#099 - How to Get 40K LinkedIn Followers in 60 Days with Brian O'Connor I The Corey Ganim Show

#099 - How to Get 40K LinkedIn Followers in 60 Days with Brian O'Connor I The Corey Ganim Show Speaker 2: Welcome back to The Corey Ganim Show. So this week's guest is going to give us a ton of insights into the realities of remote work. What it takes to build an audience on LinkedIn, how he's leveraging AI to create really good content and in general, how to grow an audience both on LinkedIn and other social platforms. His name is Brian O'Connor. He was introduced to me by a mutual friend of ours named Brian Guerin, who if you guys have watched the show for any amount of time, you heard our episode with Brian Guerin a couple of weeks ago. So I wanted to have Brian O'Connor on to give us an insight into all of the topics that I mentioned earlier. He's got a really unique story. He's been all over the world. He started in management consulting and has since fired his boss and really come a long way to building his own company ever since. So without further ado, Brian, welcome to the show and looking forward to our conversation here, man. Speaker 1: Yeah, excited to be here. Speaker 2: I love it. So first and foremost, let's touch on your origin story, right? All the way back to the beginning. Were you always an entrepreneur? Did you kind of develop that gene? How did you really get started? Speaker 1: So, I was definitely addicted as a kid. I mean, when I was younger, my first internship was in entrepreneurship. I helped an entrepreneur build an energy chocolate company. Oh, wow. Yeah. But, I mean, the big thing is post-college, I did two years in banking and then did six years in management consulting. And so, the big thing was I was building all these businesses for corporates, right? And so I started realizing like, hey, I'm building the skill set to build these big businesses. Like what if I got a percent of the value I created? And so that desire meant I started, I wanted to build my own thing and take a chance on myself. You know, so a few years ago I left management consulting and started building my own business. Speaker 2: So the chocolate company, tell me about that because that's unique. What did that look like and how'd you kind of get started in that? Speaker 1: So that was, I must've been in high school. I was like early, early. And so, or like freshman year of college, something like that. There was this guy who basically ran triathlons and as triathlons, he would take, before every race, he would do Roc-A-Cow and ginseng, combine them to create what he called the perfect fuel. And that was like the company worked at the time. It was just like, I would do everything because it was entrepreneurship, right? It was like two co-founders and me. And so I would do sales, fundraising, operations, a bit of everything. I got addicted. I was like, yeah, I like this business thing. I'd go door to door, do cold calls to literally walk into coffee shops and be like, hey, can I talk to the owner? And then just persuade the owner to take our chocolate. I was addicted to the adrenaline rush of risking it all in business. And I loved it. And so ever since the kid got hooked. Speaker 2: So you're a psychopath like me who likes going door to door and who likes making cold calls, right? I feel like it definitely takes a very special type of person, one, to just actually do those things, two, to actually enjoy them. So, I mean, what did the pitch look like? You walk into a coffee shop, you say, hey, can I talk to the owner? Is it literally just, hey, you should put our product on your shelf or at your register? Like, what was the pitch? Speaker 1: I'm assuming you're asking how I did it, not how I would do it today, because like I was... Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. Well, let's hear both, right? Speaker 1: Let's hear both. Speaker 2: How did you do it back then? And then how do you do it today? Unknown Speaker: Or how would you do it different? Speaker 1: Yeah, good question. When I was young, I mean, I just walked in and was like, hey, can I talk to the owner? These chocolates are awesome. You should have them at your checkout. And like, I was in high school, I'm sure they just felt bad for me and like, yeah, sure, we'll take it. And so like, I think at the time I used to think sales was like, who is the suavest person, who's the most charismatic, right? And who would talk a lot, right? Which is the exact opposite of what a real salesperson is, right? Because like everyone thinks of the salesperson as like, always be closing, just like this suave, charismatic, doesn't shut up, the outgoing center of attention, blah, blah, blah. That's like the stereotype. If you know anything about sales, you know that the stereotype is the opposite of reality, whereas the real salesperson is a therapist. They sit there and they're like, why are you here? What's your problem? What's your pain? Then you get to know the pain. I love Hormozy's closer framework. That's what I use to sell my own stuff, which is like, The person who can understand the customer or prospect's pain, if you can phrase their pain better to them, better than they can say it themselves, then you understand their pain or you can persuade them to buy. They believe that you have the solution to their problem. And so you sit there like a therapist and they're telling you about your pain and they start to tell you and you go, okay, what was the last time you experienced this pain? Why was it so bad? Why was it so painful? What did you do? Because if you don't try, if you ask them like, hey, what have you done in the past to solve this problem? And they go, I haven't done anything. Then you're like, all right, it's probably not, if you're going to duct tape something together, it's probably not a need that's so painful that will solve it to that. Right. Speaker 2: Or that you'll be willing to pay me to help you solve. Right. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: They've got to actually genuinely be in pain. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Because if they're not in pain, like, we sell solutions to pain, right? We sell Band-Aids to scratch. And if they have a scratch or big And I got nothing to say. You're not going to buy my band-aid. So I got to figure out like, what's, are you the right person? Like who is, what pain do you have? And how do I like, how do I have the best solution to your pain? Speaker 2: Well, and your point about asking questions to uncover that pain, right? I think that's something that so many new salespeople do. Like if they mess anything up, usually it's that it's, they jump right into the pitch and they jump right into, Hey, well, here's our solution. Here's what we can do to help. When in reality, according to you, and I certainly agree, the best salespeople are the best at asking questions. Really, they're the best at asking questions and then shutting up, letting the prospect talk and then using what it is that they say against them, for lack of a better term, to then kind of twist the knife on the pain that they're having. Is that, like, would you agree that that's kind of how it works in general? Speaker 1: Yeah. And maybe like the way I'd rephrase that is, like, look, They know you're a salesperson, right? And they don't know you, so they don't really trust you, right? Unless you have an audience and all that kind of stuff, right? So the best person to convince them your solution works is themselves. If you ask the right series of questions, they'll just convince themselves that your solution is the best need for their pain. And so that's why questions are so important because like it gets them to think and them to solve the problem and convince themselves. And so really the only thing that should be coming out of your mouth is questions and stories. Speaker 2: That's such a good point. And a good takeaway for me, right, is that, well, they need to sell themselves on your solution before you can sell it to them, right? They've got to think you're the solution before you can convince them that you are. So I think that's a great point. Now, so let's, I guess, continue on to the story, right? So that's in high school. You're helping those two founders build that chocolate company. Where do you go from there? Where did you go to college? How did the college years look like? And then how did that lead you into kind of the banking and consulting path? Speaker 1: I studied psychology in college, not because I wanted to be a therapist, but because I figured, hey, if I can figure out what makes people tick, I can figure out what persuades them to buy. I always loved sales. I built a few things. I actually built a mobile app fashion company, random stuff, and I'm so fashionable today. Speaker 2: All I wear is the same black t-shirt every day. Speaker 1: But yeah, so after college, I went into sales, right? And so I sold commercial airplanes, right? Like 737s, 747s, like the big guys, yeah. So I did two years of that, basically figuring out like, okay, fleets of planes. So if we would buy, I was at this bank, they would buy, say, 20 airplanes from Boeing, let's say, and then we would lease them to Delta. And so you can't have two, bigger differences in sales. Like one is like, I'm gonna sell chocolate to a coffee shop. The other is I'm gonna sell you a fleet of 10 747s, right? And they're wildly different because obviously the sales cycle are different. The way you sell is different. Everything is like, there's almost nothing. Unknown Speaker: There's almost no overlap. Speaker 2: Well, that's so interesting because when you said, oh, I did two years in banking and then I did six years in management consulting. When you said banking, I assumed that you were going to say like investment banking or working in a branch or something like that. But you took a totally different approach to what I was expecting. And I mean, it sounds like I mean, you were working for a bank, but it wasn't a banking position. It was literally a sales position. This almost sounds like an ancillary business to what the bank normally does. Is this kind of like a side venture of theirs? Because this doesn't seem like normal bank activities. Speaker 1: Yeah, it was actually their biggest business. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 1: Yeah, it was GE Capital, if you remember that. They sold the business since then. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Which is why I went to consult it, because they sold the business. But basically what it is, is like I sold financial products. I sold loans. And so if you think about a loan, there's two, you can give them literal money or you can lease an airplane. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: So like, okay, imagine you're Delta, right? And you need 10 airplanes, 10 747s, right? There's a lot of options. You can take cash and buy the plane outright. You can borrow cash and get the plane, right? Or you can lease the plane as if it's borrowed money. Leasing is just a creative way to do loans, basically, right? And so we offer both. We were like, hey, we'll either loan you the money so that you can then buy the airplane outright yourself, or we'll lease you the planes. Which is the same idea, just magic sleight of hand, right? And so we did both, but the heaviest thing was leasing. Leasing was the biggest one. And so the biggest difference there is we would structure the deals. As a salesperson in chocolate, you're walking in, it's emotional sale, it's small dollar amount, you just got to be suave. When you're selling 10 commercial jets, a 747 is going to cost you 50 million bucks. If you're going to sell 10 of them, what does that deal look like? Speaker 2: Half a billion dollars. Speaker 1: Right. What you have to do there is it's no longer like, I'm going to walk into Delta and be the suave salesperson. I'm going to be like, wait a second, let's look at this deal. There are way longer sales cycles, but then also it's who can structure the deal best. All right, because then our competitor will look at, it'll take our deal, it could take a competitor deal. And so I go, okay, it's a 20 year deal, right? What's the length of the deal? Who pays? And we know, like, engine maintenance in year 10, right? So it's like, who's gonna take care of the engine maintenance? Who's gonna do insurance? What countries can I fly over? Right, like, all like, there's a long ass list of details that like, they're gonna use to compare All the different lessors and whoever can structure the best deal wins. So it's more of like a intellectual, like deal making process, which is why I refer to it more as banking because it's one, we're lending money, but two, it's like deal structuring. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: And yeah, you're creative with the terms basically. Versus like the chocolate sales, which is like more emotional based, transactional, one call close, that kind of stuff. Speaker 2: Well, and this is so interesting to me because I honestly did not know that this was your background and just really the whole process of structuring deals and terms and being creative and what can we do versus what can't we do and what is the competitor offering that, you know, maybe we can't match it, but we can offer some other term that actually the customer cares more about at the end of the day. The whole deal making process is so interesting to me. And really at the end of the day, the product is just a widget. It could be a jet, it could be a property, it could be a business, it could be anything. So, I mean, I kind of want to dig into that a little further. Now, when you're, so when you're putting these deals together, like what does the commission look like for you as the salesperson? Like, are these, you're making like half of a percent or is it like really what's the structure as a salesperson? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean like I was still at the time I was like a trainee analyst, right? And so I wasn't like my managers were getting that commission. I wasn't. And so there's a base comp, which is actually pretty high because the deal cycles are so long. Like you might not close a deal in a year. Right. But then the next year you close a half a billion dollar deal. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Right. Um, and so like the, on the commission side, like I know my, all my bosses made like 900 to a mil a year, I'd say on average. Um, but it also depends on, on if you close a big deal that year or not, you know? Um, but yeah, I mean, I'd say the big, the big thing, like, so in order to do that, right. So I first had to train underwriting. And so I did that specifically. They trained us in restaurant franchises. So if you had, say like you owned, so a good deal I worked on was like Dunkin Donuts. So if you owned, I think the guy had I don't know, 25 Dunkin Donuts and you want to take out a loan to buy 10 more, right? Whatever the number is. And so like we would look at their financials. We would look at the personal financials, company financials, like the, I don't know, did they own the land or lease the land? Like what's the likelihood of risk? To us, the bank, are only going to pay the money back, right? And so that's where we get creative on like what are the levers we can pull to make this deal work, right? So is it like you can't take out more debt over this amount? You have to keep these financial ratios. Like what happens if you go over these terms, all kinds of stuff? It's the structure of the best deal. Why? Because then when I pivot to the sales side, I'm like quarterbacking. I'm the quarterback looking over, okay, legal team, what are the legal deals? What are the legal terms? Underwriters, like, okay, how can we get the best, I don't know, financial terms in for, I don't know, for the deal? Who else do we work with? I don't know. Legal, finance, everyone just figure out like what's the best deal to get the clients to close the deal. Speaker 2: That's super interesting. So basically you see yourself, I mean, you have a path to make, it sounds like 900K to a million a year if you continue to move up the totem pole here. Is really the only reason that you left because the company got sold? Is that why? Speaker 1: Yeah. I loved it. It was awesome. Speaker 2: So you would have stayed for a while? Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I saw myself in it. At the time I saw myself in it for life. I was like, this is so cool. I was fired up. I mean, like they're massive deal sizes and I liked the complexity of the deal. I loved like, I don't know, modeling, I would build financial models around like, how do we, I don't know, optimize our return, but then also have a good deal for them because there's so many levers we can pull to still get a really higher ROI for us while also like delivering such a good deal to the client because there's certain things they care about, they're different, we'll eat clear about and like the back and forth. I thought it was so cool. Speaker 2: Right. No, I love that. Yeah, the complexity because really it's a puzzle at the end of the day. It's like what pieces do we need to move around and who do we need to put where in order to make this deal work and obviously make a ton of money in the process. Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's cool. I liked it a lot. I would have been in it if, so they sold GE Capital. I don't know if you remember the era, but what happened was, so GE Cap, General Electric, basically what happened was they sold like washing machines and stuff, right? And so they would be like, hey, people want financing to buy more washing machines. And so like we'll give them financing, GE Capital. And then GE Capital started doing more than just financing washing machines. They were selling financing as other stuff. And it became so good, it became the biggest part of the business by far. And so then a few years ago, what happened was the bank bought this insurance company. And they didn't know this, but they had a lot of skeletons in the closet. And so the insurance company ends up making a ton of bad deals that they didn't know about. And then it just totally took out the bank. And so they were so hit by this insurance company that they bought, which is a bad deal, that they had to do a ton of spinoffs, a ton of restructuring. Part of it was selling off GE Capital, but it was so big that they sold it off in different parts. And so my business, GCAS, G Capital Aviation Services, was one of the last businesses to sell. They spun it off and I left. That's when I joined consulting. Speaker 2: So that led you to the management consulting. And then you were with, was it Deloitte on the consulting side? So what did your role look like there? Speaker 1: So I was there for six years. I did probably half and half, two different types of roles. One is what I'll call like op strategy and there's the other one called growth strategy, right? So op strategy is like, I'll give you an example. There's a hedge fund, started off just like doing stuff in Excel, right? Which is like, I don't know, like doing financial models in Excel, doing their own in-house finances in Excel, all that stuff. Worked out great until it became a multi-billion dollar fund. And then those processes that would take them an hour now took them two weeks. And so it just became so slow because their process has never caught up with the bank itself. And so we would go in and just like looking to go, hey, this is like how you can run more effectively. Right. And so I did that for a little bit. And then after I did that effectiveness, I'd call it part of the business. Then I switched to growth strategy. What growth strategy is, is marketing Corporate strategy, sales, that kind of stuff. And so picture like, do we launch a new product? Or should we expand a new country? How do we, I don't know, increase the ROI on our products? How do we like create a competitive advantage? So we can increase our prices, like pricing terms, all the growth side stuff. That's how I got more into, I'm in the marketing space now. That's how I got into the marketing space. Speaker 2: And so at what point along the management consulting journey do you start writing about it on LinkedIn? Because I know that's how you started to grow your audience and how you really now are in the position that you're in now. So at what point did you start kind of writing about it? Speaker 1: So, I kind of more towards the end because I ended up leaving. So, I was in corporate strategy. And so, corporate strategy fascinates me because it's like, say, imagine I was at JP Morgan, right? I'm making it up. JPMorgan has 300,000 employees. Massive. But it's 11 people who decide the future of the business as a whole. That's a corporate strategy team. And so that corporate strategy team is in one boardroom making the biggest decisions for the company. And like of 300,000 people, it's 11 people. And so such few people have access to it and such a rare experience to have. And I'm in that boardroom, right? I'm like one of the, I'm a consultant advising those 11, let's say, right? And so I started writing about it on Twitter, not giving away secrets and stuff, but talking about what do we talk about in those boardrooms? How do we decide should we launch a new product? Should we go into this new country? What are we worried about? What are the executives worried about? And I started writing about it on Twitter and that blew up. And so that took me, I know, 40,000 followers on Twitter. And like writing about that, sharing frameworks that worked with small businesses. Like, yeah, sharing how the big guys do it, tools, guides, that kind of stuff that took off. And I use that audience to advise small businesses as well. Speaker 2: So that early audience on Twitter where a lot of those people just, I mean, it sounds like were some of them small businesses that wanted to learn through you about how you're guiding these bigger companies and then using that information to grow their own small businesses. Is that kind of who that early audience was? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'll give you an example. So I had a call when I first started out. Someone reached out and was like, hey, can we talk? This is before I left, right? I just started writing about it. He was also, he was in corporate, had this problem for himself. It was like a calendaring issue. And he was like, hey, I'm gonna take my life savings and invest in myself and build this tool that I needed to show everyone else. Awesome. So he goes out, leaves his company, leaves his cushy job, And starts building this thing and gets no traction for like, I don't know how long, two years. He's running out of cash. He's just super worried. And when we were talking, I was like, all right, well, show me a strategy. Let's take a look. And he just doesn't have one. Speaker 2: At all. Nothing. Speaker 1: At all. And I'm just like, okay, who's your target customer? Who are you? Any of that? And he's like, everyone. This works for everyone. Right? And so if you're a, if you're a business sort of like I am, like immediately alarm goes off. Terrible answer. Horrible answer. Speaker 2: Right? Yeah. Speaker 1: And, um, but a lot of people don't know, they don't know that you should target one avatar, do it in one channel, do it this way. Like all these things that like, We may take for granted, right? But a lot of people out there just don't know these things. And so like, for me to just take that same, let's take that one example where it's like, okay, like target one avatar. Well, I can talk about how make up a name. Cisco did it in their boardroom. We targeted, well, their more complex business was going to be able to manage. But like on one product, maybe target one avatar. And then the story is if you're a small business, you should be focusing on one avatar. Here's why, right? That was a game changer for a lot of people. A lot of people are like, wait, I did not know that. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: And so it's like kind of like these business one-on-one things taught through both the eyes of like a complex corporate or through a small business. Speaker 2: So did he end up getting more clarity around who his target customer was? Like were you able to help him figure that out or did he kind of just run out of cash? And like what was the conclusion there? I'm curious. Speaker 1: Yeah. He had an aha moment, right? And it was interesting because like that actually for me this moment was actually a big transformer vote for me. Because like I'd always advise big corporates and like it was like They were interested. They were great. They were grateful. Thank you. But this guy, this guy teared up. He literally cried on the call because he was so frustrated with his own personal life on the line. And I never had that experience with a corporate. And so experiencing that was the first time I was like, wow, I can really make an impact to people who just need some help with basic business fundamentals. And so yeah, so I mean, we jammed a little bit on like kind of what his target avatar would be and all that kind of stuff. And it kind of let him go on his front. I didn't continue to engage with him because it was earlier on. But it was a big riveting moment. Speaker 2: Well, that is I feel like everybody kind of has those pivotal moments of when either like from his end, right? He had that conversation with you. Lightbulb goes off for him, and he kind of knows what some of the big mistakes that he's been making up to that point. And then for you, it sounds like the lightbulb moment was well, hey. A lot of these business principles that are like you said, kind of business 101 for people like me and you, a lot of people don't know this stuff and I can put out content and I can educate people on these things and help them along their journey. So was that kind of the, like one of the epiphanies for you there in that conversation with him? Speaker 1: Yeah. And like, I think the interesting part for me was, um, there's people who have experiences, right? And there's people who can like tell stories, right? Storytell. And there's overlap, but they're different because there's some people who have amazing experience, but they're horrible at communicating it. Speaker 2: Right, right. Speaker 1: Like they can communicate it logically, but in a way it's interesting, not when it like catches attention, not the way that like hits it in the right angle. It gives people an aha moment. That's a hard skill. It's a totally different skill. And if you spent 30 years of your life just deep in the weeds of corporate strategy, let's say, you've never had a chance to develop that skill, but you have amazing stories to tell. On the other side of the fence, as you know in socials, some people are awesome at telling engaging stories, but they've never done a thing in their life. And so that was kind of an aha moment where I was like, hey, I've had these experiences I love to share with people. And if I can invest a few years of my life learning how to tell them in a way that's actually engaging, interesting to people, that's going to be a really beneficial thing. In his case, I can't imagine he's never in his life heard, you should focus on one avatar, you should niche down. But it could have been that in that moment, the way it was said finally resonated and clicked and boom, he's like, oh, I get it now. Speaker 2: That's so true. And that's something that I'm trying to get better at is telling stories and using analogies. And quite honestly, I'm just not very good at it yet, right? I see some people talk who, I mean, there's certain people you hear them talk or you hear them on a podcast. And if you count the number of stories they tell, it's like, four or five a minute, right? Like some people are so good at it and so good at breaking down complex topics and making them simple. It is absolutely a skill. Now, how did you then develop that skill into, so you start writing on Twitter, right? You build up a following there. You're consulting with people. How does that then translate into LinkedIn? And then how do you go and scale it? Because I know you're a big systems guy. You talk about, Having systems in place for creating content and repurposing content. How do you translate that to LinkedIn and how do you scale it from there? Speaker 1: Well, to translate it to LinkedIn, I was nervous for a while at first. I was still consulting. Speaker 2: Oh, okay. So you were still at the job. Speaker 1: I was still at the job. And so everyone's on LinkedIn, no one's on Twitter. And so I was nervous. But in terms of Twitter, I was lucky because I'd written on Twitter now for a year at that point. And so I had written, called a hundred Twitter threads. But I also had engagement metrics on all the Twitter threads. So I knew rank order, which Twitter threads are grip. And so when I, when I was ready, when I was getting ready to leave, I was like, all right, I'm ready. I'm going to, I'm going to turn it on, on LinkedIn. I just card pasted my best threads. And I kid you not, I already got We have 15 or 20,000 followers in about a month. Speaker 2: Wow. Just from copying and pasting your best Twitter threads over to LinkedIn? Speaker 1: Yeah. So it was, I remember, cause at the time they hadn't, we were still early in terms of like, there weren't that many Twitter people going to LinkedIn. So it was such a new way of writing. I remember I've placed a bet, I don't know if you're Barrett O'Neill, he's a buddy of mine, who like crushed it on Twitter. And so I made a bet with him. I was like, dude, I'll get you a beer if I don't get you 5,000 followers in a week. Speaker 2: In a week? Speaker 1: In a week, yeah. And he was just like, I literally just copy pasted his stuff, put it in a carousel because I already had pre-made it. It took me two minutes. And I was like, dude, just post this. And buy me a beer. And he did, he got 5,000 followers. At the time it was a lot less. Speaker 2: Well, and obviously the topics that you're, cause that's where kind of I struggle is the topic, like my main area of expertise is in selling on Amazon, right? Specifically the niche of selling wholesale on Amazon, which I'm sure there are a lot of people doing it, but there's not that many people doing it. Speaker 1: Right? Right. Speaker 2: That type of content, it used to do well on Twitter, it doesn't anymore. Used to do well on LinkedIn, doesn't anymore. Really just the TAM for that market, it's just shrunk. It's not as big as it was. So what I like about your content and what you talk about is it is much more broadly applicable. Like there's way more management consultants and people in corporate strategy on LinkedIn and on Twitter too, than there are Amazon sellers, right? So that's kind of the, I'd say the struggle, but really kind of the transition that I've been making recently is, well, how do I take the experience that I have in the Amazon world, which is not just selling on Amazon, it's sales, it's negotiation, it's how to talk to people, it's how to follow up. It's all the soft skills. But then how do I storytell around that in a way that, is more than just, well, hey, here's how I sold this thing on Amazon, right? That resonates with a broader group of people. So that's why I love talking to people like you, because you've mastered that and you built a really impressive audience as a result. And also I know you've got systems in place to We're here to help you identify the best content and scale it. So do you want to talk to the systems that you've created? And I know you've got a new content system that you build out. What does that look like? Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And actually, one thing I'll say before I answer that is I'm actually going the opposite way of you. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Right. So like, it's funny because we have opposite, we started with opposite strategies and now we're switching. Speaker 2: Switching, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Because I'm actually going more niche now. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Cause when I, I think the biggest difference is like when the broader you go, the less engagement you have per follower, right? You don't have like as passionate super fans and that kind of stuff. Right. There's a way I can point to a few, I can point to a few big creators who have passionate super fans, right? Uh, Grammar Happy, right? Like, uh, like, uh, oh, Twitter name drop. Cause there's folks who are on Twitter here, but, um, but there's a very unique way to build an engaged, big audience. Most people who have big audiences don't have engaged, big audiences, huge, massive differences. Very, very, very hard to do. Right. Um, and so like, I'm more interested now in having a smaller, um, like highly engaged group. Then a bigger, less engaged group. Speaker 2: And so how do you that? It makes perfect sense. But so my question for you is, so how do you really measure that? Right? Is it literally the engagement metrics of follow or not? Sorry, not follows, but comments. I know likes are pretty useless, but is it just, Hey, how many people are commenting actual insightful comments on my post? Not just AI generated trash. Is that what you're using as your kind of success metric or is it something different? Speaker 1: How many people book calls and how many people give you a dollar? Speaker 2: Okay. I respect that. So it's all about the, it's all about how much revenue does it generate? It's like, I don't care how many followers you have. It's how many people are. Jumping on a discovery call or, you know, signing up for your programs or buying your digital products. Is that an accurate understanding there? Speaker 1: Yeah, because there's a huge difference between someone who, like, there's people will give you a lot of likes, right? Speaker 2: But they'll never give you a dollar. Speaker 1: Never give you a dollar, right? Like, why? Why don't they give you a dollar? Either they don't have the money. Sure, fine. Or they just don't care about you that much. And so like, I have a friend, I'll go back to George. I went to go visit my buddy, Graham, who I think is one of the most engaged audiences I know. And I was at a Starbucks with him. And I was like, dude, you have the most engaged audience I've ever seen in my life. He's got 200,000 followers on Twitter. And I was like, you could sneeze on Twitter and you would sell a course. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Right. So he looks at me, smirks and he goes, hold my coffee. He pulls out his phone. He types the word sneeze on Twitter and tweets it. He smirks and puts his phone back. We finished ordering our coffee, he pulls it out, he's got like 40 comments and one of them I kid you not was, where do I buy your course? Speaker 2: No way. That's wild. I mean, but that's the power of, like you said, having an engaged audience and building that trust over time and showing that you stand for something. That's one of the things that I took from you in one of our initial conversations months ago is that, and this is really what kind of spurred me to start doing this, is you're like, listen, Information will only take you so far. People want to resonate with you and they want to follow you. And I know that when we were kind of looking at the LinkedIn posting system that you had at the time, you had broken down the three types of posts. You said, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, one of them was like an expert type post, which is just more content, general information. One of them was, I think, like an opinion style post where, hey, people are either going to love you or hate you for this post, but they're not going to be indifferent, which is what you want. And then I can't remember the third off the top of my head, but is that kind of the approach that someone should be taking, even if they're newer to building an audience is like, listen, you want people to like you for you. Yeah, you want to put out good information, but. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's one way to do it for sure. There's one framework I love, right, that I stole from Ali Abdaal. That like, I think if you use it. It'll make your content stand out as a personal, like, this is Corey and get people passionate about it. It's called the Primal Branding Framework. Speaker 2: Oh, yes. I remember you telling me about that. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Let's get into that. I think that's pretty cool. Okay. So, Primal Branding. So, think of it as what are the elements of the seven pillars of brand that make up the content, right? So, like, when I form my Primal Branding up, Um, one second. Got it. I should have it up. Perfect time. Okay, sharing now. Cool. Can you see my notion here? Speaker 2: Let's see. Not at the moment. It actually might not work within our Riverside recording software here. So maybe if you could just explain it. Speaker 1: I'll just explain it. Okay. So take it as like seven pillars. I'm the CEO of Brint. And so if you, what I like to do is take these pillars of brand and sneak them into my content. Because I believe that if someone gets, if someone's able to consume say seven pieces of your content or 10 pieces of your content, right? They start to trust you more and more and more. But if you don't put anything personal about yourself, about like your beliefs, about what makes you different, all that kind of stuff, then like they don't actually know you anymore after they've consumed seven pieces of your content, 10 pieces of your content. Speaker 2: So like, all right, I know we ran into some technical difficulties there, but we're jumping back in. It's all good. So let's pick back up with the primal branding or I guess framework that you were talking about. So I think we cut out right when you were starting to describe what that is, what that looks like and kind of the framework behind that. Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. So the idea there is, hey, you want to be able to sneak in your things like everything about you. So like your origin story, your beliefs, who you hate. That's actually a big one. We'll talk about enemies in a sec. Things like that. And so if you can come up with Like phrases you say repeatedly, if you can come up with those things and then sprinkle them in throughout your content, after someone's consumed say 10 pieces of your content, they're like, oh, I know what Corey says repeatedly. I know what he believes, what I believe, and I agree with those beliefs. I also want to support him against our common enemy, right? And that creates a tribe. Of people who just totally agree with you and believe what you believe and we're a team and we're supporting each other. And that's what really builds trust. Right? And so without that, you're just kind of like a, I don't know, they're not passionate about you. With that, that's how you create passionate people. Speaker 2: No, that makes perfect sense. At the end of the day, you could put out the best informational content in the world, but if people don't care about you or if they don't resonate with your origin story or what you stand for, those types of things, it's like, why would they actually care? Speaker 1: In the world of AI, it's becoming more and more important because informational content is now just commoditized. Totally. Speaker 2: Is there a course out there on the Primal Branding framework? Like I'd love to dive into that in more detail. I mean, that's something that I, again, I'm trying to work on myself and I'd love some sort of course or like self-guided resource to implement that myself. Do you know of anything like that that exists? Speaker 1: So there's a book on it. I think it's literally called Primal Branding. I came across it in Ali Abdaal's YouTube course. But there's some books that I love the idea. It's a really powerful idea, but the idea could have been an email. And I think that's one of them. Speaker 2: I'm literally buying it right now on Amazon. Speaker 1: Yeah. So like that is one. If you want, I actually wrote a newsletter article on it summarizing it. So if you go to outliergrowth.com, that's my newsletter. And I think it's like A few weeks back, I wrote one literally called Primal Branding is the Icons Like a Caveman. And I just summarized the seven points. I don't think I have to read the whole book. I think that's enough to know what to do. Speaker 2: Well, you know what? I'm going to do you better. I'm going to do both because I'm a big reader myself. So yeah, I'll definitely go check out the newsletter. And guys, for those of you watching this, right, if you want to learn more about strategies, whether it's branding, just marketing in general, definitely go subscribe to Brian's newsletter because there's a lot of good gems there. Now, Brian, for the last portion of our conversation here, man, I want to talk about what you're doing with Talent HQ and how you can go and hire remote workers either through you or just in general, like give us the background on how the company started and how you've scaled it to where it is now. Speaker 1: Yeah. Take the origin story from Primal Branding. We get started. Um, yeah. So I'd be the big thing was like, okay, so after I was consulting, um, I was consulting clients on like how they build a marketing plans, marketing systems, that kind of stuff. And so the client would say, Hey, thanks for the plan. Thanks for the strategy. It's great. Like who's going to make that reality? Like who's going to run it. Right. And so I would go into, I would find talent for my clients. And so I'd go into Latin America, find great marketing talent and place them into businesses, into my class businesses. And my friends were like, Hey, that's, you did that. That's cool. Could you do that for me too? And so I started kind of just snowballing into finding, like solving my own problem, which was I had clients who needed people to like make this thing a reality. And so I started finding a lot of marketing talent, email marketers, account managers, et cetera, et cetera. And then took off. And so now we do a lot more in the marketing. We do marketing, sales, admin type work. But that's been kind of the genesis of that business took off alongside my CMO business. And now we have, now I'm here in Latin America physically meeting like talent, building a distribution channel. And I'm here like meeting, meeting people to plug into businesses. Speaker 2: And so it sounds like you get, you really, you've provide talent at all sorts of niches, right? You said admin, marketing. Is there anything that your people can't do? Is there any sort of talent that you won't provide? Speaker 1: Um, I mean, like I, I'm a CMO. I know marketing. I know sales. I know admin stuff and how to do the ops, that kind of stuff. I think one of our biggest advantages is that I advise people on the strategy side to make sure that they're making the right decisions around talent that's most functional to their business. I'll challenge them. If they say, hey, I need a product manager, I'm like, do you really? I think you need an ops manager, not a product manager. I'll say, oh, I think you need Someone asked me for chief of staff when you're in EA, that kind of stuff where I help make sure that they're not overpaying for talent. They're not, I don't know, they've actually thought through like, should they be using AI instead of talent in this case, right? Like I advise them through the whole process. And so because of that, like I focus on the roles I deeply understand myself, which is marketing, sales, ad and ops. But like stuff like Developers. I could find developers in theory, but I want every person who works for me to have an amazing experience. I want them to focus on the roles that I deeply understand myself. Speaker 2: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, because I mean, I feel like I'm the same as you. It's like I understand ops. I understand admin, sales and marketing. But if you ask me to go find you a good developer, not going to happen, right? That's just not something I have expertise with myself. But why in Latin America, right? Why not the Philippines or India or Pakistan or some of these other countries that are commonly go-to places for hiring talent? Speaker 1: So, I started in Philippines. That's where I hired my first person out of Philippines. And there's a huge cultural difference between, say, Philippines and Latin America. And each one has pros and cons. And so, one thing I found is that Philippine culture tends to highly value foreigners, right? They put them on a pedestal. And because of that, what that means is that they We'll do exactly what you say to the tee, which means that if an instruction falls out, if you have to do something outside that instruction list, it can kind of break sometimes. And so what I found for, especially with the marketing rules that I love and the sales rules, I found Latin America to be awesome for that because they don't need as much like step-by-step instructions as a Philippine would. I mean, you can definitely find an amazing talent in the Philippines too, but broad swath culturally, I found Latin America better suited my marketing needs and my sales needs than say Philippines. Speaker 2: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And that's been my experience too, because I've hired a lot of people from the Philippines over the years. I've got a few fantastic Filipino employees on staff right now, but that's totally been my experience as well. They want to please you. They want to do exactly what it is that you say. And a lot of times if you want them to do something outside the realm of what they can easily understand. Basically, they don't want to do a lot of thinking on their own, right? And that's not everybody. Luckily, my people are very independent thinkers and they don't necessarily have that issue. But as a culture, I think you're correct, right? It is kind of sometimes difficult for them to kind of make those decisions, whereas it sounds like not the case in Latin America or much less the case. That's kind of what you're saying. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can absolutely find examples of great talent in the Philippines, right, that can think outside the box and that kind of stuff. Absolutely. It's just culturally more concentrated in Latin America than it is in the Philippines. Sure. Speaker 2: No, that makes a ton of sense. Well, Brian, so if somebody was interested in hiring you or Talent HQ to help them find a great employee, first of all, what types of businesses do you work with? Will you work with anybody who's looking for that talent there in Latin America for any of those roles that you mentioned, or do you only service specific types of businesses down there? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, in general, most of our client base is agency SaaS econ businesses. We service outside that as well, but that's just our core competency. We do most of our work. And so typically like the target, like people who work best with us, because one advantage we have is one is the consulting thing I told you about, like we'll sit there and advise you through the whole process. Because I think most recruiters, they'll recruit exactly what you asked for. But we sit there and advise, okay, actually, does this make sense? You need this, etc. The other thing we do is really good at building teams, right? And so we have like a volume packaging where if you're like, hey, we need 3, 4, 5, 11 people, whatever it is, we've got like a package deal that enables us to do that at scale really quickly. And so if you're growing really quickly and you have you have needs, I don't know. So you need five plus people over the course of a year. Then that's where we'll be a great fit. Speaker 2: Got it. Okay. I love that. And then where can people go and hire you or find out more about the service? Speaker 1: Yeah. So our website is talent HQ, talent HQ.co, co like Columbia. Um, or, uh, you can also find me on Twitter, Brian O'Connor, Brian F O'Connor is my handle, uh, LinkedIn as well, or my newsletter outlier growth.com. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, Brian, anything else you want to leave the audience with before we part ways? Speaker 1: And that's it. Speaker 2: Awesome, man. Well, listen, I appreciate the time. I know you're having a good time down there in South America. So hopefully you and I will link up here in the States sometime soon. And guys, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, if you're watching over on YouTube, be sure to leave the video a thumbs up and subscribe because we come out with one of these interviews every single Wednesday. So Brian, thank you for your time and I'll talk to you soon. Speaker 1: Absolutely. I've loved being here. Thanks, Corey.