Read below or watch the video above.

Dennis Collins:
Hey, welcome back to Connect and Convert. Yes, another episode of Connect and Convert, where small business owners come to accelerate their sales faster than ever. Isn’t that right? Leah?

Leah Bumphrey:
That is correct. Absolutely. It’s our small businesses, not our business owners who are small. We take them in all sizes, all shapes.

Dennis Collins:
Correct, and we love ’em all, don’t we?

Leah Bumphrey:
Absolutely.

Dennis Collins:
Speaking of that, before we get onto today’s topic, I want to dive into kind of a favorite topic of Wizard of Ads people, and that’s strategy. So before we get there, we have a special offer for our listeners. We tell you in every one of our podcasts, we want to remind you of our special offer, don’t we, Leah?

Leah Bumphrey:
Absolutely. It is part of our strategy for helping business owners, and it should be part of the strategy of business owners to get some outside help, to get an outside perspective. Dennis and I are offering 60 minute discovery calls that are free. We can talk about any topic of your business that is salient to you, maybe something that you’ve heard us talk about and you want some more information that’s more specific, but it’s free.

Email Leahbumphrey@wizardofads.com. Email DennisCollins@wizardofads.com. We will get back to you. We will schedule in 60 minutes where we can talk about an expanded version of maybe a question that you’ve sent in. We’ve had some great questions that our listeners have sent in to us. We’ll have another one later on in this episode, but take advantage of our free offer. It’s all about trying to help you strategize your business. Back to you, Dennis.

Dennis Collins:
Thank you. And if you’re in the US or other countries, we will schedule a meeting. Sorry, I had to translate. I wanted to make sure everybody understood that.

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, people speak Canadian.

Dennis Collins:
Alright, we get the drift anyway. Many think that we’ve been told Leah, to follow our dreams.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yes.

Dennis Collins:
Follow our passion,

Leah Bumphrey:
Our bliss.

Dennis Collins:
Do what you love.

Leah Bumphrey:
What color is your parachute, Dennis?

Dennis Collins:
Pink.

Leah Bumphrey:
Excellent.

Dennis Collins:
And success will follow. Is that a strategy?

Leah Bumphrey:
I would say no.

Dennis Collins:
Some people do get paid for their hobbies, don’t they?

Leah Bumphrey:
Yeah, it’s true.

Dennis Collins:
I know some people, but does that make it a strategy? Follow your dream, Leah. Follow your passion.

Leah Bumphrey:
That’s like going for a hike in the woods. We do lots of hiking up here in Canada and you’re going for a hike. You got to know where you’re trying to end up and you got to have a few paths. Otherwise, you are going to get lost and there are bears in our woods.

Dennis Collins:
You’re going to get lost.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yes.

Dennis Collins:
That is a great metaphor I think for strategy.

Leah Bumphrey:
I love metaphors. Never met a metaphor I didn’t like.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah. So with that in mind, here’s what I have learned the hard way. Let me go back to my days in corporate America, right? We did annually what was called a strategic plan, right? A strategy. If I looked at that today, the stuff that we did back then, and this was a large major US corporation that were called strategy plans or strategic plans, I would laugh.

Leah Bumphrey:
You would laugh? Why?

Dennis Collins:
Because they weren’t strategic plans. They don’t fit the bill. They don’t fit the criteria for a strategic plan.

Leah Bumphrey:
Was it a to do list? Was it more of a, okay, we want to do this and this or…

Dennis Collins:
It’s more of a financial plan. It’s more for the bean counters. When I first started as a general manager, I had to do a 10 year strategic plan. Are you kidding me? A 10 year strategic plan that was like, are you kidding me? It was a joke. It was a waste of time. Then they said, yeah, you know what? Nobody can really project out 10 years. We’ll cut it back to five years. I said, oh my God. That was still, it’s a joke.

Leah Bumphrey:
I remember working in sales positions where they wanted to see my one year plan and divided up quarterly, divided up monthly, whatever you put it didn’t matter. We finally just said, just give us the number. Give us the number, the 12 month number. I’ll divide it. I’ll fit, but don’t pretend that you want to know where I think it’s going to fit in and what I’m going to actually be able to do. Just give me the number because you’re going to do it anyway.

Dennis Collins:
Again, I think that shows how silly some of these plans were. I wish I knew then what I know now. I have studied strategy. Why? Because my clients that I’ve had both at the radio stations and after, they think strategy is tactics. They confuse strategy and tactics. What’s the difference in your mind, Leah, when I say strategy versus tactics? What do you think? Are they one and the same?

Leah Bumphrey:
No, not at all. Strategy is much more overall. A tactic is a very specific, and it gives me kind of a greasy feeling when I hear that a sales tactic means that I’m trying to get you to do something.

Dennis Collins:
Or let me ask you this. If your strategy is flawed, what tactics will help you fulfill a flawed strategy?

Leah Bumphrey:
None. It’s impossible.

Dennis Collins:
So that’s what I found out by observation and by the school of hard knocks, most things that we talk about are tactics and not strategy. Why? Because we’ve been trained to think in tactics. So I had a guy that worked for me for a long time, one of the best managers I ever had in my business, and we did strategic planning their way, which was better than no strategic planning. But he was always, now that you’ve got this big ass plan, how are we going to do it? He was the tactician. He always wanted to take the strategy and say, so you made this plan, now we’ve got to do it. I said, yeah, we do have to do it. So he was my tactical guy. But strategically, it’s easy to skip strategy because our whole life is based on tactics.

Leah Bumphrey:
Question, Dennis. So would you think that a strategic plan would be like a marketing plan? Would it be more like what you would be able to give a financial institution to say, this is my marketing plan. You’re not going to give them your tactics plan. That’s for sure.

Dennis Collins:
That’s a good question. Let me defer the answer to that and go on and cover some thoughts here. I will confess right now, I am a Seth Godin groupie.

Leah Bumphrey:
I thought I saw a pin up on the back there, A little black and white picture.

Dennis Collins:
I thought I had that covered. I follow this man to the ends of the earth. He says things that speak to me. And I know a lot of other people too, but I feel like he’s talking to me. And so when I want to learn about something, I go find out what Seth Godin had to say about it, and guess what? He just wrote a brand new book. I get so excited when Seth Godin writes a new book. This one is called, This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans. So when I want to learn more about strategy, I turn to the experts. This guy has 21 bestselling books. His resume is amazing. So what does he have to say about strategy? Guess what it isn’t? It’s not a map. It’s a compass. That’s why I love your analogy with the woods.

Leah Bumphrey:
I love that. Yeah.

Dennis Collins:
It’s not a map, it’s a compass. It’s a direction. It is not a to-do list. That’s what we had back in the day in the radio stations. It’s not a goal. Yeah, we had financial goals that we set. It’s just a better plan. Seth Godin has so many great one-liners about strategy, so I’m going to throw a few out for discussion, okay?

Leah Bumphrey:
Okay.

Dennis Collins:
Strategy is seeing the race course before you actually begin the race, having an overview. Here’s a turn, there’s a turn, there’s a straightaway, blah, blah, blah. You see the course before you start the race. I like that.

Leah Bumphrey:
It reminds me of our middle son played some pretty high level hockey and he was known among the coaches as being someone who sees the ice. He could see and he could anticipate because he was looking, he knew that this guy was likely going to go this way and this guy was likely going to go this way just because he saw all of it, which is very different than just seeing the puck. And that’s why I love sports. It’s such a metaphor for business because you see the whole thing.

Dennis Collins:
Well, you do. And Seth Godin says that the people who are the best strategists understand that. He also tells us that a strategy is a set of choices that we make and stick with. It’s hard work. Trust me, having been in this world for many years, it’s hard work to choose what to do today that’s going to make a better tomorrow.

Leah Bumphrey:
One of my favorite sayings on this is “how do you make God laugh? Tell ’em your plans.” And the more specific, the more narrow it is, the more it’s that you’re going to have to make calls.

Dennis Collins:
Man plans and God laughs. Yeah, I use that all the time.

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, you said that much more succinctly than I did. I Canadianized it.

Dennis Collins:
You Canadianized it.

Leah Bumphrey:
I didn’t want to offend anybody,

Dennis Collins:
But see, here’s what I think Godin is trying to tell us. A strategy is a living, breathing thing.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yes.

Dennis Collins:
It is not something that is set in stone. It is not something that can survive contact with the real world. There is a good chance that you better have, and we had a podcast a few weeks ago about multiple strategies. If you just have one idea, and here it is, this is what we’re going to do, good luck. What happens when the competition becomes aware of your strategy and they change their strategy to head you off? What happens when the marketplace changes? When the marketplace changes and you don’t because you’re going by your strategy. Strategies I think are long term.

Leah Bumphrey:
If they’re too rigid, they’ll end up working against you. It’s like the person who’s trying to eat healthy and they’re being so specific that, oh, I can’t eat salad, that kind of salad. I need this kind of salad. You know what? Honestly, they’re forgetting that the overall strategy is to become healthier, and if you’re just fixated on this little thing, you’re going to mess it up.

Dennis Collins:
I also believe that strategy in a business is not just one area of your business. I totally reject the idea that, okay, we have a strategy for this little piece of our business. No, I think there has to be an overall plan. What’s your marketing strategy? Clearly that’s important. What is your people strategy? Your communication strategy, your internal messaging strategy? To oversimplify strategy and say, if you get this one right over here, that all the others are right? No, that’s not how it works.

Leah Bumphrey:
And they’re all connected. They have to be connected.

Dennis Collins:
They have to be, but they also have to be broader. I think tactics come in when we want to execute the marketing strategy or any strategy, the overall business strategy. Then we have tactics. So a tactic might be here’s a marketing tactic that we’re going to use in our marketing plan. Here’s a sales tactic that we’re going to use in support of our overall strategy. But I have not seen a business really succeed with just a singular strategy.

Leah Bumphrey:
It makes me think of Wizardacademy.org sponsors us. The strategy is to have people, the ultimate strategy is to help small business succeed, which is where podcasts like ours would dog pile on that. We’re part of that. But for Wizard Academy, they want people to be able to come to classes. Sometimes those classes are online, sometimes they’re down in Austin. But everything about the academy works towards that strategy, including having students being able to stay on class or on campus, having classes that build upon each other. Everything from magical worlds up to the 40 answers. These things are all important. The overall strategy is to grow business.

Dennis Collins:
The tactics are the individual classes. Yeah.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yes, yes.

Dennis Collins:
And so I think that makes the point that the overall business strategy of Wizard Academy is very clear, but how they achieve that tactically changes from year to year because they’re constantly adding new classes, they’re constantly revising. I know most of the old standard classes that used to be there 20 years ago, those have all changed. They’re the same thinking, but they’ve changed way they’re presented to make them more relevant and more interesting to today.

Uh oh… professor Paul, producer Paul. He’s listening.

Paul Boomer:
I’m here. Listening to all this and absolutely agree with Seth Godin, and what you’re saying. It reminds me also of something Simon Sinek said.

Dennis Collins:
Yes.

Paul Boomer:
Which is part of the leader’s job and part of the strategy is to create a world that does not yet exist and communicate that world. And that’s exactly what was Academy. Create it and communicate it. And you can’t create a world with tactics. You have an idea of what the world looks like, but how do you get there? That’s the tactic. But everybody knows in a business, that’s the direction we’re headed. So it parlays exactly into what Seth Godin is saying that have a North star, which is what we have and is what Wizard Academy has, and what also you and I and Leah have in Connect and Convert, we have the North star.

This is the thing that we will die on. And that’s also something that is so incredibly hard sometimes for a business owner to see when they’re so inside the bottle. They may not have one or they may not recognize it. And that is why you have somebody on the outside come in, sit down with you, have conversations and extract that information out so that then can become part of your strategy, or it becomes the strategy of this is the thing that this business is about, and it’s not about selling HVAC units, it’s not about selling surgery and this and that.

Dennis Collins:
Jewelry or whatever.

Paul Boomer:
What does that mean to you as the business owner? And also what does it mean to your customers?

Leah Bumphrey:
So what I love about our topic today is the opportunity for a challenge for our listeners, because there’s a great opportunity, I mean, you and I sit down and we invite people to join us once a week, but in this next week, I think everybody should sit down and look at what their strategy is as a business. What is your long-term strategy? And you may want to look at the tactics that you’re going to use to get you there, but to clearly identify your strategy.

Dennis Collins:
Hard to do.

Paul Boomer:
Yeah, it is. And I’m going to challenge the both of you. Give me a definition of strategy. What is strategy?

Dennis Collins:
Can I go to Seth Godin? I like what he says.

Paul Boomer:
Go for it.

Dennis Collins:
He says it better than I could. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. Who will we become? Who will we be of service? To me, that is spot-on… a philosophy of becoming.

Leah Bumphrey:
And for me, I would say that it’s an umbrella-like belief system in how you’re going to get where you’re going. I’m just more poetic than you are, Dennis.

Dennis Collins:
That wasn’t me, that was Seth Godin.

Leah Bumphrey:
But I do thinking of it as an umbrella. It covers everything. It should cover everything.

Dennis Collins:
It’s also a set of choices because when you choose one strategy, you exclude others at the moment, right?

Leah Bumphrey:
But I want to hear producer Paul here. What’s your definition? Paul, you have something in your back pocket that I can tell?

Dennis Collins:
He probably does.

Paul Boomer:
No, I’m actually very much of the same opinion of Seth Godin, and that’s actually something I ask my own clients is who do you want to become? If we were sitting down, and this is a strategy that I use with them is… let’s say we’re having this conversation five years from today, let’s have that conversation. Tell me as if we’re sitting down five years from today, what has happened since then that has made you become who you are? And that is that exact thing that is the transcending from today to tomorrow. Who do you want to become? And I love his thinking. How can I best serve you today? How can I go serve you tomorrow?

Dennis Collins:
How can I be of service to you? Identifying who you’re going to be of service to and how are you going to serve them? To me, that’s what strategy is, but let me share one final thought.

Paul Boomer:
How dare you interrupt me.

Dennis Collins:
I know. You have control of the controls. I don’t interrupt.

Paul Boomer:
That’s true. It’s happened again.

Leah Bumphrey:
He’s cooking with aluminum, Dennis.

Paul Boomer:
So what role, because we are a Wizard of Ads partners. How does strategy, or what does strategy mean in comparison to the marketing strategy? Is there marketing strategy underneath the business strategy? Which kind of goes back to what Leah said in terms of the umbrella.

Leah Bumphrey:
Absolutely. Because you have an overall business strategy, and then let’s just look at the stovepipe of marketing. But under marketing strategy then becomes the creative strategy. Because the marketing strategy is not necessarily good at the creative or the marketing feeds what the creative has to be. They’re connected. There’s some things that you can’t do creatively if your strategy is different. Let’s say you’re doing an all online strategy, you’re doing an all radio strategy. It informs the creative once you have your strategic vision.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, I love the umbrella, Leah. And yet some try to oversimplify and say, it doesn’t have to be an umbrella. It can be a singular strategy. I don’t agree with that. I think that’s a misaligned business when you have multiple strategies.

Leah Bumphrey:
And when you have an umbrella, it’s because rain happens. All I’m going to say – rain happens.

Dennis Collins:
Seth Godin would like you because that’s his philosophy. Rain happens.

Leah Bumphrey:
Thank you, thank you very much.

Dennis Collins:
And you have to be prepared for that rainy day, don’t you? Speaking of that, I just want to share one final thought. So Leah, what’s the difference between a good decision and a good outcome? Are they one and the same, a good decision and a good outcome?

Leah Bumphrey:
No.

Dennis Collins:
How are they different?

Leah Bumphrey:
Because the decision, again, using the word inform, a decision can inform the outcome. You try and make a decision that will result in a positive outcome. So what do you want to have happen here? I want listeners to call in for our 60 minute discovery call. That’s the outcome. But our initial decision, you and I talked about should it be 60 minutes, should it be 90 minutes? That decision, we hope we made the right one. If somebody needed 65 minutes, are we going to say no? No, because the outcome is what we’re after, and it’s a good outcome and it’s a good outcome for our listeners.

Dennis Collins:
So do outcomes inform decisions?

Leah Bumphrey:
The next ones, absolutely. Because let’s say we have people, the majority of the people that we have calling in, we’ve been able to be able to schedule and talk to them.

Dennis Collins:
Schedule, yes, please.

Leah Bumphrey:
In 60 minutes. What if the majority were taking 90, we would change it. We would go back to that original decision.

Dennis Collins:
Okay, That’s a great example.

Leah Bumphrey:
The outcome would inform the decision which, and there’s no such thing as a decision written in concrete that’s going to help out your business. If you are solid, this is the way it’s going to be. You are going to be a dinosaur at some point. I’m not talking about values, I’m not talking about ethics or the type of person you are. I’m talking about those structural strategies like marketing.

Dennis Collins:
Godin has something to say about this. He uses the example of buying a lottery ticket. His point is buying a lottery ticket is a bad decision because the odds are stacked so much against you and you can actually go bankrupt buying too many lottery tickets and not winning anything. However, then he says, but wait a minute. Sometimes people win the lottery. There are people who win lotteries and big money. So does that mean that it really wasn’t a bad decision? And his point is, no, it meant you got lucky.

Leah Bumphrey:
Your outcome was good based on a bad decision,

Dennis Collins:
Exactly. So I think I know as a operator of a business and our small business owners don’t get confused between decisions and outcomes. You can make a bad decision and have a good outcome. I.e. win the lottery. But you can also make a good decision and have a bad outcome.

Leah Bumphrey:
But further to our discussion, buying a lottery ticket is not a strategy. It’s not a strategy.

Dennis Collins:
No, it isn’t. But the reason I brought in decisions, because decisions are what we make to create a strategy. So we use decisions to make up a strategy. And if we make a good decision and have a bad outcome, it’s not the decision, it’s the outcome. Don’t blame your strategy. Let the good decision followed by a bad outcome, examine that. Celebrate the fact that you took a position, you had a stand, you had a strategy, but the outcome wasn’t what you expected. Let that outcome inform future decisions.

Leah Bumphrey:
And I’m taking it a step farther because if you end up with a good outcome, you win on the lottery. Does that mean you take all those winnings and buy more lottery tickets?

Dennis Collins:
Of course. That’s what I would do.

Leah Bumphrey:
Alright. Alright. I think I know where we are here. We’ve got to finish up with this one listener question. It was specific to strategy, specific to marketing. Is it important, and how do you achieve getting your staff to buy into how you as a business owner decide to market? What if your staff doesn’t buy into it?

Dennis Collins:
Great question. Let me say this first, and I apologize to our audience, but most small business owners do not inform their teams of their marketing strategy. They might come in and play a radio ad or show a billboard or something or a TV ad. That’s not informing somebody of your strategy.

Those are tactics, okay? How many small business owners actually say, look, here’s what we’re trying to do in layman’s terms. I know you’re not marketing people, but let me explain the theory behind the millions of dollars we’re about to spend to improve our position. Here’s our theory, here’s our strategy, here are our tactics. You’re going to hear the tactics, but when you hear those radio ads or see those TV spots or see the billboards out on the highway, this is the strategy that we’re aiming towards. So we don’t share that with people. I’ll be honest, somewhat guilty. We had some amazing marketing campaigns. Back in my radio days, we would use television and billboards mostly to advertise our radio stations.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yeah, that’s cool.

Dennis Collins:
We had some award-winning marketing that won awards, but I never did the best job of informing my team about what our strategy was. I did a fair job, not a great job.

Leah Bumphrey:
The why behind the ads. So what you’re saying is if that is shared, there’s more of an opportunity for everybody to be on the same team.

Dennis Collins:
The question that was asked was how do you share that with your team? And the answer is you do share it with your team.

Leah Bumphrey:
You share it, and you get them to buy into it.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah. And the buy into comes if you share it properly.

Leah Bumphrey:
We could talk about this for 60 minutes.

Paul Boomer:
Yeah. And I’ll just say this and then I’ll be quiet because you’re right. We can talk about this forever, is that goes back to strategy, business strategy, leadership, and culture. Because all those things should be built into the strategy.

Dennis Collins:
It should be part of your culture to share what you can share. That’s not privileged, that’s not proprietary, that’s going to hurt the business. But I believed in sharing everything I could share. And yet even with that culture, with that belief, there are still some things that I probably didn’t share that I should have. And I have met many small businesses who share nothing and then wonder why the team doesn’t get it. You never told them.

Leah Bumphrey:
I guess we gotta say goodbye, end of our day.

Dennis Collins:
Oh, I don’t want to, let’s stay.

Leah Bumphrey:
No, I’ll be back. I’m going to put you in my schedule.

Dennis Collins:
One of these days I’m going to come on here for this podcast and Leah’s not going to be there and she’s just going to bag me. She’s just going to say, enough of your stuff, dude.

Leah Bumphrey:
I don’t think that will happen. If it happens, it’s because I’m going to say it. I didn’t get in on the proper schedule.

Paul Boomer:
And just remember who has the buttons in front of him.

Leah Bumphrey:
Ah, there it is.

Dennis Collins:
We’re always respectful and appreciative of professor, producer Paul.

Leah Bumphrey:
Absolutely.

Dennis Collins:
Alright guys, we’re going to say goodbye everybody. Remember every week, tune every week. You never know where this is going to go. God knows what. We’ll get into next time. Connect and convert.

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