have a specked out PC excuse me and he can just have it I built a new one I'm like oh my God this is amazing so we decided to meet up at Long Beach and we
go to this restaurant and it's like a drug deal because we're going to meet we're going to talk and then come come back to the car and there's an exchange so we're sitting there talking and there's not a lot of people in this place we're in a little booth and there's another Booth
down the way and I was like I can't talk anymore I got to pee so bad I go to the bathroom and this guy uh says uh something about a forsome on his hat and I was like that's a little strange it's provocative but he's talking about uh golfing a forsome and I
turned I'm like that's pretty clever and we're in the urino I broke my own rule like two guys next to each other I'm like that's a pretty funny hat and then he says to me you know actually we know who you are the designers sitting at our table were just like they recognize
you immediately and we come by and chat with us so this is wild so here I am initiating that conversation we go back and they make these super cool attachments to the back of your cap to kind of um to kind of bedazzle a little bit to put a little bling on your
hat and it was so cool to chat with them and this is the way the world works now the 21st century we're all connected in some way we're about two people away from knowing someone who's going to change our lives and maybe I'm that person for you maybe you'll be that person for
me and it's a pretty awesome thing in a time in which we live in but I digress Ben what's the next part of what we're going to do I love what Kyle says the Ural is the new golf course business in the [Laughter] future all right streams of gold man streams of gold
all right Chris I I think that uh it's been a busy year this year and I would love to fill people in on what we've been up to do you want to do you want to start you've been traveling a lot right I have and there's been this weird thing that's happened in
between these two points in time I think it's 2019 it's one of my busiest travel years maybe 2020 I just flown back from Amsterdam from New York and I'm having a really great time and for me the reward is in getting to meet all of you in real life and hearing your story
your struggles your triumphs your tribulations all that stuff is the fod for how I'm going to take on the next year and then this weird thing happened the pandemic and so we all become really isolated and I get to spend all this crazy amount of time with my family with my children and
it's awesome not saying anything but as soon as the uh the World Health Organization says it's okay to travel again we're out in the world and there was all this pent up demand for in-person events and we realize how special it is for us to be able to connect with real people to
share space energy to feel the the the frequency of what people were doing and it was just it's so nice and so I've taken upon myself to travel all through the world we did a European tour andley Hansen is in here she gets credit for planting the seed in my brain and pushing
me to do this thing uh we've been to to the Philippines and more recently I've been to back to Toronto and and Ben I didn't know this but you don't say Toronto you say Toronto Toronto Toronto know and if you're really cool you say toron so I didn't know these things so all
this time I'm saying Toronto and you're not supposed to say that anyways Toronto New York a couple times this year and it's it's just awesome it's so awesome and you know it's funny because I know in the Dove residence dad is not a big deal it's just Dad but when we're in the
real world when somebody recognizes my boys are like I guess he's not just dad sometimes he's dad the YouTuber sometimes it's kind of hilarious for me to see just wanted to share that that's awesome yeah we've been busy um releasing a whole bunch of stuff the uh the doot Came live alive this
year for our Pro members which is a an an AI version of Chris that's been fueled with all of his coachings from boot camp and and pretty much everywhere so that's been really cool to see and uh We've also made huge stride in the library for our Pro member our Pro membership so
everything is searchable we've got indexed transcripts we got all a whole bunch of features but the thing that I've been working on really hard this year is a program called accelerator and uh this is brand new for the future as of 2023 and it's a stepbystep blueprint and coaching program designed to help
your creative business find traction and I like to think of it like all the best parts about Community coaching and coursework combined all kind of working together to help you figure out your your fundamentals and thing is is that we're almost at a 100 videos across 10 modules with multiple classes in each
module tons of resources templates tools so this thing that we've built is a beast and uh it's it's been a lot it's been a lot to build this year but so far it has been great the community is 500 incredible human strong so far and it's a wonderful place to be and the
thing is is that like I don't know about you Chris but I never thought that I would be in a position to help people kind of achieve their goals I mean especially in such a meaningful real way like we've been able to do for people who take our courses members I mean I've
never I I never thought that I would wind up here in my career it's been so surprising and rewarding for me B can I just say this to you uh because Mo and I just recorded an episode that's GNA talk a lot about mindset and your state of mind and your ability to
grow and it's this if we open ourselves to the ability or the opportunity that anything can happen anything can happen and it's a great feeling to live in that state it really is and if we have time I hadn't planed to do this but I want to talk about confidence and how you
can rewrite or redirect yourself into a path towards growth and development versus one where you feel like you're competing against the fivers and the upworks and and the AI Bots that are about to descend upon all of us it's a state well I don't want to do that just yet because I want
you to work through the program and we we'll answer questions we didn't set an agenda so do we have an agenda Ben how is today's call going to be structured if I may yeah basically I would love to to share some wins here in a second I want to go over some of
the curriculums that we've put together and then we're just going to open it up for questions and turn this thing into a big conversation um and so we'll we'll do our best to to answer all the questions in the chat so that sounds good sounds good um let's start with some wins now
I I love to be able to shine a light on what people are saying who have been impacted on from what we're doing and honestly Chris these are brand spanking new like literally this year you probably haven't even seen these yet so this is a good one this was by far the best
course I've ever taken not only have I walked away feeling inspired but I also can't wait to share these insights about this about stylescapes with my designers your approach will be a GameChanger for us as we move forward and remove the guessing out of the client designer equation do what you love love
what you do now this this comes from naen and she's she's writing this in I just got this email this morning about stylescapes for sure I've not seen it then I was like what is this about whose course is this and I'm like hey that's my course I love that yay n thank
you for writing that and there are a couple of courses and resources that we have been that seem to be the perennial the the game changers for people stylescapes is one of them it transformed my life when I learned it from my my my mentor Jose I think the other one's the perfect
proposal I just can't stop hearing enough good things about it where people are like yo man I look Pro and I went in and added zero to my my budgets and they said yes and there is a thing everybody there is such a thing that appearances do matter perception is often times reality
so when you submit a proposal and looks a little janky it isn't worded and phrased correctly it's not structured in a way that big companies are used to seeing their eyebrows grow go up and they're like worried that you don't know what you're doing so just by adopting a format and think about
it and I know it's such a trivial thing to point out but it's actually real so when you follow the format of a proposal that we've worked on for years to get it to the place where it is and you just adopt that you just take a leap frog from the years of
suffering of toiling and experimenting trial and error and you land and you land in a way that makes you like look like a pro you're your in your confidence increases and the confidence that you project is then reflected back when they like yeah no problem of course we can do this so stylescapes
is one of these other things it's a weird concept everybody to kind of prototype and pre visualize what you're going to do before you actually put in the energy and effort and I got to tell you I'm not trying to just toot my own horn here the people who do this swear to
us that they'll never do it the old way that this is the way moving forward and it saves so much heartache but better than that aside from removing the friction from the relationship with the client and figuring out like what the hell am I going to make it actually allows you to expand
your visual vocabulary to try out Concepts that you've never tried out before and Ben I'm not volunteering to do extra work but I just had an idea yeah I wonder how styles would be authored if it was authored today with the Advent of AI Technologies so that you can create really quick mockups
using mid Journey or Firefly or any one of these tools Del um subtle stable diffusion we should really think about that to change the colors and do mockups and patterns and textures in fact some enterprising young person should buy this course and build a robot to say what are your three key words
is it spicy medium or or mild that you're trying to do and it will just generate it based on that and that would be really cool I can see a future in that so the addendum to this would be an AI version where we show you how to use AI to build stylescapes
because now you don't even need other people to do it for you and guys any of the courses that we talk about I pull my uh my browser window over here I thought this was a weird animation you're it's hand animated that's right um if you head to the Future and click the
blue Banner at the top you'll you'll get to this page that's got a search function and you'll be able to search say for example for stylescapes which is right here you can learn all about it so any of the courses that we cover are right there okay there's a lot of style on
our site I didn't realize when you type in style it's like how to be stylish how to make style frames style Wars and then there's style escapes I want to say a quick hello to Tim Wester Housen who I haven't seen in a while so Tim how's it going buddy um people are
saying that um the perfect proposal brought tears to their eyes or something like that it's like oh my gosh oh my gosh yeah I'm so glad all right here's another one this one is about the style guide kit yet another styl related item this comes from Hans and he says I just went
through the Hamilton Brewery style guide provided in the materials and holy schnikes I am impressed looking through it really kicked my brain into gear and inspired me nice work dude can't wait to delve deeper into this course and its materials so just I I think that this shows just being able to access
somebody else's materials can bring you forward Leaps and Bounds and I remember that being the case for my journey I mean Chris being able just to see what you and Jose were doing and the kind of documents that you were using to present materials and all that kind of stuff mindblowing and it
helped me move move forward so fast so I think Hans hit the nail on the head right here wait Ben did you author this yeah yeah this is one of mine oh nice well done well done Ben thank you it it almost seems like this presentation is a little bit biased it's like
congratulations Chris congratulations Ben I had nothing to do with this everybody this is purely Ben this is Ben's AR we're just gonna Pat each other on the back and you know you know who's really handsome you are sir you're really handsome you as well thank you thank you you're too kind all right
let's let's let's get off the uh the uh Ben and Chris train and talk about color for creatives this one comes from Caroline P She says I loved it man I took it pretty seriously watched and rewatched some parts several times I wanted to make sure I understood it's a bit embarrassing to
admit but I'm a seasoned designer and I did not know about many of the things that you taught in the course I very much enjoy your teaching style she's talking to Greg Greg gun by the way yes and love how you mix Theory and tips and tricks in the course the balance is
just right also it's just very cool to see a designer actually doing the work and seeing how they approach the problem huge praise for this course I personally have taken this course and the one of the things that I that I learned which kind of blew my mind was the meaning of the
hsl sliders in in all of your design program Hue saturation Lumosity Luminosity um even just knowing that was a game changer because I always saw these things and I was like how do you what is that for why not just go cmk or RGB or whatever um fantastic course if you're in the
design world and and Greg is no longer with us I mean he's still alive but he's not with the company he is I think known as the person with the best hair in in the company right Ben oh yeah he has Jake Gillen all hair I believe largely because he has hair he
wins by default easy race to win yeah all right thank you Caroline I appreciate that okay this one comes from Asher Asher says uh you called it out in the beginning this was an this was for illustrator uses users needing to see why to switch to InDesign this was such a concise and
impactful lesson time is the most precious resource and learning these operations has a major impact on time use now he's talking about a lesson inside the style guide kit that walks you through how to use in design as something that can control a design system now part of I guess what I'm pulling
from what Asher said about the course he's looking over another designer's shoulder and I remember working at blind Chris and being able to walk out into the main part of the office and just watch Min Emily saying watch them work and I would pick up so many little things so many little tips
and tricks about just software in general or the the process and workflow that they had um so that's another benefit of of jumping in courses like these is that you get to kind of look over somebody else's shoulder all right this one comes from Joan this is for opsis which is a notion
template for uh running your creative business she says this system has changed the way I do business entirely this is a great sandbox for us business owners you can adjust your workspace as you see fit this is amazing an amazing starting point you can either use it as it is or play with
it and create your very own version as I see it it is a high impact lowcost investment for your business I highly recommend it which is awesome to see because opsis was our attempt at figuring out some kind of business management template software that you could buy once and use forever without a
subscription without having to pay some you know a fee for a CRM and a fee for invoicing software and a fee for project management software it was a buy once use it forever solution so um I'm so glad that that Joan enjoyed it okay this next one is really good this comes from
Michelle she's an accelerator member and she says I landed a dream client from a cold Outreach email in our books this is an incredible win it's an $1,000 job wow three times larger than our previous best from a cold email it's wild the thing is is that in in accelerator we teach that
all these lead gen methodologies all these channels that you can use you got to exper experiment and and find what works and so the fact that Michelle was able to land this level of client cold email is awesome and this is why I'm here these wins they are incredibly fulfilling personally for me
to to see somebody go out there and win big I'm curious Chris take a break here we've got a couple more to testimonials to kind of cover but I'm curious to see have you heard any stories from the road that you want to share that wouldn't be in something that's like written up
and posted in this in this presentation yeah I hear lots of stories I mean from it's it's hard to say mostly let me just tell it the way I kind of can recall okay when people come up to me it's usually an event unless this is a random in the street encounter they're
overwhelmed with emotion they're a little bit nervous when I say a little bit I mean they're shaking a little sweaty and they're also just having a hard time articulating so it's not as clear and concise as when somebody sits down and writes one of these things but I will tell you something um
people and why you say you this is why I'm here this is why I I wake up every morning is because to realize that you actually have the ability and then the responsibility to impact people's lives that you will never meat it's a pretty heavy thing to carry with you and when people
see you first of all they're like oh so that's what you look like in 3D cuz I'm so used to a two-dimensional thing so they're still processing that and they get up to me and I I I I ask them sometimes because I'm not sure because I can feel them shaking literally when
we go take a photo like I might put my hand on their back or shoulder and then I could just feel them shaking I'm like are you okay like yeah I'm just really nervous right now I'm like there's no reason to be nervous there really isn't and and I think I'm going to
interpret all that body language and nervousness as just genuine appreciation and gushing so when they they say that your courses have helped me through a dark time there's probably a lot more story involved in that like I wanted to quit or you know I never thought I could do this and then everybody
in my life in my world told me it's not possible and then I listen to you and I do what and it's possible you just you gave me a career you gave me a life and now I can change lives of the people I care about so that that that billion person mission
is is strong it's real and it's happening right now the one story I can share with you that's very Vivid in my mind is pre- pandemic I'm in Geneva speaking at um I think it's Awards a ww or no it's digital design days I'm sorry digital design days in Geneva and this this
guy this young man reached out to me and he said Chris you're going to be here I need to give you something I have a small gift as a token of my appreciation he goes will you meet me outside the event at this time I'm like shoot I'm trying to keep up with
my busy schedule but I happened to just walking and he said Chris I'm glad you can make it I totally forgot I just happened to be outside and he was waiting there outside and he comes over to me he's like oh I got to tell you last year I was like making $199,000
a year living with my parents and this last year following your advice I made a 100 Grand I live right over there and he's pointing to this beautiful beautiful like uh apartment buildings I'm like wow he goes so you know I just this is um the the least I can do for you
is to give you this you know we're known for a chocolates here in Switzerland I'm like yeah so he hands me some chocolates I'm thinking it's a couple of bars it's a couple of sticks but it's pounds of chocolate so I'm simultaneously super grateful and and and just like beside myself and also
like what am going to do with pounds of chocolate smuggling it through the airports I'm going to deal with this cuz now I don't have space for this but but it's wild so I make a habit now and I'm not trying to Inception anybody here when I travel abroad and I know I'm
going to run into people I tried to pack less than what I need because often times people will give you a painting they'll give you a picture they'll write testimonials in a booklet they'll give you something that mean something to them and here's the sad part I come home my wife's like honey
where are you going to put all that junk I'm like babe it's not junk just mean something but let's put it in the closet let's just safely store it in the closet right so it's wild people make action figures of you they build custom Lego bricks and I'll show you one here in
case you guys haven't seen it it's pretty wild so I definitely feel that gratitude and it's just like it aims me up to go back to the notepad and and write out more ideas to read more and to to go and teach and and do more for more people absolutely and I uh
I'm eternally grateful for everybody that will approach one of us and share those stories because we talk about it internally we talk about it in in one-on-one meetings we talk about it in our staff meetings every single week we share the WIS that you guys bring back to us because it fuels us
it gives us that like that energy to to keep moving forward so thank you and this is a this this whole series is just to be able to shine a light on some of the incredible things our audience has been able to do yes so rvy has asked uh can we see some
of the gifts that people gave you I just showed you the custom Lego version of myself full with glasses and everything and I'm like yeah that is pretty much me this person this little Lego guy has a golden microphone which is so cool and this came in a custom package designed box with
the photograph and the typography it was so freaking awesome there is a Professor X modified person in a wheelchair that is like modified to look like me someone's painted a superhero on back of a Je jacket and giving that to me there are paintings that are hanging in my AIS somewhere and it
seems super egotistical like I'm a dictator of a third world country I have a portrait a giant portrait of myself I'm like it's a little embarrassing but I have it here so people they're just amazing and I'm not doing it for the gifts I'm doing it for the cash let's be real here
everybody so let's Money Talks I'm Asian that way just slip me a folder full of cash and low unmarked bills that works really well for me now I'm doing it for the impact I'm doing for the impact and I do believe this the scorecard that's important is to create impact helping other people
achieve what they want in their lives the the unit of measure later on is the amount that they support you so we we want to create impact and and this is true with you too so if you're a one two person company trying to make an impact on your client's business the more
impact that you can create the more they will thank you in dollar bills that's what Blair ends is just look at every dollar as an individual thank you note the more thank yous you get the more money that's how it works okay so thank you everybody speaking of dollar bills Lauren K says
we landed our first strategy and design project over $10,000 I would have never had the confidence to land something like this before and that was out pricing and boot camp all right so this is a brand new one Chris comes from Carrie G I know Carrie G yeah she attended your personal branding
Workshop yes okay so she says the personal branding Workshop was truly transformative Chris has an exceptional ability to guide participants to Deep dive within themselves throughout his guidance I Unearthed aspects of myself that were challenging yet crucial to creating a strong and unique personal brand finding my two-word brand was a pivotal M
moment unlocking numerous numeral Pathways and sparking a plethora of new ideas for Content products and books thank you thank you prayer hands words can hardly Express the profound gratitude I feel for this experience this was cool to see it someone who didn't get to attend the event this was in Miami right Chris
this was actually in Europe so this was if it's personal branding she traveled to Berlin so when we went on a European tour we hit up eight cities eight is it eight cities yeah I think it was eight cities and actually turned out to be nine so we add an additional location something
like 15 work work shops and we did three on personal branding so this one was in Berlin Berlin was a very unique uh experience for me and I want to tell you a little bit about it so we do personal branding and it's not like what you think and I I know I
deceive people sort of on purpose people think I'm going to do personal branding because I want to grow my social media following but in in in actuality it's a little bit like design therapy to help you get in touch with who you want to be in the world and to tap into some
of your your pain as a point of power so standing in your pain as a point of power and there was this moment and I'll describe it because she's also here we're in the room and I'm telling everybody so yesterday was all about business stuff today we're getting into the personal stuff so
uh I encourage you to be as open as you want to be to be as vulnerable as you can bear and go a little bit beyond that and and somebody had asked this question when I gave him the prom go take a few minutes and write down all your Shadow words the the
words that you feel shame guilt frustration anxiety anger whatever it is and and these are tied to unresolved childhood trauma okay so it's like these little fractions that happen or infractions that happen when you're a child that then create some kind of emotional Schism in your brain and you carry this pain with
you and so you bury it so if you spoke out of turn and you were reprimanded for it now you don't speak and you think you're a loud mouth you you think you're just too much you're you you're extroverted or something and so somebody asked me like hey how deep do we go
with these shadow words I said I just want to warn you I'm not a therapist so we we kind of have to ride that line a little bit because I won't know how to put you together if you're completely broken at the end of this thing and I don't want to do that
to you but goes deep as you want so I'm setting it up for you not to hit a single or to hit a double I want you to to swing hard and go for the bleachers and to go all the way home to come home and I chose that word and that was
uh the match that Lit the powderkeg of emotions in the room everybody was feeling it at that point and then a few sniffly noses a few teary-eyed glassy eyed people started and then one person starts to sob and it's a chain reaction in the room and it's a whole bunch of people that
started to cry and just because they've never had this kind of inner dialogue before in a place that they felt safe to be themselves it was a really transformative moment and I'm trying my best to recreate this wherever I go to have a room full of strangers crying together and just being so
vulnerable and being so brave and so when K's talking about that I think she witnessed something that was wild I'm not talking about women crying I'm talking about men women big hairy beefy bearded gentlemen crying and it was just it was an awesome thing for me to experience that they trusted me enough
they trusted themselves and each other enough to go there it was wild Ben and so I would not be surprised that a few people from that group wind up making different life decisions about how they want to show up in the world and I think car's one of them that's awesome yeah it
was so rewarding to see the feedback come streaming back from wherever you were all year it was it was really cool to see all right next up this one comes from accelerator and it's our very own Tumi Tumi is a brand strategist she says I landed my first five figure client a $244,000
job agreement signed 50% deposit paid no questions asked I am very motivated this is just the beginning and since then I've heard that this engagement has grown to be upwards of six figures so I am incredibly proud to play a part in uh in tumi's Journey there so stoked that she was able
to go out and do that okay right oh go ahead uh I wanted just to quickly address a couple different things here somebody said Chris you should get a degree in Psychotherapy or psychology I love being able to administer psych psych psychological therapeutic advice without the consequences of what real therapists have to
deal with so I'm going to stay on this side of it y'all and to my friends who are in San Jose I see that you comment to come to San Jose that's my hometown I'll be there just just be patient we'll be there okay keep going an ey keep an eye on the
channels all right this one comes from Diego and uh it's there's a whole bunch of stuff in here so he says all the products from the future are absolutely awesome I've purchased the perfect proposal the brand identity course with made by James and The Branding Basics which is actually brand strategy fundamentals from
anal Hansen also I'm in the accelerator program and it's been a blast I've learned and improveed so much I'm already three times a better artist manager business owner than I was two months ago and that's that's huge I think that that speaks to confidence more than skills and and confidence not in a
showy kind of ego way but just being trusting yourself to to to have good judgment in those roles artist manager business owner confidence takes you a really long ways all right okay last one this one comes from Nick is a future Pro member and he says despite working hard the revenue wasn't growing
and I found it hard to land projects I was passionate about joining future Pro I found my tribe people genuinely or people wishing to take control of their lives and genuinely enjoying their work mentoring from those who have navigated similar obstacles enabled me to label situations accurately and respond effectively this is where
it gets good my agency's prices increased by 40 percent without a hitch our leads have grown and the best part regained time to spend with my family I might not be at my ultimate destination yet but I'm loving every step of this journey and I owe much of it to the prog group
thank you Nicholas is an amazing human being I've met him in person a couple of times I think he was in our Barcelona Workshop as part of the pr group uh we Tred to meet up and hang out so we all had dinner together it was super special it's very sweet guy just
so happy for him yeah so this is this is really how we measure success and as I was pulling these things together I I had to I had to pick number one just just things that have been submitted within the last year but then also there were so many stories that I could
have shared so many kind words by incredible humans but I had to to to whittle it down and so I'm extraordinarily proud to share these stories with with all of you now we've been doing this for a long time now Chris I mean we're going on well for you it's you've been teaching
for decades and for me I've been a part of this for six years now so I've got a question for you right after coaching what is probably thousands of people both oneon-one and in a a small group setting what do high Achievers have in common good question question Ben if I could spin
or cast a spell or you know uh wave a magic wand I would love all my students to have a couple of specific traits the number one trait the greatest predictor of future success is a person who has a high bias towards action they're the leap before you look they're the build the
plane as you land the plane kind of person and in in my life I've only had a handful of people that I can say that are the super high achieving state of mind and they can do anything it turns out too that there is at least some anecdotal um coincidence that the people
who tend to be the highest Achievers have some background in military or police it's because they're they're trained I think maybe the military or police tracks them but they're also trained to put aside their identity for a minute follow Direction and Achieve result and they've learned in boot camp in basic training and
in the field that you're dependent on your your captain your sergeant and each other to for success and if you work together as a team put your nose down and just follow the rules you will have amazing results so some of these people I barely finish my sentence and they're already executing whatever
it is that I've said I'm like oh hold on you need the rest of the plan like no I don't I'm like yes you do just give me two more seconds I'll tell you the rest of the plan now that seems dangerous it seems Reckless and it might be but let me flip
the situation on the other side the opposite of the high achieving people need to know more they always need to know more and there's no amount of information that will satiate their desire to know more why does this work when have you seen this what evidence you have uh why would it work
for me it's worked for them but they're just sitting there worrying about those those outcomes now uh I heard something from Pastor irn mcmanis who runs the Mosaic Church he said this and it was really interesting how he frames things he says people who say I'm an overthinker often say that with great
amount of pride I'm an overthinker means I'm deeply intellectual I'm academic I'm I'm I'm Sublime cerebral whatever it is they just overthink he goes overthinking is code language for something that we're not always um in tune with we only overthink When We Fear of negative outcomes so says overthinking is playing out all
the negative outcomes in a Perpetual Loop he goes you never overthink when you think of a positive outcome right so when somebody invites you to go to a party or if you love fishing or camping you don't sit there and like well how's this going to work what kind of equipment you just
go for it because you're so excited you're moved to take action that when we say overthinking what we really mean and what's really happening is we're playing out all the negative outcomes com in a Perpetual Loop so that's the opposite ends of the spectrum people who don't think at all who just do
and then people would sit there and take no action and just sit there and like well this could happen and that could happen and what if that happens there's there and and Jim Ron said this a person I I often quote and admire what if is the language of the poor because it's
not what if this happens for me it's always what if the negative outcome happens they just get stuck and they just stay there all of you right now all of you who are tuning in can change your life in small and big ways if you just took more action so you're here because
maybe you're curious maybe this your first time here like what the heck is going on there's a live stream or maybe because we've earned some trust we've showed up enough times so what you have to do now is you have to decide who do I want my mentor my teacher my my instructor
to be and just trust that they've been there and they know how to get you there it doesn't matter if it's us just find anybody find a relative find a friend find a peer a former employer or current manager or boss and ask them what is it that you should be doing such
that you would be able to achieve certain results and just try it out without question as it's instructed to you something that happens a lot of times I'll say to somebody I need you to make 13 calls today I need you to say these things they're like cool I'm going to do that
I'm going to make four calls I'm going to say this thing instead I'm like that is not how you do it so often times people think well I want to modify it cuz that's not going to work for me my instruction to you is pick somebody that you trust like and and you
think has good intentions for you do the things they tell you without modification as closely to how they've instructed you first several times before you change give you an example early this year in January I worked with a personal trainer he said eat this I eat that he said measure these I measured
those those things he said move this way I move that way I did exactly everything he told me on the days in which he told me and when I couldn't he would repand me for it sort of in a loving coach kind of way those personal trainers and then I would adjust and
adjust and keep adjusting until I did it consistently enough the way he prescribed it to me after a couple of months I started to organize the exercise differently so I would be exercising hopefully once a day and breaking out my workout so it works with my schedule but I was able to build
on that knowledge and experience that this works here's how I can modify it there's a very specific order in which you have to do this those of you guys that have seen the shua re videos know exactly what I'm talking about the first way is to do it the way you're instructed exactly
the way that you were told to do it that's the key everybody yeah and I've I've noticed the something very similar um in coaching a ton of of accelerator members really successful members the the the ones that make wonderful testimonials because they're having incredible client wins are the ones that will ferociously attack
their knowledge or experience Gap and then get out there and do stuff doing that having that bias towards action is massive and having this attitude of I don't know if it'll work but let's let try like you were saying Chris just the ability to be like hey I'm going to I'm going to
go out there and try it because the worst that can happen is nobody's going to respond to my cold email nobody's going to pick up the phone maybe a client's going to yell at me the core is is they're going to try it they're going to go out there and do stuff and
that's that's that's what I've noticed the top performers in all programs do and Chris you and I have joked several times before about you know we can't we can't do your push-ups for you I guys I've been trying to get Chris to do my push-ups for years and I've been doing it it's
killing me it's just it it doesn't help me out but we can help you shorten the knowledge Gap um we can help you ferociously attack this so that you learn just enough to enable the action that comes after so as Chris mentioned before in our lookbook for this year we've actually pulled together
a few DIY curriculums so that you can build your own program it's kind of like designing your own degree right and I think it's probably worth taking a look at one of these um Chris are you ready to start on this you want to start with brand Identity Design or you want to
take it somewhere else no I'm ready to start on this but I just want to say something to summarize some of the things that we're talking about it's not Chris overthink it's not Chris overanalyze it's not Chris contemplate it's Chris do Chris get it done it's not Chris don't you understand doing is
the operative word that's why that slogan from that company just do it shut up and do it just do the work that's what's going to create the results all right back to you Ben all right let's pull this up okay so this is one of the curriculum that we put together in our
lookbook and this is for uh those of you who are interested in becoming a brand identity designer so we've got a whole bunch of course recommendations and to to to kick things off got brand Identity Design with made by James so I'm going to go over here I'm going to pull the the
my my hand animated slide in with the website here brand Identity Design with made by James was just released this fall and it's starring James Martin himself now I'm sure tons of you are following this dude on social media he's got incredible content on his Instagram and I'm in the process of taking
this course now I was part of the curriculum design conversation so I knew exactly what was going into this course but while I was checking it for Quality I got hooked and so now I am taking this course because James is such a good teacher the information is so good and it's actionable
he guides you through the process of a visual identity design project from end to end so highly recommend if you're interested in brand Identity Design no matter if you're a beginner or somebody more experienced there's tons of good stuff in here for you all right so next up we've got brand strategy fundamentals
and this course was written and created by our very own annaly Hansen Chris you want to tell the people who Annalie is if they don't know already Yes anley Hansen is a brand strategist a former Chief marketing officer Chief branding officer based out of Stockholm Sweden and she's authored one of our most
popular courses with hundreds of thousands of sales that we had to create an award just to acknowledge how badass she is and so brand strategy fundamentals is taught from a person who does it from uh within the agency side so she's heavy into research and quantitative and qualitative interviews and she's doing things
that I don't know how to do so if you want that fundamental framework to learn how to do what she does this is it yeah and her teaching style is so warm and welcoming the facilitation exercises that she goes through it's it's awesome so highly recommend this course for all of you branding
folks out there all right so next up we've got the brand messaging kit written by someone you might know yes yes it's Charming intelligent charismatic and very humble person myself authored the brand messaging kit so many years ago um my my former business partner my mentor Jose showed me the core framework which
is what he used to design websites and do user experience design and it's a pretty awesome framework and I immediately saw the connection to that framework to how I could use it to build uh Brands and do brand strategy work and so I I adopt it but um when Jose and I went
through a fairly emotional breakup when we separated ourselves and started a new company I wanted to do my version but I didn't want to hurt the sales of core facilitation framework so where I saw gaps in terms of the execution parts of it so I authored a like a micro version of the
framework which is designed to help you find the voice and tone of a brand my perspective on this was most of the designers that are are here today are really good at coming up with logos identity systems and the visual aspects but we don't know anything about the writing component of it like
how we make something have personality that's what the brand messaging kit is and when I first authored it I was like okay no one loves me and no one cares because we had like $5,000 worth of sales and I kind of just forgot about it and then later on like a year and
a half later I check in on it and it's doing robust sales some people love it my friend an Hansen checked us out recently uh she's crazy that she's not only a teacher with us but she's she's also a big supporter of ours that the live stream that we did on LinkedIn she's
like oh there's a sale I'll just buy the brand messaging kit I'm like anley you're crazy love you thank you very much she and she goes through this and she goes oh my God there's this two-word exercise like is this where this is from I'm like you know how I talk about your
two-word brand I'm like yeah that was the beginning of it so this was authored years ago yeah this is a 2017 special here is that right 2017 I think so okay still good I think that the cool thing is is that this framework comes in really really handy and and maybe you've been
in this situation you're sitting there you're designing a client's website or you're putting together a recap of your brand strategy and you really need that little Punchy headline that hook that kind of summarizes the brand right the Mad Libs got you so far but the Laura myum is staring you in the face
and you just need something to put above the fold on their website or something like that this framework is a fantastic way to to fill that in and so you can knock the socks off of your of your clients with something that's built with the brand messaging framework all right all right Ben
I have to read some of the comments for you first of all cardi thank you very much for supporting us and I as a teacher I I'm I'm I never get tired of hearing from people like this was good this was helpful I learned a lot I love your teaching style Etc so
thank you very much Mark goodkin is asking he can't see the courses on our site Ben how are you pulling this up can you go through that part again like go back to the main site sure so just head to the future.com and you can either go to courses and tools but if
you want to search just click the shop now button right here so we integrated a search here for this uh for this campaign and you can pull up the next course on the list which is the style guide kit so this is a resource that includes a template and a guide book specifically
for creating style guides for your clients now if you've ever been in a position where you've designed a logo for a client you put together a brand identity for a client and then you're driving down the road and you see this thing on a Billo board and it's just been mangled beyond belief
because it's squished or stretched or like combined with a with a bunch of drop shadows and and chrome effects from Photoshop the brand style guide kit is designed to help you help your clients not do that crap and so um it's a really easy to ous framework I've also written a whole bunch
of the copy that typically goes into brand style guides and you can copy paste do a tu just a tiny bit of editing to make it brand appropriate and uh it's ready to go so that is the brand style guide kit side question coming in from design language podcasts is is it okay
for us to do reaction videos to your content how do you feel about it I'm totally okay if it's out in the public domain and you want to do it uh I think reactions are a way for you to get some attention to provide your own perspective but also to honor the people
that the content you like I don't think it hurts anybody so if you have an interesting spin or take please do that I think where it gets destructive and not good is when you try to hide your sources and pretend like these are thoughts that you had on your own uh I was
recently accused of this which which really kind of like offended me in a way and that I'm like am I really that way so I heard through the grap Vine that another public speaker was really upset at me because they were saying that I steal all their ideas and I don't give them
any credit like really I'm the guy who tags every single person here's the book list here are the resources so I I find that sometimes I do it almost to an annoying level when I'm citing ideas that people are getting tired of me saying in this quote and Blair n said this or
David C Baker or whoever it is so I'm just like what okay whatever uh hey Ben we have cardi who donated seven Canadian to US whoa thank you cardi thankk you so much just want to acknowledge I see that on the top there so appreciate it he says Chris your knowledge and gifts
you share with us have changed his life honestly I live by your message and words Pro shooter for 30 years amazing amazing and hopefully for another 30 years all right so next up in this DIY curriculum we've got stylescapes now we've already talked about stylescapes a little bit so yeah put a pin
in that one yep typography typography is vital to Brand identities making sure that your type layout your composition is all on brand is super vital and the the course that Chris has done on typography is I I would say the best out there I mean I've taken several of the the courses that
are are competitors and hands down you don't learn fundamentals like this anywhere else um logo design you got to have a logo for brand identity it's it's at its core Chris you want to talk a little bit about logo design yeah logo design is something that that I didn't want to teach but
I thought you know what there are some people out there teaching things I know nothing about so I I need to take a moment and to work on this and show you our process from the words in which you get from the clients and that you can derive from maybe doing the brand
fundamentals course or the core Discovery framework and once you have those words what can you do so my designer at the time Emily shei or Shay and and I worked on this together and we designed all different kinds of logos we covered the different types from a word Mark to combination Mark to
a monogram and everything in between we kind of just demonstrate the working process and building not just the logo but a little bit of the identity around it so that's my spin with an amazing talented designer Emily shei yeah I I think the coolest part about the course is the way that you
broke down all the individual types of logos so we're moving deeper into more of the design aspect of branding and being able to say okay what's the difference between a monogram a monol line a word Mark symbols and icons combo marks and then emblems and Crest and being able to see one of
these come together through the uh through the lessons was really really neat so great course all right so we talked about color for creatives but let's talk about illustration for designers I'm going to pull this up real quick and here we are okay so I don't know about you guys but drawing has
always been difficult for me I've always I've always loved to draw I've got sketchbooks full of drawing but I would never call myself an illustrator but the thing is is that if you can pair an incredible design skill where you're you mastered typography layout composition color if you canare that with illustration that's
a superpow that is an absolute superpower and Greg is an incredible illustrator and he's done a wonderful job in this course to kind of help you expand that skill set so definitely recommend illustration for designers especially if you like greed gun's hair only do it for the hair all right and then finally
we've got lettering with Nils Lindstrom now Nils was your teacher right Chris that's right Neils is an amazing teacher um he's a hard ass I will put that out there and I remind Neil of the things he said in our course and he was a little shocked he like did I say that
I'm like Neils you sure did you sure did Neils comes from the Old School of Art Center where you know what if it ain't perfect it ain't perfect and he's not going to be one that gives you an a just because you you showed up there's no participation Awards so Neils I I
took for lettering part one and part two and we did this live stream and people were freaking the F out they thought it was Photoshop what Neils was doing was he was taking a piece of chalk and he was drawing an alphabet and he was just doing it because he's done this a
thousand times before and when you see old school letter form designers who can chisel out of a slab of stone Tran Gothic you're like this is not possible but there are people who can do this kind of stuff who can take a read and write with it and develop a modern alphabet and
you're like wow this is really how type type faces were designed it's really based on calligraphy and and how we hold the read in our hand and so seeing this and seeing a master at work now you see that that logo in the middle the one in black and white there that's blind's
logo after many years of trying to and failing at designing our own logo in this kind of old school blackletter Gothic tie face with the flourishes we we hired several designers it just didn't turn out turn out right and I don't know why it took me so long to realize this I'm like
I know who I can call I call my former professor and I I show him what we're doing and he's like yeah I can do this and he just turns around in a day it's like it's nothing for him he just shows some sketches I'm like the th nails and then the speed
in which he can work using illustrators to design this it's incredible it shows that when you've been doing something for your life in your your entire life and you put in your 20,000 hours with him it's so effortless so if you want to see a master at work and how he shows you
how to do lettering as he teaches it at Art Center this is a bargain Art Center currently I think is about $23,000 a semester and if you take five classes each class is about four grand give or take and you can take this course from him for a few hundred bucks and I
think that is a deal and a half but the coolest thing and I do want to say this the coolest thing is what what we do for our instructors everyone who authors a course for us collects a royalty imp perpetuity which is a fancy way way of saying forever so every time a
course is sold they make a percentage of the sale and when when Neil started getting his royalty checks he and I talked and he said Chris every time I get a check I almost have tears in my eyes because I've never had this experience before that my teaching can reward me in ways
and Neils is getting up there in age and the beautiful thing about what we do and hopefully we haven't had to deal with any of this is you can gift this to your surviving children or whoever you want to gift it to and we want to create that kind of education company I'm
sorry to zoom out to talk about the bigger Mission here is we're out here selling courses because that allows us to play tomorrow this is an important part of our business this is just business 101 you get paid today so you can play tomorrow so you need to keep getting paid so you
can continue to play Until You Are able to achieve your mission but I want to be able to create a place where we attract the very best students that would be you and the best instructors the most knowledgeable charismatic Dynamic teachers in the world such that they after authoring their course whatever it
is one two four courses whatever it is can collect a royalty for the rest of their lives the publishing model applied to education that's what we want and when our company blows up to be a $100 million company or 200 million whatever it is that means all the authors are are going to
be making money based on their individual contribution our model is not like master class or not master class skillshare where everybody takes a percentage of pie and it's pretty opaque as to what happens you know when you collect a check students have purchased your course that's the way it works it's a onetoone
relationship there that's it man yeah and to zoom back in on on Nils here you can see right there on the screen is a screenshot of him creating a Sif type face with a piece of chalk on a chalkboard I saw it I I saw him do this live while we were recording
this course and I remember just standing there and I'm pretty sure my mouth was open the entire time because when we say that he wrote it on the board with a piece of chalk it wasn't like he was like do this and then erase a little bit and then fix this and then
sketch sketch sketch and then now he no he walked to the board he put the chalk on the board and he goes and there's a letter it was it that was it so huge fan of of this course okay so we have curriculums just like this one for graphic design web design packaging
design motion design illustration lettering commercial art photography and videography in the lookbook so if you head to the future.com click that blue Banner scroll down to the bottom of the page you can still download the lookbook and pull these curriculums now the cool thing about what we've done here is that we've also
included a ton of resources from our friends that we've all linked to inside of the lookbook so programs like shift nudge and uh flux for web design um and anything can Barber for lettering so there's a ton of resources in there for you to be able to build the curriculum that's going to
help you shorten that knowledge Gap so definitely download the lookbook PDF like I said it's on the bottom of the season of savings page and that can help guide some of the decisions um that you run into so but know you guys are tuning into this live and you've got Chris do and
myself right here and we're here to help so I want to ask you a question what knowledge gaps can we help you with so I'd love for you to let us know in the chat chat in the comments below what knowledge gaps can we help you with so put your question in the
chat what are you struggling with right now what do you know you need to learn in order to help you accomplish your goals or maybe it's sneaking suspicion what do you suspect that you don't know so if we can connect it to a future course or resource or membership we will otherwise we'll
do our best to answer as many questions as we can in the time that's given so while they're working on that Chris do you want to yes walk them through some of the content you've thinking about yeah I want to talk about confidence is that okay Ben go for it all right uh
so Ben first of all thank you for doing the heavy lifting the things that I I don't love to do but I have to do with you because otherwise we don't like I said we don't get to play another day and I like to play so let's on that note I want to
talk to you a little bit about confidence everybody so Ben is it possible to go full frame on me when I'm doing doing this part yeah go for it okay let's do it let's test your skills with streamyard here there we go who's that handsome guy and there we go here I am
everybody perfectly lit with four or five lights I'm not saying how many but quite a few lights I I want to say a couple things about confidence when you are starting out there's going going to be a very critical decision that you need to make if you make the right decision what what
results you get builds your confidence and that then makes you more able to go out there and ask for what you want then you do work that's great again and that keeps building up your confidence and those two things start to your your work your confidence and the what you can charge are
kind of tied together you're existing in The Virtuous cycle and it's going up and up and up to such a point where I'm at today where I have I'm full of many things but self-love uh I'm My Own number one fan and I believe in my heart no matter what somebody pays me
they'll always get an excess of value back so if you pay me $110,000 you'll get at least $10,000 but I aspire to give you much more and I think hopefully those of you that are fans and have purchased the products or seen me speak or show showed up to a fireside chat with
me can see that I'm deeply passionate when it comes to teaching giving and reciprocating value back to people because I don't take it for granted that you're here and you're giving us your precious time and attention on the other side of that confidence Spectrum or spiral is you don't charge enough and you're
compromising in your work and you're attracting the wrong kinds of clients that then make you think that you're not worth it so you charge less and the cycle goes downward so the Vicious Cycle vers versus The Virtuous cycle how does one get on this path that is a billion dollar question if I
had the answer for that I would be a very wealthy person today all they can do is tell you what has worked for me and hope that you find a way that works for you okay so in the very beginning my after graduation I had some credit card debt I was living off
my credit cards and other than that I had a very modest apartment I paid $1,200 for it for 2,000 foot Loft in downtown Los Angeles and I didn't buy any clothes I I had a third hand hy- down use car and I didn't buy anything so what I had was very low demand
in terms of financials so when I went out there into the world and somebody offered me something that wasn't right for me either their personality their business the price the deadline the scope of work was out of alignment I had the power to say no I think uh who said this I think
David C baker said this or one of the many influential people that I look up to said the only real power you have as a creative person is your ability to say no yet very few of us exercise this power these two letters n o no so when somebody would ask me something
funky and I got that weird tingling in the back of my my neck I'm like I'm sorry I just don't think I'm a good person a good fit for this for you and you deserve someone who's going to be excited about this and I'm not that person and I would just say no
I would say no to investors I would say no to projects that weren't a good fit and each time I said no I knew there was a consequence to it but the thing that I held higher than the financial downside to all this was my level of esteem my respect and my free
time those are really important to me because what I did in the free time was I worked on myself I would read books I would go out and meet people I would learn skills attend workshops or classes I worked on myself so very early on and you know this if you don't have
a lot of expenses you're a single person you don't have a lot in terms of the monthly recurring bills you can be very selective so then I would say yes to the right kinds of opportunities because there was no pressure to say yes and those people oddly enough respected you more or respected
me more it's kind of weird we think we're doing the clients a favor by reducing our rates such that it's easy for them to say yes but when you do so they actually treat you with more more times than not less respect like it's so cheap let's change this I just keep spending
more money and it must not be of high quality since it was so affordable if you think about something that was so cheap and easy to acquire you don't cherish it when you know there's something that's one of 10 in the world that it cost you a lot of money that you have
to wait in line to be able to acquire you treat it differently if that thing were lost damaged or stolen it would break your heart you would commiserate over like the this thing is now absent in your life for sure you would so the very beginning of my career just year one out
of school I was getting work they offered me jobs a job that paid me more than what I was getting paid currently but I said no I kept saying no and then when I was freelancing doing work on a day rate I kept raising my rates because I could afford to say no
and so quickly the people and I saw this I would I would go to the studio their Studio because I was a freelancer I would see how they treated their staff I would see how they treated other fre aners they were yelling at them they were like saying horrible things disparaging things to
them yeah when I walked in the room they're like okay sorry let's focus on this I'm sorry you had to witness that I'm like why did they treat me differently now back then I told myself because the work was much better but I don't think that's why looking back on it now I
think because I held myself to a higher standard and I was a person of esteem and self-acceptance and I wasn't going to take it so they knew and people know this and if you had children you know they push the boundaries to find the gap between Mom and Dad they know who breaks
faster than the other person they just work on that person it's why today my kids when they want to do something they know they shouldn't do they never ask me they always ask Mom first and then Mom would say I'm not going to decide just go ask your father and then my wife
would say did they ask you about that thing I'm like what thing they've never brought it up to me cuz they're they know the BS meter is going to go through the roof I'm not going to take it if you have a legitimate question or request I of course will humor you and
listen and and and weigh the pros and cons so when you're out there in the world and you have uh you're outliving your means meaning you're spending too much money you're buying things you don't need you're driving fancy cars you're eating at fancy restaurants you're creating a situation where you are desperate to
take the work and you need it so my advice to you if you can repeat my success here is to strip down your life into a point in which you're living as modestly as possible living like a monk and then when you find a client that doesn't feel right for a thousand different
reasons you politely and professionally just say no and then you use that free time to work on yourself don't use it to play video games don't sit there and wake up at 2 p.m. work on yourself because everything that you do that adds to you creates value for you into the future on
an exponential scale so back to my story I'm getting work I'm charging more I hire people to help me almost immediately I hire my former roommate I hire people that were uh classmates of mine and before you know within the first year I have three or four people working for me and I
just out of school and I'm able to build my company and because it built on this Foundation of self-acceptance self- Lov being my own fan and having that that esteem that regard that I'm not going to take a project when it doesn't feel right that I I I know bser when I see
one so I'm like no no thank you I appreciate it and I'm willing to fire clients when they misbehave that was a lot of power and each time I did that I attracted different kinds of clients and then really quickly within the first couple of years we went from scraping by to making
millions of dollars in revenue and that's what afforded me the opportunity to hire the kinds of people to train me to continue to help me to level up and how we were able to work with clients like Xbox Nike Audi to create music videos for bands like n sparkley for Justin Timberlake and
the last music video we did was for Coldplay because we kept saying no now believe it or not some of these big world famous World touring bands told us they had zero budget and what did we say no and then miraculously they came back with a couple hundred thousand for us to do
the project is that weird how that works so hopefully you can extract the lesson from the story and start to think about and reflect on how you're handling yourself how you're approaching your clients and how you're going to start to exercise the power of no if you can do that I think you'll
start to move the tides in a different direction so instead of being stuck in the Vicious Cycle you can move towards The Virtuous cycle that's it for me Ben that's wonderful thank you for that Chris and I want to Echo um our good friend Matthew Ina who's he says saying no to the
wrong opportunities leaves room to say yes to the right opportunities spot on absolutely spot on I want to answer a question here saw from Colin who asked do you attend professional development conferences to help you grow and add to your skill sets and the answer is no surprisingly no I do like reading
books books are my almost my favorite way to learn but I'm going to tell you A life hack here Colin going to professional development conferences can be an addiction but it also could be quite pricey if you don't have the time or the means I suggest you do something different start a podcast
interview the people that you admire and ask them all the personal development questions that you want you get a tailored oneon-one consultation for the amazing price of free try that instead whoa Tim Tim what are you doing here Tim just gave us 20 bucks thank you Tim says Tim thank you Chris and
Ben air helped me get to 100,000 and Chris your coaching helped me set the course to hit 200,000 this year amazing thank you for all that you and the future team do working on bringing more value to my clients amazing Tim uh wish you continued success and I'll see you on the road
next time so Tim got a follow-up question I think we should surface that one okay so he says actually have a question in struggle but it's really specific to the situation he wants to Niche down into the gaming industry any tips for breaking into it only knowing it as a consumer is a
question that we get quite frequently so unknown niches unknown markets how do you break into them Ben I want to ask you that question first what has worked for you in the past and then I'll share what's worked for for me honestly I haven't been in so I don't have any personal experience
with that um so I'm I'm probably not the best one to answer that one okay I'll tell you three stories really quickly on how we are able to move from Niche to Niche okay there's a couple of things I need to say upfront one is you need to be talented you need to
know your stuff and then the real challenge is just jumping verticals okay so if you don't know what you're doing this becomes extremely exponentially more difficult number one story is this I've been in mixed martials fan for a really long time I I went on eBay and actually purchased VHS cassettes with the
early UFC so I could watch them and I would rewind and watch and listen to commentary I purchased everything I could so for I think UFC 1 to like 150 I paid for every single pay-per-view and so if you start to do the math at 40 or50 or $60 will pop I've given
the UFC a lot of my money I've attended live gated uh events before as well now there was a period in time in which working with Spike television and we're working on show promos for a show called The Shield with Michael chicklas and I had just seen that Spike TV secured a contract
with the UFC for The Ultimate Fighter season 1 and we missed the opportunity to work on that but when I saw it I'm like wait a minute this on Spike we're working with Spike we need to let them know that we want to work on this I was even working on the count
my my creative director Eric was working on it I said Eric you got to tell Terry our client that I'm a big UFC fan and I know a lot about MMA would love just the opportunity to be considered so one of their their their client calls while they're talking about the shield he
mentioned hey just want to let you know Terry our creative director the founder of the company is really a mixed martial arts fan and would love an opportunity to work on the promos for the UFC and that's literally all it took because when season 2 came around they gave us the opportunity to
bid on it to pitch against other companies and I think they were impressed not just with the work the work was good but with my level of knowledge of the different Fighters their fighting styles and the history of the the owners and all the kind of back room drama and we W up
doing The Ultimate Fighter for I think four or five seasons it was an awesome relationship so much so that somewhere in there Terry the client invites me to go to a live event with him and gave us amazing seats and that was an awesome experience that I to this day would never forget
so to be able to not only be a fan but to shape some of the visual language around the culture and to be able to attend an event and get backstage access the one they give press permission to attend I was able to do that I met Dana White I met uh spacing
his name now Joe Silva the Matchmaker at that time so sometimes it's just you being able to articulate your passion and your your love for an industry for a sport for a genre of something and you have to be able to to not just talk to talk but you got to walk to
Walk that was one number two I love playing video games so whenever there's an opportunity to work on video games I'm all over it and I thought well we're in the commercial space we design commercials and we make we direct things but we'll never get to work with some of the game brands
that we love well here's another example whenever we have an opportunity to talk about gaming put it out there what was that Ben soda sorry about enjoy your beverage as I'm pouring my heart out just pop that Red Bull whatever you're drinking Okay just set it down yeah all right so what happened
was um we I was on LinkedIn and and Kier McLaren told me to do this which is a shock that this even works he says you notice when people check out your profile LinkedIn lets you know and if you see someone's checking out your profile they don't do that by accident so reach
out to them and say this I noticed you were looking at my profile is there anything I can do to help and it happens that I was taking his advice the very next day because I'm that kind of guy who takes action really quickly I saw that somebody from Sony was check out
my profile so of course I I I try to write a little bit more like hey big fan Love video games is anything I can do to help that one interaction turned into us doing several projects for Sony PlayStation we designed things for E3 we designed animated logos a bunch of different things
we wind up doing a few video game projects and then once you have some examples of you doing work for one client their competitors start to pay attention so we wind up designing the cover art the key art for Need for Speed Pro Street and for EA's skate the competitor to Tony Hawks
pro skater and we got to bid on other projects like one for tiberium and some other project I can't remember so that's how it begins you you have a passion you need to express it you need to put your feelers out there and you need to be able to say it somehow on
social media um to clients that you're talking to today and you just got to let them know don't make them guess that this is what you want to do and as soon as you break in the other projects just fall in I'll save you from the third story I think that's good enough
yeah that's great in your first example with the UFC you said you reached out and asked them if they needed help with something what was that thing that you were inquiring about some deliverable no with the UFC we didn't do that that way we're already working with them uh through Spike TV I
see spike is their first broadcast network they've since moved to two different networks uh then Fox Sports and then now to ESPN where they currently reside we just told them this my my creative director who's working on a different project mentioned to the client our owner is a big fan of the UFC
he's consumed all this content I just want you to be aware of that because if there's an opportunity to work on The Ultimate Fighter for season 2 we'd love to be considered it was a very clear ass first started off with a statement of passion that's it and I like that you were
already working in um what would be kind of like a submarket or a collaborating market Market next to the thing that you were really looking to to break into um so that's a I think that that's a fantastic takeaway is if you can get close look at look at the the supply chain
the um people who manufacture items for it or the the companies that are involved on a fringe level and see if you can get into the market from that perspective as well there is one hack here and tell you this secret super shortcut to all of this instead of working sideways to find
your way up if you become a person of influence if you build a large social following all you have to do is just leverage that you have a large social following by saying man does anybody know anybody that works at EA or Sony or Xbox I'd love to work on XY or Z
right I forgot to mention the several projects that Matthew Andino was the director for for Xbox we got to design some really cool TV commercials and things for E3 we got to design um video game end tags for Midway games for uh a couple other brands and it was like for a period
of time we're doing a lot of game work and so the hardest part is to get your first opportunity so put all your energy to getting that first opportunity because once you get started other people will take notice if you've done a good job all right we've got a couple of people who
are asking let's see I want to see if I can show these yeah you should be hey there we go hey look at you using features like this yeah so maskman says I'm struggling with web flow I'm good in figma but web flow is a bit tricky will you teach it here it's
probably not a course that we're going to come out with at least we don't have any plans to oh you're motioning what is this no I said Ben you're answering it and you said we're not I'm just acting I'm like sign languaging the whole thing yeah so we don't have any plans to
release a web flow course but our good friends over at flux have taught incredible webflow courses also check out webflow University it's free um so if you're looking for more information on how to use that tool definitely check that out all right and then fairy dust says web design I need help with
web design I think traditional design fundamentals will take you a very very long way when it comes to web design so things like typography layout and composition um the two courses that we have in our in our shop called typography 01 and the grids and layout kit will help you tremendously in web
design for UI specific processes and uh layout tips and all that kind of stuff I can also recommend shift nudge made by MDS he's a friend of the channel um incredible class on on web design but start with the fundamentals because if you can start with the fundamentals you're not going to fit
into the latest web design Trend you're not going to like uh jump head first into whatever everybody else is doing on dribble and awards um start with the fundamentals and that's that's my biggest recommendation oh color too definitely take color well I have to say also consider the core Discovery framework which will
help you with user experience design and they do dip into a little bit with stylescapes and understanding how to create a pallet of what's possible and then organizing the the site map and then figuring out the features and functions that way so it's a complicated question with many parts and pieces there's the
formal design aspect which I think Ben covered all that and then there's the designing flows and user States and things like that that Discovery will help you with core Discovery yeah all right let's go to Monty Monty says public speaking now Chris this is I mean you have gone from not a public
speaker to a highly sought after public speakers so what do you got for Monty we don't have any courses for public speaking everybody we we have zero courses for public speaking the only way we can help you right now is through one of our most expensive it's the most expensive product that we
we have which is called brand lab we're helping people become persons or people of influence that's through content creation and also through public speaking but I'll point you to a resource and there's several resources that are free online beautiful videos you can watch on YouTube so Monty I just would start there there's
a professor at Stanford he talks about how he's able to talks and he has some really good tips he says uh and and also I just because I can remember his name Eric edms with mind Valley mind Valley so look up Eric andms he talks about a lot about storytelling and I think
you can get a lot of value from that you can also listen to a couple of the podcasts we've had with people like Kindra Hall who wrote the book stories that stick and and I will point to this resource just because I I just talked about it with my group brand laab it's
called how to deliver a TED Talk and it's written by Jeremy Donovan it's not super thick so it won't take you too long to read it's been beat up to hecking back because Matthew and I shared this book and he wrote in I wrote in it and it's full of notes it's looks
totally thrash but that's how books should look if you're using them you can see you can see our highlights you can see U all the notes that we've taken in the margins of the book so there's a couple things that we can talk about but without it becoming a mini course here we
don't have anything to to offer yet and I and I will probably at some point but it's not high on the priority list for me right now that's great thanks Chris okay let's go with Carl Marcus VI oh no I just lost him but uh Carl was asking how do you create case
studies and how do you Market yourself as a brand and strategist so I can I can kind of tackle the case studies bit um you're going to write case studies from the perspective of impact being the biggest driver for someone who's uh interested in reading this thing so when you look at a
case study it's the story of a project you're going to put a lot more effort into the impact that the strategy has especially if you're not offering brand execu so any kind of like design service or deliverables or anything like that so what does this mean well with this new brand strategy were
they able to increase Revenue were they able to decrease the time it takes them to do stuff were they able to increase the happiness and joy of the people who work there um what measurable outcome did your strategy achieve and you want to focus on that as your focal point in your case
study then if there's been execution um whether that's you can see that in a website or a brand Identity Design or you know marketing messaging or wherever people have rolled it out you can also put that in your case study just make sure that you're giving credit to those people who actually performed
the executional parts to it so that's that's my two cents on case studies Chris okay how do you show brand strategy work in order for us to answer that question we must have a common understanding and definition of what brand strategy work is if we look at the Strategic part it's a road
map on how to go from point A to point B how to go from where you are to where you'd like to be that's strategy right and so that is hard to show it's very difficult but you need to remember everything that you do in life is a story sometimes it's a bad
story and sometimes it's a really compelling story so when you're talking about case studies you're trying to tell a story what what is it that you want me to know what was the conflict and how did you resolve this and what was ultimately the takeaway that's how you should structure your case studies
so when we talk about brand strategy there's a lot of research interviews uh you you might do Discovery sessions that don't look sexy but you're a designer so we know you can make ugly things look good so what you want to do is you want to make that process of collecting organizing information
on lining it look sexy you can create then diagrams you can create lists and highlight words you can present it in such a way that you can make a lot of dense information easily accessible you can screen back the words and highlight the keywords you can organize it separately on a different page
these are three key words this is the two-word brand this is the messaging that was written for it this is how we were positioned against our competitors you can create a strategic document I've seen these before because when we used to run our agency clients would send us documents that they spent a
lot of money and time I'm producing to understand the core pillars of a brand that's important so if you're talking about pure brand strategy that's what pure brand strategy is it's not actually in the form making of it and that's what designers very good at so often times we use the word brand
strategy when we really mean Identity Design and they're a little bit different okay so let's make sure we're using the same language so if it's a do it this way if it's B do it this way if you do end then sup To Nuts show the process then show the deliverables so one
thing to add as you're creating your case studies when you're writing the copy that goes along with this story The the words that tell the story of the project a great way to analyze what you've written so far is to ask yourself could I copy and paste this into another Project's case study
if so you're probably covering your process you're probably covering what you did what you made what you done over the over the course of a standard project but you're not being specific enough into the insights so this is especially important for you brand strategist yes you're going to talk about the research that
you've done you're going to talk about the facilitation that you've done you're going to talk about all the all the actions that you've taken but you have to pair that with specific insights if these four items LED you to uncover this insight about your client's customer base need to tell us what that
Insight is so that's a great litmus test for case studies if you can copy and paste the language over to a new project you need to get more detailed because clients are going to hook into those insights they're gonna be like oh my God I never even thought about it that way I
wonder what this person could do for us wonder what things that they could uncover for us so if you're struggling with case studies if this is a if if building a portfolio of work that works for you is a challenge I highly recommend jumping in our accelerator program that is literally what the
first three modules are all about um so yeah we can definitely help you there then I noticed towards the end there that when you're speaking that I heard a horrible staticy sound as if a phone was creating interference but it seems to be okay now just watch you know I heard that all
right so we're coming up on time here but got time for one more let's go to Ralph Ralph says what to do when a client breaks s so and how do I structure contracts you want to talk about the breaking scope of work conversation Chris yes what we call people or clients who
break the S so we call them SS I'm just kidding I'm just kid cheating everybody just want to liven up the conversation a little bit okay uh there's two things that you need to know despite your best efforts and defining scope of work with contracts and and onboarding documents humans don't read those
things and they will Veer off the path so let's talk about best practices and then let's talk about reality okay so what you want to do is you want to outline the Rules of Engagement so to speak with what they can expect when they can expect the clearer you can do that the
better off you are and you want to use as few words as possible while being clear the good news is this used to be hard to do now you literally just type in I need to create a Rules of Engagement or a scope of work document or something to protect myself with client
work and here's what I need please write this in non-legal terminology that's easy to understand use as few words as possible into chat gbt and it'll just do it for you chat is actually very good at writing legal documents believe it or not so you just give it a few parameters guide it
along the way you should be able to have this now the reason why I emphasize make it as simple and easy to understand is it's more likely to be read but even if you do this you you are not excused from explaining this to your client so when you're in that process in
your sales process you can say okay here's the scope of work here's the kind of rules of Engagement what you can expect what I can expect and you you want to verbalize this to everybody present so at least they're able to hear it from you one time because they will not read it
and they will sign your terms and conditions or your master service agreement they'll just sign it without reading it because I know I do this I know you do this when you buy a product or you sign up for social media they have you reading 18 pages of Legal Information that no one
reads they're human too so they won't read need it so what you want to do is just highlight a few things to say like if the project delays Beyond this period of time we'll close out the job we'll complete the building part and then we'll reopen this as a new project once you're
ready to resume uh in case you need more revisions besides the three that are included in this bid I will warn you before we get there and guide you through the process so that we can avoid charging you overages those are like the key things the deadline can't move unless you want it
to move and you can afford it to move you cannot pause the project forever excuse me there's a finite timeline for which you can do that and not to be considered an overage and there's only so many rounds of changes that you can ask for without it falling outside of scope are we
clear do you have any questions because I don't want to start off on a bad foot I want you to be aware of all these things they're yes yes it's perfect they signed the document we're good to go now then it's up to you to control the engagement and to inform your clients
when they're going to be heading into a possible area where they're going to have to spend more money before you get there here's the slippery slope of Goodwill the client ask can we add this thing you're cool can we do this and then before you know you've added 17 new things that you
weren't supposed to do because you just wanted to say yes you cannot blame them for that you can't brow beat them for like look at all that I've done because you've not made it clear to them the there's a simple way that you can organize your project so that you can avoid this
outcome to begin with first of all let your clients know you can send us feedback as often as you want but we will look at it on this day once a week if it's different project Cadence you can say twice a week whatever it is and no matter what comes in you and
your team are instructed not to respond because what you've inadvertently done is you've increased the amount of iterations in which they can give you feedback on so when the client sees something they might have a thought they're can give you a piece of feedback and they'll continue to do this throughout that period
of time until they can have a conversation with you and then you can summarize let's say they sent in 14 requests for changes you can say this is great I just want to go over with you what's important I see some conflicts between request 2 three and 7even how do you want to
resolve this so you talk it over and they're like okay that's cool so you say to them before I do this I'm going to give you a summary of what we agreed to and if you sign off we're going to get to work that will be revision number one cool they see it
they sign off on you do the work revision number two comes up you're working through it you're you're going to say to them the next revision will be the last opportunity for us to do anything without occurring additional expenses to you I just want you to be aware of that so as you're
doing revisions number two let's sort this stuff out coming to to number three uh you do what is necessary and you feel like oh my gosh they're going to ask ask for another thing at this point you need to let them know again let's try to consolidate all the feedback and make our
best efforts so that I don't have to send you a bill for more changes here's the cool thing that you need to know clients will stop asking for changes when it's financially painful for them to make changes until then they'll ask and ask and ask and if you're going to give they're going
to ask for more that's how this works so the best way to mitigate or reduce the amount of change requests that you get is to put in some penalties in there otherwise like children exploiting parents they'll keep taking from you that's my best advice on how to do that so there's the legal
thing that you can do which is to set it up properly you can explain it to them but you realize people are people still and there's always a little fudge Factor here and there so often times I'll ask myself hey is this really a big deal if it's not what I'll do is
I'll tell them this isn't that hard for us to change but I don't want this to be an expectation moving forward I'll take care of these things and we won't count it against a revision just so you know you're planting the seeds to not be a doormat Ben do you have any additional
advice for this no but if if this is something that you struggle with um I can heavily recommend the legal kit which is a collection of templates um legal contracts that we've used throughout the years that you can adapt to your business and then also if you want practice at having difficult conversations
like this I cannot it is so important to practice and that's where having somebody um to kind of Bounce these things off of or talk through these difficult conversations with so important and uh our both of our uh membership communities accelerator and pro give you the opportunity to partner up with somebody and
and kind of practice having a difficult conversation like this with a client so definitely recommend um the legal kit accelerator and pro to help you guys work through these difficult situations I want to say one thing to address the question I saw kind of floating in there b before we wrap up here
yeah is we used to have only one coaching community and it was a one- siiz fits all so it want up being a perfect fit for some and a really poor fit for others and what we wanted to do is to create an additional coaching group to meet you where you're at today
so that you don't feel like you're outgrowing the group or the group is too much for you and you feel like an impostor so the way Ben and I have talked about this is if you're early in your business if you're still trying to get to your first $100,000 in annual billing accelerator
is the group for you it's run by Ben and by Stephanie I'm not involved in it not yet is run by Ben and Steph and they're the perfect people to help you with this because in the very early stages what you need are systems and process processes and you got to get your
portfolio together and you have to do the hard work of making some cold Outreach and you have to do that for you to be successful this group is super singularly focused for Creative service professionals only so no coaches no therapists uh no no uh basket Weavers it's just for Creative professionals that's it
the idea is Ben and Steph as you've seen will help you get those financial wins so that you can get some support you can begin to hire teams you can develop processes and systems so that you're going to the next level we see the pro Community is for anybody that's from $100,000 to
say $750,000 somewhere around there so now you're scaling you've got systems you know how to deal with client onboarding you can deal with objections and that's what we try to teach you in this group and in it are literally hundreds of hours of recorded calls that take you through whatever it is that
you need it's powered by search so now you can search for keywords and it'll identify the videos and the segments which you most likely need to watch you can do it that way uh inside the pr group we have the doot which is an AI version of myself trained on exclusive content that's
not available publicly it's been trained on the entire business boot camp curriculum and other things so especially if you're a boot camp alumni and you need a little bit of Polish and help it can roleplay with you it could do sales and objections handling it could do lots of different things and it's
getting smarter every day cuz we're feeding it more specific content so you're like well what happens if I'm above $750,000 well there's this other group that's intentionally designed to be very very small for a 100 people maximum entrepreneurs that are somewhere from a million dollar to $5 million in annual buildings and we're
there to help people whove already mastered the the the business component and now want to understand the design and and personal brand building component we meet every single week different group they're they're just crazy butt kickers right now there's only 10 people in this group it's a brand new thing we just launched
and so it's great it's intimate those are the three groups if you're just starting out and you're still getting your sea legs your business legs under you accelerated is the place to be without a doubt because you can see the wins the real wins from people doing the work and you need guidance
from somebody who's going to really walk you through from A to Z that's Ben and Steph they're going to do that in the middle is the pro towards personal brand building thought leadership public speaking content creation that's the brand lab it's not a business accelerator it's a brand accelerator absolutely well thanks Chris
I appreciate that um just a reminder before we go any purchase that is merch courses resource ources memberships anything that's purchased between now November 22nd and November 30th we're going to email you a $3 gift card in December that you can maybe forward on that Goodwill to somebody that you know so just
wanted to say thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for being an incredible crowd today thank you so much for tuning in live thank you for making this a wonderful place to be and and giving me personally the opportunity to help you on your journey so thank you and on
behalf of myself and the the rest of the team that aren't here Jess and Carrie um Mark Rodrigo Mo Stephanie Andes I'm probably forgetting a few people here Monica uh dang Ben who am I forgetting thaty everybody I wasn't keeping track but the entire the entire entire mother freaking future team on behalf
of all them I just want to thank you especially during this time of Thanksgiving this is us giving thanks to you for supporting us for making the dream possible we'll be here if you're here and we'll keep doing we keep fighting the good fight with you and I hope to see you at
a faride chat a workshop or somewhere in the future remember you are not defined by the past the future is what you make it bye everybody see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music]
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