EPISODE 222 WITH ROBERT STORY: REVOLUTIONIZING PODCAST PITCHING AND SELF-PROMOTION

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 222 with Ronald Story: Revolutionizing Podcast Pitching and Self-Promotion

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right! Hello, hello, and welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet? podcast. I always like to tell you guys what I’m excited about. I am excited about today’s guest because he has basically perfected and made accessible the piece of the speaking business that is the bane of my existence Right? Like the part that I just Couldn’t handle.

Erin Marcus: Just couldn’t handle because of the routine needed, the detail needed. It’s, it’s not because, it’s because of me, okay, not because there’s anything wrong with the product, it’s me, I couldn’t do it. So, before we get into the details of what that is and how it’s gonna, I have so many questions for you. But, Ron Storey Jr.,

Erin Marcus: why don’t you give everybody a little official introduction of who you are and what you do.

Ronald Story: Well, I mean, I’m the guy who takes away the pain, right? Yes! Yes! There you go. There you go. In 2023, we sent almost 500, 000 pitches for podcast speaking gigs just on that side of the business for consulting, speaking, podcast guesting corporate consulting, any of that, we sent almost 500, 000 e mails.

Ronald Story: Booking close to 10, 000 opportunities. And this is not including the people who use our software. All the data comes from our software, but this was just my team manually sending these emails. So

Erin Marcus: if you know me like this much, you can understand now why I couldn’t do that. I can’t handle it. I can’t. It is what it is.

Erin Marcus: Know what you’re good

Ronald Story: at, know what you’re bad at. Yeah. So I mean, I have a little bit of history to add some context. I know a lot of people, I always love to meet with clients and they say, Oh yeah, you know, pitching, cold pitching doesn’t work. And I say, well, how many did you send? Oh, I sent like 300. I’m like, yeah, that’s why it doesn’t work.

Ronald Story: So I’m a firm believer that you have to do enough for long enough. And that’s what I teach our clients to do. And that’s what I like to help other people do. All right. So

Erin Marcus: when you and I met and you have a platform that does this, that is absolutely amazing. And I have questions like on the positive and negative side.

Erin Marcus: So. Setting the stage with the fact that I believe if you are a thought leader in any way, and most solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, small business owners really benefit from approaching their marketing as a thought leader, and to me, speaking is just an absolute amazing way to reach an audience, not just Paid speaking, but free speech, like there’s so much you can do with that, right?

Erin Marcus: It’s the primary way I’ve grown my business. Two different businesses now. The problem was getting booked. It was, you had to find the gigs. You had to find the person to talk to. I’m telling you back. You know, not so long ago, I would spend my evenings looking up who is the current vice president of 200 different chapters of Women’s Council of Realtors.

Ronald Story: Yep, I know what that feels like.

Erin Marcus: Again, this is why I couldn’t keep with it, right? And so tell us a little bit about how you have solved this data problem because that’s really what it is, right? Ultimately at the front end, it’s a

Ronald Story: Yeah, it’s, it’s a huge data problem. So I come from the world of cold calling.

Ronald Story: So I spent the first 12 years of my life as a financial advisor that was just on the phones all day. Now this was before the internet, you know, like was popular. So I started as a financial advisor in May of 2000. So all we did was cold call. There was no cold email. There was no way to scrape data from online.

Ronald Story: LinkedIn wasn’t even invented. I left that

Erin Marcus: world in 2000, so I don’t

Ronald Story: know. I get it. This was, there was no LinkedIn. There was no Facebook. None of that existed, right? So nowadays there are, there is LinkedIn. There are data centers. There are different places where you can buy data. And I spent. From 2012 to 2018 doing sales consulting for software companies.

Ronald Story: And they have these things called growth hackers and the growth hackers, the person who’s figured out like a, not a white hat way to do it and not a black hat way to do it. Kind of in the middle, you got it in the gray, right? And I was that gray hat dude. And I used to tell all the guys, I said, look, I can’t code, but you can’t sell.

Ronald Story: So we need each other, right? If you’re going to grow the business, you’re going to have to learn how to sell. And if I’m going to grow my business, I need to find people that can’t sell and help them. So I, coming from that world, I learned a lot about cold email and cold email is just like cold calling, but it’s via email.

Ronald Story: So you find the emails of strangers and you reach out to them and you say, Hey. I’m in this business. You’re in this business. Can we help you to solve this problem? Well, most consumers will call that spam, right? Because on a person to person basis, on a consumer basis, it’s illegal, right? But on a B2B basis, it’s totally legal and it’s done all the time, right?

Ronald Story: It’s like there’s a do not call list for consumers, but there’s no do not call this for businesses. Right. So you can email businesses, and I would say 80 percent of all selling that’s done on enterprise level is done via email. Right. So, I took those skills and one of my friends she said hey, I’m a john Maxwell speaker.

Ronald Story: Can you get me booked for gigs, and I’m like. I probably can let me try. It’s just an email. I get to the meeting. So we started sending emails for the meetings and she was like, Holy crap. This is working like you should do this for other people. I’m like, No, I don’t want to do this. This is too easy. Like You know, like nobody will pay for this.

Ronald Story: Like the, the sales companies, they pay for it because these software companies, they have venture capital and all of this. I’m thinking a one person speaker ain’t gonna pay me a lot of money to do this hard work. Right.

Erin Marcus: So, there’s this whole. Exactly.

Ronald Story: So I found this little niche of people that I could help who didn’t want to sell, who didn’t have the time because they were working full time jobs and they’re part time speakers.

Ronald Story: A lot of times when they’re just getting started, or they’re doing consulting on the side, so they needed this service. And I went out and I started gathering data, and I found this company online I went to sign up for it to get some data from them. And. It gave me an error. So I contacted the person. I said, Hey, I got an error.

Ronald Story: When I signed up, I really want to use your, use your data. And he says, man, I shut the company down. I’m a developer. I can’t sell, you know, I just shut it down. I don’t even use it anymore. And I’m like, yo, you want to sell it to me? I can help you make a sale, sell me the company. So on January 7th of 2018, I actually bought the company that I run today, and it was just a set of 258 million emails that were directly linked to people’s LinkedIn.

Ronald Story: Now, let me ask you a quick question. When was the last time that you’ve updated your LinkedIn profile?

Erin Marcus: This year. I’m due to do, I do it about every six

Ronald Story: months. Exactly. So you can’t, people constantly update their LinkedIn profile. Yes, it’s current. Here’s the magic question. What was the last time you changed your login email address on your LinkedIn?

Ronald Story: I don’t even know what it is. Exactly. So we have the correct email.

Erin Marcus: Right. Thank God though. Internet browser. Remember exactly.

Ronald Story: So our data is current because people update their LinkedIn, but they never changed the email address. Right? So we use LinkedIn to search and find the people. We use some software to scrape the URLs. And then we just cross referenced it to our database, and that’s how we built PitchDB.

Ronald Story: So we looked up all the event organizers, podcast hosts, all of that, scraped their URLs off of LinkedIn, and put it into PitchDB, and that’s how we built our database of 3. 7 million contacts. Which is insanity! Yeah, it’s

Erin Marcus: it’s a lot. Well, and here’s the thing. One of the things I’ve learned is the numbers are a lot.

Erin Marcus: But when you create the process and the process is automated using technology, the numbers are almost irrelevant because once the process works, it

Ronald Story: works. Exactly. So we have 3. 4 million podcasts, but we’ve cataloged over 178 million episodes, right? So once we go in and we know your website for your podcast, now we can grab your RSS feed and pull all of your, your podcast data into our software in order to be able to display that accurately.

Ronald Story: So we get real time updates. So when you update your podcast, it updates our software automatically, right? So that’s the tech side,

Erin Marcus: which is like amazing. And for those of us who used to, like I said, had to do this during watching movies at night, like the tech side is amazing, but let’s get to the sales side.

Erin Marcus: Cause I know that’s your, like the tech, I get the feeling, the tech side, you learned the sales side, you know, right. You learned the tech side because you had to do that. How does one of the things you and I agreed on right when we first chatted. As a podcast host, I get pitched every day. I get pitched every day for guests.

Erin Marcus: And the mistake that I watch them make is they send me a book about how wonderful their guest is. I’ve never read. I’ve never read any of them. I have no attention span. I have no time. I don’t read it. How has your sales experience now taken what was a database that most people really wouldn’t know how to use, or they would use it poorly, and made it something that is of value, of benefit, to a consultant who also speaks, to the people who Use that database.

Ronald Story: Yep. So the one thing that I know that every human has experienced, at least 99. 7 percent of humans have experienced is dating. Either you’ve been on the receiving end of being asked out. Receiving end of dating. Yeah, exactly. Like you’ve been asked out or you’ve asked somebody out, right? So even though we sell B2B and B2C.

Ronald Story: All sales interactions are p2p person to person, right? So if we go back to the natural human interaction of dating, imagine if someone came up to you and they said, Hey, Erin, let me tell you about my last five girlfriends. And this is why it worked. And I got a divorce for this reason, but this blah, blah, blah.

Ronald Story: But I think you and I will be like this in five years. You’ll be like, dude, you’re a weirdo. I don’t even know your name. Right? Why are you telling me all of this? But that’s what their pitches are. I’ve been on this stage. I’ve done this. I’ve been on this podcast and you would love to get how

Erin Marcus: great I am.

Erin Marcus: Look at how right. Like if you’re in a bar and someone walks up to you and goes into a monologue of how amazing they are, that’s basically what people are doing to me all day long.

Ronald Story: 100 percent in which they should just reach out to you and say, Hey, I love the podcast. Are you still looking for guests?

Ronald Story: Right. Hey, are you single? That’s all you ask. If she points to her ring, just turn around and move on. She’s married. Move on. Right. But you just ask, Hey, are you single? And if she says, yes, I’m single. Cool. Now you tell them why you would be a great guest on their podcast. But if they’re not looking for interesting guests, then move on with your life.

Ronald Story: Right. So I see a lot of people, they invest too much. Into pitching. They want to write the perfect pitch for the perfect podcast. I’ve never seen one podcast make or break anybody’s career. So it’s going to be, you got to do hundreds of them. Anyway, you got to go on a lot of podcasts, but people think if I get on this one thing, it’s going to change my life.

Ronald Story: You’re already screwed just with that mentality.

Erin Marcus: Well, and I had that same realization in my last business when it came to sales, because almost. Accidentally, I, due to just some rapport that a woman and I had during a consultation, I started my sales conversation that time with Alright, so what’s going on?

Erin Marcus: And she told me. And we had this amazing conversation. Instead of me, all up in my head, trying to come up with the exact perfect thing to say to somebody to get them to buy something from me. It just doesn’t work that way. And it’s also so, such a stress reliever to know that it doesn’t

Ronald Story: work that way.

Ronald Story: Yeah. I mean, I think that that’s the thing that most people miss. Imagine if a person go back to dating, you walk up to someone and you tell them all the details, Hey, I know you live here and here’s the car you drive and here are your kids names. You’re a stalker. Now they’re not

Erin Marcus: just walking away. Now they’re calling the police.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. Yeah.

Ronald Story: You’re, you’re a stalker, right? But that’s how much invested people have been trying to get on the perfect podcast. Don’t be a weirdo. Realize there are other women in the bar. There are other

Erin Marcus: women in the bar. Just don’t be a weirdo. You’ll be fine.

Ronald Story: 100 percent And know that, you know, somebody will love you eventually.

Ronald Story: Right? So, you just keep shooting your shot. That’s how life works. Alright. I’m sorry

Erin Marcus: to be crude. It’s so true. But okay, so let’s take this to the extreme then. If all you are doing is an opening line, and you’ve gotta shoot your shot like a million times, how do you stand out in a world of AI? Where everyone is more and more and more looking the same.

Ronald Story: Well, I think the thing is, if you do interesting things, you’ll be interesting. Right? Most people haven’t done anything interesting, but they want to sound interesting. It’s like, just be cool and you’ll be cool.

Erin Marcus: Right? Again, it goes back to just don’t be a

Ronald Story: weirdo. Yeah, exactly. Right? You, I remember when I was in high school.

Ronald Story: And one of my friends, he, he would go shoot a shot at a young lady and she would shut him down. He would say, man, if I would have worn my cologne, I would have got her.

Erin Marcus: This failed way before then.

Ronald Story: Yeah. Like you need to work on your personality has nothing to do with your clothes, bro. So most people are looking for the perfect pickup line of what to say in the email. So they’re kind of treating the email pitch as the pickup line, you know, roses are red, violets are blue, you must have fell out of heaven because I love you.

Ronald Story: Don’t say that. Right. So, but that’s what that’s what they’re looking for. So, the key is just understand, go in with an abundance mentality that there are 3. 4 million podcasts, right, some of them hate looking for guests. That’s the bane of their existence. They’re like, I got to spend two hours vetting someone on LinkedIn, looking through all of their stuff, listening to old episodes, making sure that they’re, that they’re not going to come on and embarrass me on my show.

Ronald Story: If someone reasonable just reached out to me, that would save me three hours this week. Right. So you, you pitch for engagement and then when they reply and say, yeah, who’d you have in mind, give them a couple of quick sentences with a couple of links to podcasts you’ve already been on. And then they’ll find out if you’re interesting or not.

Ronald Story: Right. And then you’ll be surprised. You’ll get a lot more bookings versus trying to find the perfect podcast as the perfect audience. You’re probably not going to get on. Right. If I pitch Joe Rogan, I’m not getting on there because even though he interviews people, he books his own guests. Jamie is looking for his own people.

Ronald Story: So you can send, you can send them all the emails you want. They answer it right. But here’s the one thing I know I can go on a podcast with zero followers, right? With zero downloads and still get in front of 30, 000 of my true customers, even though that podcast has zero followers. Think about that. A podcast with zero followers.

Ronald Story: I can still get in front of 20, 000 of my own ideal customers with it. You know how I do that? Because it’s not the podcaster’s job to promote me. When I go on that person’s show, they’ve recorded the content. They’ve edited it. They’ve put it out. I’m going to promote myself. Right. So I’m going to take that YouTube video.

Ronald Story: I’m going to run 200 bucks worth of ads to it. That podcast is going to think I’m the greatest guest ever. Cause he’s like, dude, we put out your episode, yours blew up.

Erin Marcus: So let’s do, let’s go. When you told me that, and I’m a pretty decent marketer, but when you told me that I’m like, that is genius. So, tactical takeaway right here.

Erin Marcus: Do that step

Ronald Story: by step. Alright, so, most podcasts, if they’re recording like we’re recording here on Zoom, they’re gonna put it on YouTube, right? YouTube has a thing called And this will be on YouTube. And when someone sees it, they’re gonna see it has thousands of views. Because I’m gonna run ads to it, regardless, whether you want me to or not.

Ronald Story: You can’t stop me. That’s the beauty of it. I love it. Like, LinkedIn will let you I mean, not LinkedIn. YouTube would allow you to run ads to any YouTube video.

Erin Marcus: You don’t have to own the video. It doesn’t, you don’t Like, do you realize that you’re, you can run an ad to a video that is not on your channel?

Ronald Story: Yeah, because YouTube is thinking it’s just the url. Only an insane person. . . Yeah. Only, only an insane person would run ads to a video that they don’t want people to see. So if you want people to see it, you would run ads to it. So all the YouTube videos are, has the ability for you to turn it into an ad.

Ronald Story: Right. So when Erin posts this, I’m going to take the link and I’m going to run ads to it, and I’m going to pick my target audience. Right. And I’m going to find them all over the world. And I’m going to say the people that want to do this thing. And then YouTube only charges me if they watch 30 seconds of it.

Ronald Story: Right. So my average podcast view on YouTube, my average watch time is 22 minutes and 31 seconds. That’s on an ad. So I put the whole hour in there as the ad and they never click off and they just keep watching it for 22 minutes and 31 seconds. That’s my average. Now, I may be able to get that larger as I get better at, you know, and I keep doing more podcasts.

Ronald Story: You’re

Erin Marcus: still way ahead of the curve here.

Ronald Story: Yeah, 22 minutes. I guess I want to watch a 22 minute ad. Yeah, that’s an infomercial on television. Right? That’s a, that’s a Ginsu knife infomercial, 22 minutes, right? That’s somebody’s commute, right? Exactly. So, but that’s what we’re doing. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

Ronald Story: That’s how you, you can drive views to your audience regardless of the audience of the podcaster. So to me, I go on any podcast, I don’t care. I do the, they can talk about

Erin Marcus: anything. The same thing. I do the same thing because I don’t, just, to your point, most of the podcasts that I’m on, we do at least as much, if not more, to market that podcast as the host.

Ronald Story: Exactly. And I mean, somebody, it may be a podcast on basketball, somebody who’s watching basketball as a public speaker that wants to be on podcast, somebody who’s listening to that basketball podcast, they want to be interviewed on other podcasts. So my audience is everybody put me on, put me in coach I’m ready to play.

Ronald Story: I don’t care what podcast you put me on I’m going.

Erin Marcus: Well, and so one of the things you’re illustrating here without saying it, find a way, like. I think so many people don’t get to where they want to be because of how fast they stop. Do you think for one minute I wanted to spend my evenings looking up the email addresses because it changes every year of the vice president, right?

Erin Marcus: I mean, but did I want it or

Ronald Story: did I not want it? Exactly. So here’s what we’ve built. And this is how I like to describe my company pitch DB. Our company is built for self promoters. If you’re looking, if you’re looking for an agent to promote you, don’t use our software. It’s not built for you. Right? Right?

Ronald Story: Because it requires you to get in and actually send some pitches. But if you’re a self promoter and you’re saying, look, I’m not waiting to be chosen. I’m going to choose myself. Our software is exactly for you because we’re going to give you all the data you need in order to promote yourself. Now in today’s society, the word self promoter has a bad connotation, but in reality, if you look at all of the richest people on earth, they’re all the best self promoters, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, everybody that’s

Erin Marcus: out there, right?

Erin Marcus: I mean, look at Jason and Travis Kelsey. That’s all they do. That’s it. Cause they know you’re only going to play football for so long.

Ronald Story: Exactly. Right. So, you know, Taylor Swift. Yeah. Like they’re self promoters. So I’m not waiting on someone to come down to Columbia where I live and knock on my door and say in Spanish no, I don’t want to be famous.

Ronald Story: Right.

Erin Marcus: What do you want and how bad do you want it? And I think there’s, you know, But when you combine that with where we started the conversation, you didn’t say be fake, you said be interesting, right? And I think that’s where people also get stuck. You don’t have to be anyone but you. Be interesting. That was when I first started professional speaking, that was one of the best pieces of advice that my mentor gave me was like, be interesting, don’t be boring.

Erin Marcus: Now, you don’t have to be nuts. Most people are interesting if they learned how to share their stories.

Ronald Story: I think everybody’s interesting to somebody, right? So someone who, like I mentioned, I live down in Medellín, Colombia. Somebody who’s listening to this is going to say, Oh, Medellín, I always wanted to go to Medellín, right?

Ronald Story: And then they’re going to look me up and they’re going to see a lot of my podcasts talk about me being in Medellín on Travel Podcast, right? So being interesting is just being yourself because there’s a tribe of people who are just like you, who are just looking for a leader. Right. One guy said that everybody is like avatar.

Ronald Story: They’re looking for someone to plug their tail into. Right. And I thought that was incredible. Right. And I think that that’s just be yourself. Tell your story. I’m a black kid from a poor city, the murder capital of the US. Right. East St. Louis. I was going to

Erin Marcus: say it’s East St. Louis or Detroit.

Ronald Story: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s, it was for 20 years.

Ronald Story: We were the murder capital.

Erin Marcus: I was in college in central Illinois during that time. And we would go down to St. Louis to listen to the blues clubs. And

Ronald Story: so, so how does a kid from there end up in the cocaine capital of the world down in Medellin? That,

Erin Marcus: that one. Not a far, like that one I got .

Ronald Story: You, we get it.

Ronald Story: Right. So it’s one of those things where it’s like, oh, that’s interesting. Why did, how does a guy who didn’t speak Spanish go to Medellin and build a startup?

Erin Marcus: And build a startup to help speakers in the United like Yeah. I mean, so, okay. So more of the origin story. How does, ’cause one of the things that I know is.

Erin Marcus: It’s hard for people to see what’s possible beyond what they see. Right. It is. It’s you’re up against neuroscience. It’s representation matters because it’s very, very hard for anyone to imagine anything that’s beyond anything that they’ve experienced. Why would you? Right. So, okay. So how did this happen?

Erin Marcus: Again,

Ronald Story: I was born and raised in East St. Louis, and I’m five foot six with. Four inch heels on me,

Erin Marcus: you

Ronald Story: know, I’m, I’m a short dude. So my, my basketball and baseball career work was over before they happened. Yeah. They weren’t going to take me, but East St. Louis is known for having great athletes and great musicians, Miles Davis, you know, great Olympians, Jackie Jordan, Kersey.

Ronald Story: These are great people for me, St. Louis, but I was just really smart. And I’m like, I can’t do any of that stuff, but I can think, so I’ll go into business. Right. So, you know, that’s where I’m from. I had an opportunity. One of my great friends. He’s like a brother to me, got a job as the principal at the largest school in Columbia.

Ronald Story: And I said, yo, I’m going to come down and and visit. I came down and visited and You know, seven years later, two kids later, I’m here. This is home. This is how I ended up here. You know, 17 employees in our company, they’re all here in Columbia and in Venezuela. And yeah, so, I mean, that’s how I ended up here.

Ronald Story: It was just a dream. A kid that didn’t, I don’t know how to code. But I built a pretty decent software company. So whoever’s listening to this, you talked about having the vision. Look, just have the vision and go and work on it. And you’ll be surprised how many people say, yo, I can code, but I can’t sell.

Ronald Story: So I’ll come work for you. If you can sell it, I’ll code it for you. There you go. That’s how I ended up here running this

Erin Marcus: company. Well, and it’s so true. It’s find the way I think that, and I don’t know that we’re doing the next generations, any service by this whole instant gratification or give up instant gratification or

Ronald Story: give up.

Ronald Story: But I think that’s always been there. I think that there’s been instant gratification or give up in every generation, right? I think it’s a bit more instantaneous now, but it’s always been there, right? But also the ability to have success has been the window for that is shortened also, right? So, you know, both of them have kind of, we’ve kind of condensed time a bit on success and failure.

Ronald Story: And I think, you know, the people who can play the longest game will always win. Right. So I want to play an infinite game, like in, in a relationship. We, we were, we started off talking about relationships. How do you win at marriage? There’s no winner and loser. You just, you, you keep it going, right? How do you win at business?

Ronald Story: You don’t one day say I won at business. No, you want the business to keep going. The business you want it to

Erin Marcus: be. That was one of the, like one of the I’m, I very much believe like words matter, how we talk to ourselves matter, and one of the things that I have removed from my vocabulary is needing to fix something.

Erin Marcus: I don’t have to fix my mindset, I don’t have to fix my calendar, I don’t have to fix, because as soon as I start talking about needing to fix it, I think that there’s some magical date at which it’ll just work and never be a problem again, and that’s not how this, it doesn’t really work that way. I just have to manage it and stay on top of it.

Ronald Story: Yeah, it’s an infinite game that you just want to stay in until you decide to sell the business or until you decide to get a divorce or whatever. There’s no winners and losers, right? You’re just in it together. You’re playing the game, right? And I think if most people treated their business as an infinite game, something that they’re committed to for the next 10 to 15 years, their approach would be different.

Ronald Story: Like if I knew I was going to be doing this for the next 15 years, wouldn’t it make sense for me to take two years to get it right? Yes. Right. Like if I, but if I’m trying to, I got to hit 18 million this year in my first 12 months. Well, dude, I don’t have any time to get it right. So I’m going to go and try to promote a bunch of junk and it’s going to be a bigger failure.

Ronald Story: So if I give myself a longer time horizon, I got it. I got the time to make it better. And then the time to launch in stages and to build a sustainable business. It ain’t about winning. It’s about surviving. Well,

Erin Marcus: and I think that is going back to the instant gratification, but also marketing and it’s not marketing is not wrong.

Erin Marcus: We all have to do it. Self promotion. You have to market your business, but Instagram would have us believing overnight success. Yeah, not necessarily even intentionally.

Ronald Story: But we’re all adults here. Like, everybody’s listening to you. You would think. Yeah, but here’s what I’ll say. And I, this is my reality check that I gave myself.

Ronald Story: Like, look, this dude’s 22. He’s claiming he made a million dollars as a life coach. I don’t believe him. He lived enough life.

Erin Marcus: Well, and that’s my thing, though. As soon as somebody starts to say, just do this one thing, just do this one thing. And you know, your business million dollars, I don’t know anybody who whose business works because they just did this one thing.

Erin Marcus: And it’s a LinkedIn Autobot. But that’s

Ronald Story: when I was a kid, my mom told me this, he says, if your friends ever say, say this to you, all you got to do is says the minute they say that y’all going to jail.

Ronald Story: All you got to do is he says y’all going to jail. Just know that just remember when you hear all you got to do is you’re probably going to jail if you do it. And that stuck with me forever. Like, you know what?

Erin Marcus: And I think, you know, I’m a big fan of like, don’t just listen to what you are telling people. And the product that you offer, but look at what you’re

Erin Marcus: modeling, right? It’s the work ethic. It’s the understanding a market need and then how to fill it. It’s doing it right. Instead of, you know, sacrificing quote unquote, cause it isn’t a sacrifice because it doesn’t even work that way. Sacrificing a short term potential for true

Ronald Story: long term. Here’s the, here’s the best analogy.

Ronald Story: Your business is a child. Right. Everybody

Erin Marcus: thinks their baby is so cute. 100%.

Ronald Story: I got a two year old and because she doesn’t know calculus right now at two years old. I don’t call her stupid. And parenting never stops. I’m going to parent this child until I’m dead, even when she’s 40 and I’m 65 or whatever, however old I’ll be, she’ll still be my baby and I’ll still be taking care of her and fixing things and maintaining our dad daughter relationship.

Ronald Story: If you treat your business that way, instead of saying, I’m going to give birth to a child and send them to college within the first six months, even before they walk, your perspective will be better and you’ll, it’ll be a better child. You’ll be, you’ll raise a business that would actually benefit society.

Ronald Story: I mean, the analogy is perfect. Like give it 18 years to figure it out. Right. Okay. Watch this. Let’s say you give me an like an outrageous number that you would do in the first 12 months of starting a new business and outrageous number, pick a number. Oh, people are

Erin Marcus: always talking about that million dollars or one.

Erin Marcus: I mean, they’re always tight at first year, a million

Ronald Story: dollars. Okay. So you do a million dollars in the first year. Okay. Apple did a billion dollars today. You’re still a baby business. So who cares? Ain’t no trophy for that. So once you realize there’s no trophies for these little bitty things that you just get to brag to other little bitty businesses about, you just realize I don’t need none of these trophies.

Ronald Story: Let me just keep building a great kid. Like I realized, I’ll tell you something funny with my daughter. I’ll say, Oh look, she can say this. And people who had kids, they were like, okay, my four kids have been doing that.

Erin Marcus: She should say this, right?

Ronald Story: And then you realize, like, let me stop saying this because all my friends, they got kids already.

Ronald Story: I’m the latest one. I had a kid at 43, my first child, right? You’re doomed. It’s like, you know, so they’re like, my grandbaby does that. But that’s how we sound when we talk about our six figure business, our seven, like to a real business owner, they’re looking at you like, what are you talking about? Like, you’re happy about this?

Ronald Story: Like, so more

Erin Marcus: than I think that perspective, right? Yeah. And that perspective is important because I think it’s I always talk about I want bumpers in my gutters so that I don’t fall off either side. I want the ambition, but I want the reality. You want the success, you want the goals, but the reality check.

Erin Marcus: Absolutely, absolutely helps

Ronald Story: the percent, you know, the way

Erin Marcus: that I learned the way that I learned some of this was about sales, you know, because to your point, getting on the getting on that one podcast and people put that much emphasis on every sale because they think every sale is the end all and be all and there’s, you know, oh my God, they said no to me and, and the one of my mentors said, to do it.

Erin Marcus: Every single person who drove past McDonald’s on their way home from work today without going through the drive thru said no to McDonald’s. Do you think McDonald’s cares?

Ronald Story: Nope. And from the guy who sent 400, 000 emails last year, 99 percent of them told me no. Right. I don’t care. Guess what? I 10, 000 meetings we said.

Ronald Story: So. Watch who you measure yourself against. Set your own standard. One of the biggest pet peeves is when someone says, well, what’s the average number of pitches I need to send in order to get booked? My question is, do you think you’re average? And they always say, no. Okay. So why does the average matter set your own standard and then set your own benchmark, send a bunch of pitches and find out what your numbers are on your topic for your audience.

Ronald Story: And then see if you can improve upon that. Right. You got to do enough for long enough. And if you don’t believe your average, why do the average numbers work, just go. And

Erin Marcus: what you’ve done with pitch DB is made, made it all possible. Made it all possible because it used to be a nightmare.

Ronald Story: I mean, you used to have to go to each individual website of a podcast or look up their contact page, do that.

Ronald Story: Or you, you went on a podcast matching site. where they would say they will match you with podcasts, but you only have access to the podcast that joined that site also, that are also on the site. So if they’re not on that site, you can’t, you know, so those are like dating sites or speaking gig dating sites.

Erin Marcus: And I, I mean you, all these we tried to build a phone have, right? And all these places have their use in the marketplace. Yeah.

Ronald Story: We wanted to build a phone book instead of the dating site. You remember the old yellow pages, phone books, white had everybody’s email. I mean, everybody’s first and last name, your address, everything was in there, right?

Ronald Story: That’s what PitchDB is. It’s the phone book for speaking gigs, podcast conferences press opportunities. It’s the phone book for that. It’s not a dating site. The people that are on there, they’re not specifically looking for Erin Marcus or Ron story, but if you reach out to them, they just may be that day.

Ronald Story: Right. So that’s how we look at it. Awesome.

Erin Marcus: Well, you’re awesome. I love chatting with you and all of your insights and information and it’s, it’s this mixture of drive and detachment, right? And I think that you have to have the drive because otherwise you don’t do enough work. But if you’re, but if you don’t have the detachment of, you know, from each and every step, you’re just gonna make yourself

Ronald Story: crazy.

Ronald Story: What? 100%. And that’s the one thing that we know your brand is forever. You’re going to constantly be building your brand. So you should be going on as many podcasts as you can, because you’re constantly introducing yourself to a new audience. And as long as you know that nobody’s coming to save you, you’ll, you’ll take it upon yourself to be a self promoter, right?

Ronald Story: So promote yourself because there’s no, there’s no guarantee Erin’s going to have you on our podcast. And even if she does, you still need to take that video, run some ads to the YouTube, run your YouTube ads too, and promote yourself . Love it. Even after you go. On the show. Promote yourself.

Erin Marcus: Promote yourself.

Erin Marcus: Absolutely. If people want to continue this conversation with you and learn more about you and learn more about PitchDB, what is the best way for them to get a hold of you?

Ronald Story: They should go to www. pitchdb. com I’m sure Erin’s going to put a link in the bio of this podcast. And if you use Erin’s link, you’ll get 20 percent off.

Ronald Story: Of our listed price. So if you go directly to the website, you won’t get the discount. So I’m telling you, use her link, the best way to get, to get the 20 percent off discount. And yeah, I’m glad that, that you had me on as a guest.

Erin Marcus: You’re awesome. And so much fun. Love it. Love it. Love it. Thanks.