Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Ladies, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Tron podcast. This is your host, Rashad Woods. Now I got a gentleman that will tell you the secret sauce if you're willing to listen to it. From straight from entrepreneur, from startup to billion dollar businesses, who's carved out enough time for my little program, my little small portion of the earth? Roy Osing, ladies and gentlemen. Let's get this started. I'm pumped today.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Hey, listen, great to be here, Rashad. Looking forward to it. Dude, let's get, let's do this.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, and you know, obviously, you know, first of all, people try to complicate things and think that building something successful, splitting an atom or it's gotten overly complicated and you basically have told people, for lack of a better term, to stfu, this is what you need to do. So yeah, let's go down to it.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Yep. Well, you know, I mean, the world, we've been taught, right, that if it's not complicated, it can't be. Right. The textbooks tell us that.
Other so called experts who have never run businesses tell us that. Academics tell us that, philosophers tell us that.
Well, I'm here to tell you as a leader of an organization that started from very little in the data world and sitting in a monopoly telephone company who basically took that organism into a billion dollars a year, by the way, that business today is 18 billion a year.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Right, I saw which one it is too.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: So yeah, I like to think of it. So we basically got down to basics. We got down to simple stuff. Look at human beings, okay? Respond to simplicity. They don't respond to complexity. They need to understand and agree with what you're trying to do as a leader, okay? And so, so it, for me, it was really simple. I like doing crazy stuff anyways, and people relate to that. If you get up and you try and explain a formula, right, to a frontline service person as to why they should be behaving a certain way, they will kick your ass. I mean, it's just as simple as that. They'll, they'll say, go away. I mean, I don't understand that and it can't be true. And so part of leadership is getting back to simplicity. Make it simple and put the textbook down, okay? I want you to all put the textbook down for a while and listen to Papa Roy explain some basics of life that actually work in the real world.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Right?
Yeah. You know, and I thought like, be different or be dead is the, is the central theme not only of the book that you wrote, but it's a way of life for you. So for people who don't know your background, how did you get started on this journey of saying, listen, you can copycat all you want, but there's a limit to that and this is how you're ultimately going to be successful?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I've basically always been that person. My mother, I remember always harassing me because I was trying to step out always. And I questioned everything, etc. And said, well, why not this, why not that, et cetera. So I think it, it's pretty well in my DNA and, and I practiced it practically my whole life and in business certainly. And when I was asked to take up this opportunity to lead the company into the Internet world from a monopoly telephone company, I jumped at the chance and quickly realized that the issue that we had that most people don't really do a very good job at is all about differentiation. And so the name, the idea and theme of Be different or Be Dead evolved out of a concern that I had then and I have now that organizations do a woefully inadequate job of differentiating themselves from their competition. And we can go into that a little bit if you want. So that was the genesis of Be different or Be Dead. The or be dead is simply, was simply my view of saying, look at the ultimate consequence of, of not being different from your competition is pretty significant.
Okay? It's quote death. Organizations die. They just do. And we may as well talk about it that way because that's the truth.
Look at the world is replete with organizations and people who claim to be better, who claim to be the best, who claim to be number one, who claim to be market leaders. And it's all narcissistic bullshit. It's not true, okay? It's not true. You can't prove it, like in whose world is best defined? And so I call that clap trap in my work. And I've had to create my own differentiation strategy around that. Like you would think, right, Rashad, in a world that is hyper competitive, technology changing every day, rules and regulations of business are changing every day.
Customers are super powerful. You would think that organizations would get better at answering the question, why should you do business with me and not my competitors? The truth of the matter is they're getting worse. And it's promulgated largely by academics who pontificate over blue oceans and don't want you to be in a red ocean. And how's that helpful when 99% of small businesses are in red oceans, for damn sakes? Come on, give me a Break I'm a red ocean dude. I can help you in red oceans. And so with that sort of background, we started just doing stuff. And so I've created this thing around be different or be dead called the only statement. The only statement is the solution to a world of claptrap differentiation expressions, okay? It blows up the brand promise notion. It blows up the universal or unique so called unique selling proposition world, which aren't unique at all, right?
Expressing to the market what you think you are is hardly an expression of why should you buy? Why should you buy from me and not anybody else? So the only statement's a real simple thing. It says we are the only ones who. Not we are the best. Not we are the, we're better. We're the only ones who. And so the quest for an organization, and I helped them do this because I created my own process, is to actually find that unique sweet spot where they exist by themselves. I've actually created a blue ocean for them. But I don't call it that because the blue ocean notion is crap anyway.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: It's great to oversee.
You're caught up in the, in the, in the, the look of it, all, right?
You, do you know what I mean? I know you're coasting along and you're not actually innovating.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: So the thing that drives me crazy on this is like for anybody to say to a practitioner, because I'm a how to guy, right? I'm a frontline guy, I'm in the trenches guy. I get messy for somebody to say to me that the secret for growth for you, Roy, is to find a blue ocean. I want to hit them in the mouth because it's not helpful.
I want somebody like me who exists in red oceans, okay? With hungry competitors, powerful customers, ridiculous regulators. And nevertheless, notwithstanding all that have succeeded, I want to listen to those people. And so part of it for me is trying to bridge that gap between what I've learned and how we were so successful and that academic world. And so when I say I've created a practical way to get a blue ocean, I mean it. My stuff I've actually thought through and I think it's a communications issue here really how I, how we can get people and help the people in red oceans get to a world where indeed they are unique in a way care about. And I do that through my, what I call my only statement. And I'm the only one that does this stuff, right? I mean, I am the only one that does this stuff. I don't know, maybe some people think it's beneath them, Rashad.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: I think it's because it's kind of scary, right? So, like there's a couple different things. And I asked this because you've been successful in your fields. How do you keep from not being in the copycat syndrome, but at the same time tailoring your needs towards a going market? And I asked that because streaming, perfect example, is streaming, right? Everybody was like, okay, you know, Netflix was the first entry into streaming, right? And then every other competitor said, oh, people want to watch stuff at home. And so then if you didn't have a streaming service, for example, you were left behind. But then the problem you ran into is because you were late to that market, everybody pumped billions in content and then all of a sudden they realized they had to claw back because the cost structure wasn't in place that they thought it was. It was as easy as people thought it was. And there's mergers, there's acquisitions. I don't want to ramble, but how do you keep from being a copycat, but at the same time you could be a blockbuster and go completely obsolete?
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Well, look, it, it's pretty straightforward, okay? I mean, being unique, right? And being successful is absolutely not about technology and it's not about products and services, okay? You need those, right, to play the game, but they're not going to get you to win the game, okay? So part of it for me is you need a strategic context. And this is where most business leaders, and I mean this in the most respectful way, they fall down because they don't take the time to create a strategic context for the business. What do I want to be when I grow up and how do all of those things like AI streaming, if you happen to be in that world, how do they fit within that? It's far too easy for people to jump to the tactics because it's sexy, right? And everybody's into it. And so I got to, I got a stream. If I'm in the business of communications, I got to do streaming, blah, blah, blah. You might have to. Okay, but what I want you to do is think a little broader, okay? And answer the question, how do all those gee whiz things fit in my context of how I'm going to be unique in satisfying the cravings of the people that have the potential to deliver the growth I'm looking for? And in that sentence, I've fundamentally just described to you the strategic planning process that I had to create. It's called strategic game planning.
I do this in a 48 hour workshop with the executive leadership team of small businesses, medium large for profits. It really doesn't matter. And we basically determine growth goals. We identify what I call the who do you want to serve? Which are the customer groups that have the latent potential to give you the growth. And then we take a deep dive into those customer groups and answer the question, what do they crave? Not what do they need? And let me say here, they may need streaming, but they crave something else because everybody else is providing them with streaming.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: The challenge is to figure out what those target customers desire, what they lust for, what they covet, what they want. Because fundamentally the needs space is heavily contested. It's me too stuff, you know, the true me too movement exists in it and exactly that. And it's highly price competitive, right?
The craving space, there's very few people playing in there because they don't even know how to spell the name. And so you can play in there with relatively few competitors and it's price insensitive. The third part of this says, with those people that you're going to target and an understanding of what they crave, how are you going to compete and win? That's where the only statement comes in. We are going to be or we are the only ones who da da da, da da. And it's all targeted at the customers that you, that you want to go after with the cravings, you understand, that will give you the growth that you, that you need. So you can see this stuff is all sequential. It is so tight and so targeted. You don't have the right to even talk to me about AI okay without me understanding what your strategic game plan is. So you see the regimen and the discipline and the reality is, man, nobody does it. Very few people do it. And when people say to me, I don't understand how I'm not being successful, well, I know how I know why you're not doing your work.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Well, the thing is about it too, and I say this respectfully, there's a lot of, there's a lot of salesmen on the Internet. There's a lot of flashy ads. There's a lot of people who are subject matter experts, right? And so people ultimately get caught up in the pizzazz and jazz, right? Like, and there's a statement, and I just used it on a previous podcast, this quote rings true. You know, if it's free, you're not the customer, you're the product being sold, right? And what I mean by that is you're quickly, you turn on a YouTube ad. You go to Instagram, somebody's flashing something, and it becomes very hard for the consumer or somebody who wants to go grow business to find out what's authentic or not.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Right?
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Because ultimately people are very visual and they see something successful and they don't. They want to cut corners and realize, well, I can get from point A to point, you know, z, without taking these necessary steps in between.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: You see, I. I don't think. I don't think you're in the YouTube business. I don't think people should be in the YouTube business. I don'T think they should be in the streaming business. I think they should be in the business of serving a group of customers who will deliver them their growth goals in a way that's unique. And if that uniqueness happens to be. Happens to involve an assembly of communications tools that includes YouTube, okay, so be it. But you are definitely not in the YouTube space. You aren't. Because if you. If you think you are, then. Then your mind says, well, how can I be different in supplying YouTube? It's the wrong question.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Well, it's the same thing when, like, people can say whatever they want. The UFC is the behemoth of mixed martial arts. It's not that. And people have tried to copy that exact same business model. Oh, all I have to do is get signed fighters, pay them, cage in the audience. I mean, look how many MMA organizations have absolutely went completely, like a year and they never heard of again because they tried to compete with ufc.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: Well, that's exactly the point.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: It's impossible to replicate their success. They were the first to market. They've got the three letters that everybody associates with mixed martial arts. Now they have other. You know, there's places in Asia and in Europe that do their own regional, smaller level. I'm going to stay in my respective lane, but in North America and certainly most places globally, you're just not going to be able to compete.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: So. So I don't even want to talk about competitors. I don't want to talk about competitors. I don't want to talk about technology.
I don't want to talk about tactics. What I want to talk about are the people, okay, that you want to serve, that you understand their cravings, and you're going to deliver unique value to them, whatever that looks like. It may involve a bottle of Cabernet sauvignon, and it may be tagged with a communication service somehow customized for them. Okay? But I don't want to talk about what they're doing in Europe.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Because that's all, look at. All you're doing is going down the rat hole, what you need to do.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Great point.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: If you, if you have a half an hour to spare, go figure out what those customers of yours crave. That's what you do. And then decide how you're going to play into that craving space. Because when you do that, you're being functional, okay? You're serving your strategic purpose. If you, if you don't do that, you're being dysfunctional, all right? And look at.
We all have limited bandwidth, we all have limited time and resources. We cannot squander it. In fact, the people that are focused, I think, have a strategic advantage over most other people just for that very reason. They are so mindlessly focused on their strategic intent that everything else they don't see, that they don't. You know, And I'm not saying be, be, be oblivious to it, but I call it chasing. Yummy. If you chase all that stuff, it may feel good and taste good, but it gives you, it doesn't quench your thirst and it doesn't take care of your appetite because at the end of the day, you achieve nothing in terms of furthering the growth of your business. And so that discipline is missing out there because we just love to chase. And things are changing so rapidly, you feel left behind, right? If you're not in it, well, let me tell you, you're ahead of it if you're behind it, if you're doing the right thing.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: You know, I've used this example on several other episodes, and I'm sure people would think I sound a little redundant, but I always use the White Castle comparison. Right? White Castle was the first fast food hamburger joint in the United States of America. I don't want to say worldwide because I don't want to be ignorant like I know everywhere else. But the way that they've survived all these years is they knew their lane. And they never tried to go the McDonald's route and be the Happy Meal, be the conglomerate. And they're still family owned. They never franchise, and they're offered in store stores in the US like at your Kroger's and at your Meyers. But they survive all of these things because they serve their, their specific customer set that knew that they. What they were getting with White Castle. And they never, for lack of a better term, pulled an Icarus and shot too close to the sun and then burned themselves up in the process. So while all these companies tried to imitate, you know, McDonald's and got to get the toys and all these other things, they were like, this is what we do. And they could be around the corner from a McDonald's, but they focused on their core customer base. And that's what you specialize in.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Well, that's it. I mean, that's it in a nutshell. You asked the question earlier. How can you create? Okay? How can you not copy? I call it gargling Google. Like, the world gargles Google. And now it's getting worse, worse with ChatGPT, by the way. It's been exacerbated. But you do that by actually creating the strategy process that you and I have just been discussing. It forces you to not ask the question, well, what are they doing? What's working for them? I think I'll try and copy that. I mean, that is a definition of insanity. To actually believe that what works for somebody else will work as effectively for you as it does for them. I mean, the premise is all screwed up anyway. I mean, but. But you know, the experts in benchmarking and best in class. And if you think I'm being sarcastic, you're reading the absolutely right. Those. Those idiots, okay, are infecting the minds and sou of pretty decent people who actually want to have a business that they can exit at some point in time and retire on for sure, okay? What they should be listening to are people such as myself, okay, that understand what growth is and that you need to create, not copy. And that's where the world starts. It's hard, okay? Copying is easy. It's lazy. It's lazy marketing. It's lazy everything.
To actually be able to create needs a whole lot of energy.
But it can be done. It can be done through people who have had success achieving levels of high performance. Those are the people you want to talk to, okay? And you will never see, you will never find.
If you had a conversation today with Lady Gaga, you would never hear her say, well, I copied what. What Taylor Swift is doing. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, give me a break.
I. I'm sorry, man. It just drives me crazy. The world is as fun. Gaga is the most original thing out there. And if you've read, I'm a kind of student of hers, and she is the most absolute, magnificent example of rule breakers, disruptors, serving fans. Hell, she's named her fans, you know, the little Monsters, for God's sakes. And back in my day, the Grateful Dead, their fan base was called the Deadheads. Maybe I should call my fans to be different or be Deadheads. What do you think?
[00:19:15] Speaker A: You know, I think that's a start. You know. You know what I got, one question I got for you is how were you received in that circle of the NBA, the academia world, where, you know, people have to over analyze and psycho babble things. Right. And I say that respectfully because, hey, to each his own, whatever you accomplish. Right? So, but like, how do you basically say, like, listen, dude, break it down to basics. Know your customer base, find out what they crave, and then target that and, and master that particular lane. But people want to have these big meetings for 25 hours about topic after topic.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Yeah, very good question.
Yeah, I'm laughing because, because I've had some interesting experiences with that group of people. I mean, it's starting with something really simple. It used to be a hundred years ago that, that I was a regular invite to the MBA graduate program of the University of British Columbia because I'm in Vancouver, Canada.
[00:20:16] Speaker A: Vancouver's beautiful, by the way. I went on.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Suspension bridge, two years.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Oh, man, I can't do that. I can't look down.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: I had to do it, man. I had to do it.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: Oh, that's, that's awesome.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: Beautiful city, man.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Well, thank you.
Well, we're starting to get a lot of challenges, as are most large cities.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: So congested.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, geez. And anyways, so I was on this kind of like regular speaking circuit and of course, what I, what I noticed all of a sudden was that the number of invitations that I was getting were sort of on the decline.
And the reason for that, the reason for that is I was a threat. I was a threat to every professor who was teaching an MBA related class. Because what I taught. Okay, was I, my, my go in was basically, by the way, okay, good for you. You have an mba. I want you to put that aside now and listen to other things that will leverage what you've learned in a way that's going to make you successful in and of itself. It won't make you successful because these guys walk out expecting like six, seven figures right away. And I kept saying to them, you're insane. Okay? I mean, I don't even believe you. You're rude. It's discourteous. So that whole proposition of getting them to do a right angle term. And I don't, I don't blame the MBA students whatsoever. It's not their fault. It's the program and the professors and that whole university vibe around it to actually imply or explicitize the fact that if you get this degree, you can expect you're entitled to be successful. And it's just blatantly dishonest. And so I, I found talking about killing dumb rules and cutting the crap and all that kind of stuff, they'd rather talk about systems efficiency. And I talk about cut the crap, you know, so I, I found that I, I was disinvited. They unfriended me, Rashad. They unfriended me. And, and that was, that was fine. In, as a, as a kind of like a consultant or mentor, I don't have the same problem because what I discover at the grass grassroots when I'm talking to particularly small to medium businesses, okay, which tend not to have a lot of those people, they have real needs that they want satisfied but with a practical approach. And so I'm walking right into their sweet spot, even though I have to drag them.
You know, the power of the momentum of the past and the power of tradition is pretty hard. And so we have to work hard at kind of getting them to sign up with some of the more simple approaches. And it's kind of a spillover of academia that they're fighting. And I would say that one of my biggest disappointments is that I have been relatively unsuccessful in moving the glut of people in that bell curve, right, of how you do things, and bound by tradition and bound by, you know, copying is unsuccessful. Moving them to the right, the tail of the distribution curve where people do things differently. So I'm, I'm not seeing that's moving as quickly as I would like to see.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: What's funny is that you see all these CNBC and MSN reports all the time that say, college graduates can't get, you know, my, I thought I had a computer science degree and I thought this would, you know, to your point, I had the Google job, I had the Apple job, I had the Amazon job, I had the Microsoft job. And then, you know, the reality smacks them dab in the face to your point, because it's like you were conditioned that as long as you went through this four year program and you took all these courses that you were going to get something on the back end of it. And if you didn't break any rules along the way to do so, you're going to find a little bit of egg on your face or even a little bit of humble pie. And that's not to slam anybody that's, you know, out there looking for anything, but it certainly can put you in this cocoon that this little hollow world that you walk in is certainly going to lead you to this little funnel path to get you where you're at. And then there's a second stool to that that I just want to say is that now you have a situation where because the market is going towards copycatting all the time, you have a lot of talent that's being poached with high level salaries. When it comes to ChatGPT now, they're poaching people and these salaries they're throwing out are ridiculous. So what are your thoughts on both of those?
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Well, I mean, that's just the way it is. I mean, there's going to be, you know, I think certainly artificial intelligence is a tremendous opportunity for us all as long as it's used the right way. And for me, it's not always that way. It's used as an easy copycat tool.
And again, I mean, I mean, when a name of a business becomes just a normal part of the language, then you're in trouble, okay? Google is that word and it will become something else. It'll be bots and everything else. And so for people who want to be original, who want to do something special, okay, for themselves, or hopefully for somebody else, that's going to be a real challenge to break out.
And one could argue that the actual opportunities for those kinds of people are going to be challenged by the volume of stuff that's happening on the other side, on the technology side, like the AIs, et cetera, et cetera. Okay? And what we need is, we need leaders in business who actually get the fact that it's not about, you know, being special and being different or being driven by technology, okay? It's really a matter of how do you use all of that stuff to achieve the level of performance in the business that you want to achieve. And we're not getting that kind of leadership. And if we had it, it would give meaning to a lot of career paths, right? That people would choose to go on because they would see, oh, there's, I can get a PhD in imperfection because that makes sense. How can you try and formularize a world that is chaotic and changes on you every nanosecond? I mean, the people that imply that you can apply least squares regression analysis, because my degree is in mathematics, how you can apply that to the forecasting world, they're fricking out of their mind, okay? And yet that's what they do. So I talk about let's get it just about right and let's execute the hell out of this puppy and learn as we go, right? Heading west is my definition of a decent strategy. Now, you can see how much precision there is in that, of course.
Well, there's none other than it's west. And we'll figure out where west is as we go. Is it Vancouver? Is it San Francisco? Is it wherever the hell?
We need more of that to actually see organizations become relevant. And that's the key thing, okay? When you are driving your business, okay? From a technology point of view, you risk irrelevance.
What the hell, you risk irrelevance.
Okay? Now see, there's an example. Okay? Look at Rashad. Look at this bloody things talking to me, okay?
Come on.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: I love.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: Shut up.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: You know, you didn't listen. I would cannot tell you what your energy level is like. And I got to be honest, you. I don't want to derail anything, but that was the funniest thing I've seen. See, because I'm thinking like, it's my mind talking to me. Real talk, you know, like, I'm like, dang.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: When you talk about cravings, I just want to say this real quick, right? It's like the NFL. You know why they can put themselves on Peacock on Netflix, on YouTube, on CBS, on ABC, on ESPN? Because they know you're gonna pay for it. They know 150 you're gonna pay for it. So they're like, okay, you can piss him on all you want. That we're on six different streaming services and on Thursday night and on Monday night and taking up all your Sunday and Saturday night games. But you know what, what's going to happen? You're going to subscribe to all six services. Yeah, that's a point blank period because you crave your September to February. So deal with it. And you know what people are going to do? They're going to shut the hell up and they're going to do it. They really will. That's how, that's how big a behemoth that services.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep. Well, that kind of describes the nature of the challenge that many businesses have. You know, they get, they get to a certain point and they go, whoops. I mean, as soon as you look at, at your business and your markets differently, if you start to, to say they're really not markets, they're a whole bunch of individual human beings. As soon as you start to look at the world that way, it changes. Okay? In other words, your relevance to that starts to change. And that's what's supposed to happen. Because in order to, to affect the change in relevance, you have to do Things differently. You have to be more creative. Right. And it's a good fundamental drive. I mean, one of the first questions in my strategic game planning process that I really have a lot of fun with to the point of innovation is the question, how big do you want to be? That's a question about top line revenue growth. So it says, okay, wherever you are today, what do you want your top line to be in 24, in 24 months, not five years. Because a five year plan is, is a, is a charade. It doesn't exist because the fourth year never shows up. It just doesn't. Right. And it gives you permission to put everything off until the year that doesn't show up. And so you don't have to, have to take any risks.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: No sense of urgency.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: None whatsoever. You know, and plus 48 hours, 48 months or 24 months, sorry, is, is an executionable thing.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: So.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: So if you're talking about a planning period of two years, it forces you to execute, measure, and then learn as you go.
So I have fun with clients because they're not used to the question, how big do you want to be? They say, well, how do we calculate that? And I say, you don't. It's a declaration of intent without having any idea. And this will drive the academics crazy when I say this without any idea how you're going to achieve it. And the reason for that. So it's an audacious goal. So the reason for that is if you know how to achieve something, you have zero motivation to do anything different and you have zero motivation to be creative and you'll just go copy Google. If you have no idea how to get there, you have no choice. You have to be innovative and you have to ask the question, okay, given that, I don't know, how are we going to do this? How are we going to go on this journey? And it forces you to be creative and motivational. And when I do these, these 48 hour planning sessions with particularly small to medium business, you would not believe the transformation of the people in the room when we are actually going through the process that starts out with them perspiring over the fact that they've signed up for a revenue goal that they have no idea how they're going to achieve. And I keep saying to them, look it, if you're not sweating, the number's not big enough. That's it. Right? And the CEO is going apoplectic because, you know, I mean, he's been taught to do numbers and that through the MBA school.
Oh God, Yes. Oh, and I'm going, oh. I mean, Jesus. Yeah. So. But it's a wonderful. It's a wonderful way to get at it. Right? It's just a little gimmick. And at the end of the day, they're all converts. They believe in it. And the cool thing, if you. If you follow up with these guys on a regular basis, you discover how amazing they are at executing a strategy that's imperfect. Right. It's. It's sort of. It's not even clear. It's just kind of, like, vague, and it's a. It's like an amoeba to a degree.
But it has to be, because the world won't let you be pure, won't let you be clear.
[00:31:56] Speaker A: I think one of the things is that when there's an established business model, it's kind of like, you know, back to the Netflix situation, where no people will go to the movie theater. We have to have them sit down. I mean, they started out as a distributor of other people's content, and they weren't a threat to the established players. And then they realized, you know what? We're going to create our own content. And then what people thought was, when Disney pulled off all of their stuff off of Netflix, Netflix would suffer a blow. Netflix is still the leader in the market in streaming because they were there first, because they dared to be different, because they're like, okay, well, you know, with all due respect to Disney, we can be fine without Disney. We have enough of our own momentum engineers and software. But I will say this is a brief note. They had to pivot themselves when they realized that they had to put advertisements on their platform because there was revenue missing by not doing ads on there. So being different doesn't also mean that you don't have innovation or changes that take place in your current business model. Nobody dropped Netflix because they put ads on there now. People just deal with it. I do.
[00:32:54] Speaker B: Well, it. It forces.
If you have a. Be different mindset and, And. And. And sort of have a little bit of it running through your.
Your arteries and your veins, it does beg the question. Like, I always find myself whenever I'm sort of challenged by anything to do, it's always, how can I do this differently? That's my lens, okay? I never, ever go to Google. Unless, of course, it's a pedantic thing that says, you know, where should I buy such and such? You know, so if it's. If it's like, it has no significance to my overall life, then I'll use it. And my wife's crazy about using it. Drives me nuts. I gotta what what they should do, you know, they should Google should create a block for people like me who want my wife not to have access to it. And I would pay a lot of money because if I were able to get buy a service like that, it would save me a lot of money because she'd never get to Amazon. Like seriously, this is called a non buy version for concerned partners, right? I'd buy that. I'd pay 100 bucks a month for it and it'd be a bargain.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: Oh my gosh, man. You know, and if you, you know, honestly, I love rule breakers. I love people who have chart in different paths in life and give different perspectives. And that's why this show was created. Because if I think everlasting curiosity in seeing different perspectives, I would never get a chance to talk to a person that started a startup, built billionaire businesses from Vancouver. Had. And I took my leap into the red pool, so to speak. Red ocean, so to speak. Had and I created this space to be able to do so. So for you to take time out of your busy schedule to be able to be on here, I'm truly, truly honored.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: My pleasure.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: So I always ask every guest this. I mean you've already reached the pinnacle success and you're continuing to help people. We're osing your book. Where can people find you and everything you have to offer.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: So I have a website and again thank you for inviting me, Rashad. I appreciate it. I have a website, it's called Be different or be dead.com and I've tried to just laden it with resources for people to make it easy for them to get access to the content and think about it, et cetera. So I have a blog and I would really love it if you personally would subscribe to the blog and all your listeners would subscribe.
I've been blogging on this since 2009 when I actually wrote my first book, Be different or be dead, your Business survived survival Guide. And so I blog on every week and I blog a lot because I talk about the content in different ways, recognizing that people learn differently and just certain kinds of language triggers some people and not others. And so and plus I love it. I mean and I'm learning about my stuff more and more as I talk about it and as I apply it in the real world, trying to help businesses kind of like grow. So check out the blog. There's a books page. I've written seven books around this.
Five of them are ebooks and so they're kind of like slivers that go into marketing and careers and customer service and stuff like that. And there's a podcast on my homepage called Audacious Moves to a Billion. So I've actually created my own podcast. Not like the one you and I are doing, because what it is, it's a podcast based on reposting my stuff. I've done over 120 some odd and with permission from the hosts, I actually at some point feature it along with the host feature it on my website. So if you look at my website, be different or be dead.com now you'll see audacious Moves to a billion players. Sitting there with my skull and redness.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: I've seen that.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
And there's a quiz and it jumps.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: Out at you immediately when I visited the website.
[00:36:35] Speaker B: Oh good.
[00:36:36] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
[00:36:37] Speaker B: Oh good.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: So everything about your personality and your vibe and your, your audaciousness and dareness to be different immediately stood out to me. Right? Because.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: You know, just briefly, people have this box when it comes to how, you know, business or to market has to operate. We have to test it, we have to product, you know, develop it. And those things have their validity for certain features that were require safety and food consumption and all those other things. I'm not dismissing that. But sometimes you just have to shoot the basketball.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: I mean sometimes you just got to shoot the basketball, man. You know what I mean?
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Well, I mean I loved what Michael Jordan said in the day. You have no idea how many basketball games I've lost.
He kept shooting and shoot.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: He remembered all the game winners he missed.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: I know, I know, right?
[00:37:28] Speaker A: Tom Brady remembers the three Super Bowls he lost and you're like won seven.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: I know, but you know what the, the education system teaches people not to fail.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: Yes, that is very true.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: Okay, and so, so there's this, there's this line of sight thing, right, that I, that I have a problem with. If you want the world to be creative, if you want the world to be, to be free and to be caring, okay, Et cetera, et cetera, then you have to line up every aspect of your society, including the academic system, to actually deliver that. You can't say be creative and yet punish people when they try something different and they stumble. I mean, bad leaders do that. We've all seen them. I've had them. Okay, try this, but don't fail. Well, I used to have in my organization as part of my direct reports performance plan, the number of failures okay. We'd start out the year. I said, okay, I want at least three failures a month. Okay. That's 36 failures. Right. And at the end of, the end of the year, I'd say, well, how many times did you fail? Now, the only caveat was you could never make the same mistake twice. I didn't mind you taking, making the mistake once, but if you didn't learn from it, shame on you. And I'm going to whack you in the side of the head. Right. That's just the way that's going to happen.
So part of the meeting, it would be Rashad. Okay, you signed up for 36 failures. You only got 25. What the hell were you doing?
[00:39:00] Speaker A: Coasting.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Yeah. No, you were Googling, dude. That's the problem.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Imitating.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: So when I told that to my HR host, she thought I was absolutely freaking crazy.
[00:39:13] Speaker A: We've all been conditioned, and unfortunately, I think that a little bit of differentation strategy goes a long way.
One of the reasons, you know, I created this show was because I thought there was a space to be able to talk to people like yourself. To be able to.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: There is a space.
[00:39:27] Speaker A: And at the end of the day, and this is, this is the God's honest truth, this information out there is free for people. It's just what you do with it. Because people like yourself, you know, are telling people this, preaching this, have lived it, have been successful from it. And so if you want to, and I'm not dismissing anybody from higher academic academia, sometimes you just gotta say, you know what? I'm gonna message Roy Osing and let the chips fall where they may and maybe, yes, spread some knowledge. Rest of the world, you know what I'm saying? Like, and sometimes all it takes is tell me how you did it so I cannot copy it, but I can apply the principles that you use to be successful.
[00:39:59] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:40:00] Speaker A: For other audiences. And then tailor, make it to who I am.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: And that's what you do.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: Listener can be. You know what I mean?
[00:40:07] Speaker B: That's what, that's what you do. Exactly. Right. The, the basic principles are so different than what people are being taught that it's okay to line up with that principle and now try and figure out how to make it work for you. Right, right. So you can morph it, you can squeeze it, you know, whatever you want to do and, and, and have a go. That's the other thing I didn't say. I really. I have an email. It's roy.osingmail.com and I'm I really encourage people to do exactly what you just said, reach out to me. And it's funny, you know, I enjoy this. I do have people doing that. And they'll send me their draft only statement and they'll say, hey, Roy, this is. I heard you on the Blah blah podcast. Here's my only statement. What do you think? And so we just do a one on one for. For a few. A few weeks in some cases. And, and I help them along and, and I feel good and they get something out of it. And by the end of it, I've also had taken the opportunity to kind of inject some other might be different or be dead juice.
[00:41:05] Speaker A: It's sop, you know, know it's a lonely path and you better be prepared, you know, it's better to be laughed at and, and for being different. What's this saying? You laugh at me because I'm different. I laugh at you because you're all the same.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: So, yep, there you go, Roy Oing.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: On the Tron podcast, the randomness of nothing. And this is not about nothing on this particular topic. It's about something that you create for yourself. So I appreciate very much for your time, sir.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: Yep. Take it easy, brother.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: You bet, you bet.
