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Matthew Burns:
Okay. So, Leah Bumphrey, you’re now becoming a regular. Thank you. This is going to be so much fun. You said something, and I don’t know that you meant it the way you said it, but I took it in a different direction, and now I want to tell everybody else.

Leah Bumphrey:
I can’t imagine that happening in our conversations. Are you kidding me there Burns?

Matthew Burns:
It’s so weird that I just take over. It’s strange. So this is the topic you wanted to talk about for this episode, which was doing what you are afraid of. And I thought, I was really curious about the angle you wanted to go because this is everything in life. And you started going down this path. This is everything in life. So explain to me first why you wanted to talk about doing what you were afraid of, and then I will give you 55, one thousand examples of where my brain goes when you talk about this subject.

Leah Bumphrey:
Okay. Always with words, definitions mean everything. So afraid. What do you mean by afraid? Are we afraid, like you’re afraid to go swimming with sharks? Are we talking that you’re afraid, like you’re uncomfortable in a situation where you’re talking publicly? Afraid that you think, oh my goodness, if I start this project at home and reorganize, it’s going to take forever, everything’s going to be a mess, and I’m never going to get done. So let’s, as they say, define our terms, gentlemen. When, whatever it is, something that you do not want to do, when you allow yourself to start, it changes. And there’s science to back this up. I know you’re more of a nerd than I am. You can tell by the glasses.

Matthew Burns:
I will definitely talk about this.

Leah Bumphrey:
But when you start doing something, all of a sudden it becomes easier to continue. It’s the law of momentum. It keeps going and going. You lose that fear. It becomes possible. It becomes something that makes sense to you to continue. And even if it’s something that you’re never that excited about doing, let’s use public speaking, let’s talk cold calling if you’re a business owner. If it’s something that you’re not that excited about, you still build up the confidence to know, “Eh, I can do it.” And people, once you do it, having done it makes the next time having to start that much easier, and it just keeps on going.

Matthew Burns:
So this is amazing because I spend … Well, I don’t know if it’s just me. I mean, you have a bunch of accounts. We have accounts that we share. I have some of my accounts. We also work with other partners. We’ve got it as a nice web of work that we do. But I don’t know if you’re feeling the same thing I am right now. But with the introduction of AI, the scope of what it means to do content creation or content marketing has changed in the last little bit. The AIs are scrubbing the internet and figuring out what’s important and what’s not important. And just writing a blog post doesn’t have the same weight as it used to because that was tricking the algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t exist anymore. We’re now in the world of these AIs.

And one of the things, and you’ve heard me do this when I’m onboarding a new client, because we can’t make people know the company without them making them know the owner, because that’s what we love to do, is we love the story of the owner to come to the forefront one way or another. And so if I think in the Uncovery process that I’ve got a really good angle where they’re going to become the voice, they’re going to be the face, they really need… It has to be wrapped around them because it doesn’t always work that way. But quite often we like to do that. I ask them this question, “Do you want to become famous?” Most business owners are not out for fame. They really don’t, and they actually shy away from it. They’re like, “No, it’s not about me. It’s about the client. It’s about my people, really good business owners don’t want to be famous.”

And it’s tough sugar, baby, because you’re going to be in a coffee shop trying to have your morning breakfast with your staff member, and you’re going to have somebody to go, “Are you the guy I heard about on the radio? Are you the guy?”

Leah Bumphrey:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Okay. So I know that. They’ll see the logo. We have one of my clients whom I have full permission to talk about. His name is Tommy Cool. And Tommy Cool is the most self-conscious… He is really cool. His name is Thomas Matheson. He owns Tommy Cool Air down in Corpus Christi, Texas. And he is afraid of being in front. He doesn’t like it. The humility. His wife is a very private person. And so they go to restaurants now, and people come out, “Oh my gosh, you’ve got to be Tommy cool. You’re Tommy cool, aren’t you? I know that voice, blah, blah, blah.” And his wife just shirks, and she gets … And so he doesn’t want that for her, but he realizes he needs to have that little bit of fame and stardom. Here’s the reason why I’m telling this story. I’ve asked him for content creation, for content marketing to do a video every week like Crumbs for Giants, like Sticky Sales Stories, like the Empire Builders Podcast, all these things that were where we’re constantly training the AI that we know what we’re talking about by putting the information freely into the world, let the AI determine whether we are awesome or not.

That’s why we talk about the Wizard of Ads on every episode. That’s why we talk about our clients. I’m giving up the goods here. I’m telling people exactly why we’re doing some of the things that we’re doing. It’s because we want the world to know that if you really want something, we’re the ones who can provide this service. Well, it’s no different than any other business vertical in the world. If you want people to know, you need to talk to the AI and let the AI know, because the first thing that comes up in Google now is Gemini’s answer.

It’s not a search engine result, and it’s not an advertisement. It’s a Gemini’s answer. The next thing that comes up is YouTube playlists for the subject matter about which you’re asking questions. There’s no cost to that. It means you’ve got to train the AI to put those two things up first. So I’m asking him to do these videos, and he fought me and fought me and fought me. So what did I do? I sat him down, and this is to your credit. This is what you said. You just have to get off the blank page. You’ve got to do one.

Leah Bumphrey:
Do one.

Matthew Burns:
So let’s talk for five minutes. And he goes, okay. And so we talked for five minutes in a video. And I said, “That same conversation on your next BNI meeting, deliver it for 10 minutes.” So now you know the subject matter, you’ve said it, we’ve talked about it, and we pulled out all the details. He went to his BNI meeting, and it was terrible. It wasn’t something he’d ever want to see on TV, but it was 10 times better than the conversation we had for five minutes on camera. And then he took that exact same thing and made a social post about it, and his social post was brilliant. He was so afraid to talk about himself because he didn’t want to sound condescending, hockey, over the top, blah, blah, blah, look at me, look at me.

Leah Bumphrey:
People let the search for perfection, the desire for perfection, get in the way of the really, really, really good start. I was talking with a friend of mine, a client down in Charlotte. She owns a cleaning business. She’s fantastic.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, this is your Brazilian lady, right? Oh, she’s incredible.

Leah Bumphrey:
I love it. And she’s afraid she’s not creative enough. And I said, “Stop it. Just do it. ” And she posted me a video this past week. It was beautiful. It was her with her office manager. I said, “Post that right away. Oh no, no. Don’t even watch it. Just post it because it shows that you are a real person, that you have real people working for you, and that you are here to work with the people in your area.”

Matthew Burns:
Yes. Oh, the connection of a real human being is incredible. I’ll give you one more story, and it’s about me. So I became a Wizard of Ads partner. Yeah, boring, boring, boring. I became a Wizard of Ads partner back in 2018, 2019. I got my-

Leah Bumphrey:
You are so much older than I am.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, exactly. So I got my invitation in 2018. I finally accepted 2019. I went to my first partner meeting in February of 2019. And before that, as I accepted that, I was still a marketing manager for a major manufacturing company. And I met Roy for the third time in my life, fourth time in my life. I took three classes, and I spent a day with him because we had to meet, so I could become a partner. And he says this to me, he goes, “Matthew,” he says, “I don’t think… ” Because I came on as a graphic artist. That’s what I came on for. I’m able to see visually before I put it on paper. I know what the whole scope should look like. It’s this weird thing that I have in my brain. And he said, “I don’t think that’s what you’re here for.”

And I went, “What are you telling me? ” He goes, “I think you’re a writer. I’ve seen your business writing. Your business writing’s really good. I think you’re a writer. Even though we need you for this other thing that you do really well, I think you’re a writer. I think that’s what you’re going to become.” And I was like, “I’ve never written an ad in my entire life.” I’ve written copy for brochures, I guess. So yeah, I did write ads, but I never wrote what he was talking about was radio ads, television ads. And I spent the next four years figuring out how to become an ad writer by writing one ad at a time. And by being terrible at my first ads, the critiques that I got on the ads for my partners, for Mick Torbay, who’s been a great sage for me, a really good mentor.

The amount of ads that I wrote for Stephen Semple, where he said, “Too many points, just talk about one thing, go back and do it again. The angle’s interesting, but you’re wasting words that are never going to get heard.” All of the critiques. And I was afraid to continue, but what I had to do was buckle down every day. I just started writing something every day, and not for my clients, but just to practice, so I could stay creative and follow the rules that I was given by the partners who were writers who were helping me through the whole thing. And it was writing something every single day.

Leah Bumphrey:
And were you scared when you started that? Were you scared at the beginning that you would-

Matthew Burns:
I was given an account, and I’d never written anything before. What do you mean, was I scared? I was like a child trying to get out of bed in the middle of the night being as a monster?

Leah Bumphrey:
[singing] At first I was afraid, I was petrified.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, it was terrible. And my writing was okay at best. And then slowly but surely, I got hired on to do junior writing for other partners, and eventually I didn’t need to hire junior writers anymore because my creativity was getting really good, and now I have junior writers working under me so they can learn the craft and they can become better and do what they’re doing. And I love… And I now most-

Leah Bumphrey:
Isn’t that the ultimate thing in business is to be able to know that you’re giving back and you’re making a difference in helping.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right. But don’t say no. If somebody sees something in you that you don’t see in yourself, at least try it. Give it a go. You owe it to yourself to see whether or not it’s actually valid or true.

Leah Bumphrey:
As soon as you feel that little bit of fear, that’s when you know you better do it because if you don’t do it, double down.

We do not go through .. At the end of life, we don’t sit there and go, “Oh, I’m really, really glad I didn’t do that. ” We go, “Oh, I wish I had done that. ”

Matthew Burns:
Missed opportunities.

Leah Bumphrey:
I wish I had done that.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. Get her done.

Leah Bumphrey:
And my 25-year-old says, “Let’s go. Let’s go.”

Matthew Burns:
So I really love this topic. So doing what you’re afraid of, it also just means a couple of things to me. It means exponential little bits.This is a phrase that I was taught in my first year as being a Wizard of Ad partner. Roy H. Williams set this up. ELB, exponential little bits. We call them elbs when we talk playfully within the partners. What are we doing every day to move our business forward? What are you going to do every day to move your business forward one small, tiny step? Is it getting yourself in front of a camera so that you can become the face of your business? Is it getting out of your employees’ ways and trusting them? Because if you really going to push your company past that five, 10 million dollar mark, you have to have the people running the whole business so you can just work on what the next strategy is.

Let’s say you’re not a business owner, if you’re a marketer, please try. Just do the next step, put one more foot in front of each other. If it’s you really wanted to get into writing, just start writing and then put your writing out in the world so people can poo-poo on it so that you know what to fix. Who cares if they poo-poo on it? Fix it. Do the thing. Take the next step.

Leah Bumphrey:
Or go fix it. Tell them that they’re wrong and that you’re fantastic.

Matthew Burns:
Whatever it is. Stick to your guns.

Leah Bumphrey:
Do it. Do it.

Matthew Burns:
Yes. Yes. Move forward. Okay. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this topic a lot, actually. And if guys, if you have questions about what I mean by exponential little bits or if you want help getting off the blank… Listen, if you’re a marketer and you’re having a hard time getting off the blank page, ask us questions. We can totally help you do that. If you’re a business owner and you’re just looking to talk about what potential is for you, where are your people? We can help you with that as well. Leah, as always, it’s been a pleasure. I love talking with you. And remember, the Wizard Academy, if you want to learn about all the stuff that we talk about, you can learn at the Wizard Academy, tons of courses to choose from. Anyway, thanks.

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