Transcript

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camaragal people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work, and the meanings we derive from work.

What if everything that you are waiting for, everything that you are wanting, every dream that feels audacious to even entertain is within your reach, if only you had the audacity to ask.

So in 2008, clients would pay me to write and to publish for their websites. I had several retainer clients that I kept for many years. And how I went about this every single month is I had introduced myself to experts in the same industry as my clients, people I didn’t know, people that my clients might’ve mentioned in passing perhaps. And I’d reach out to interview and to quote them because I had to produce content, right? I was a content producing machine at the time. I would quote them and I would publish them and I would link back to their website. And a lot of these people went on to hire me and to introduce me to their network.

Around 2012, clients would hire me to train and to teach their students, their groups on marketing, on starting a business quickly and easily, on marketing yourself as a soloist, getting on out there. And of course, a lot of that audience went on to hire me as well. Now I never pitched in these groups because that would be unclassy and that’s not what I am about. If I’m getting paid to train and teach on behalf of a business, there’s absolutely no way that I would overtly pitch that audience. But nonetheless, a lot of those people would come back sometimes years later and hire me.

From about 2015 onwards, I started speaking on stages, large and tiny, for free and paid. And I would be interviewed on other people’s podcasts. I would teach and train other people’s groups, sometimes through formal training institutions, sometimes as a guest lecturer at universities and sometimes more informally. And again, you don’t need me to tell you this — a lot of those people would come back to hire me.

So borrowing other people’s audiences is a strategy that no doubt you’ve probably heard before. But if you’re sitting here scratching your head thinking, well, that’s all well and wonderful, but how the hell am I supposed to do that? How do I leverage other people’s audiences? How do I get in front of people’s audiences in the first place?

Well, I’m having a party. I’m having a party and you are invited. Consider this your formal invitation — you can RSVP at hustleandheart.com.au/pitch. Of course, I will put that in the show notes. The Life’s a Pitch Party is happening and you are invited.

Now what people tend to overlook — and what a lot of those big online gurus, back in the day when online business hype was at its height and every Tom, Dick and Harry was an online coach of one description or another — what a lot of those people didn’t include in their trainings, what they didn’t include in their big courses, was that the big opportunities, the relationships they had with each other, came through good old fashioned one-to-one relationships. And part and parcel of these relationships is being a good human.

So that is what we’re doing in our Life’s a Pitch Party. We are reaching out one-to-one. Yes, we are doing it. And why are we doing it together? Why are we doing it as a party? Because if you are anything like most of my clients, most of the business owners that I am surrounded by, you would probably rather chew broken glass than pitch people, than reach out to a stranger or even reach out to a friend or a family member, forbid. Don’t worry — you’re not going to be hitting them up for money. Something way, way, way better than that.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you wake up in the morning and you delete, delete, delete, delete — five, ten, maybe more spam emails. Every single morning I wake up to people who are pitching other people onto this podcast. Please stop doing that. It gets deleted, sight unseen, almost sight unseen. I do scan all these emails and I delete them.

So now you’re thinking, well, why on earth would I want to be part of that? Why on earth would I want to be one of those people who are in your LinkedIn DMs, no doubt, who are in your inboxes, asking for favors with a sense of entitlement? Because the clearest, most direct, easiest and fastest way to get what you want is to ask.

Telepathy is not a reliable strategy. We cannot rely on other people knowing who we are, knowing what we do, knowing why they need us, and knowing exactly how awesome we are if we don’t actually open our mouths and talk. So we are not going to be one of those spammy weirdos. We are not going to be one of those sweaty, same-same, delete-almost-sight-unseen people.

We are going to pitch like humans — no automation, no AI, no software. I’ve had clients before who’ve tried this kind of stuff out, then come back to me and go, “Shit, I’m in trouble because the software people have marked me as spam.” And I’m like, well, yes, because you’re sending mass emails anonymously with the same boring ass message. Of course you’re being penalized as a result. So we’re not doing that.

If everybody’s doing a bad job of pitching, the opportunity is to do a great job. And I don’t know about you, but I find that very motivating. I see sloppiness. I see unethical behavior. I see crap. I think great — there’s an opportunity for me here to not suck. Because branding is dandy and marketing is sparkling, but the quickest and the easiest way to smash your goals? Pitch, baby.

And I am going to be sharing stories, starting now, with how one short, sharp pitch can change your business overnight. So if you’re on my email list, you would have heard this story before. March 2020, I lost about $30,000 of booked face-to-face training. Like everybody else, I was kind of scrambling for a moment there. 2020 turned out to be the busiest of my working life to date, but for a moment there I was like, shit, what am I going to do?

So I did what I have always done. I reached out through an info@ or a hello@ — one of those anonymous email addresses that you find in the footer of a website. The training institution that I pitched had been on my imaginary list for two, maybe three years. I’ll get there one day, I’d tell myself. I had never quite managed to get around to it. But needs must — there’s nothing like a bit of financial pressure to put a rocket up your ass.

So I reached out. I sent that info@ a short, sharp, plain text email. I did not have an introduction. They did not know me from Adam. And they said yes. It turned out to be about ten to twelve thousand dollars worth of work. And it really reaffirmed something for me.

Life’s a Pitch started because of that experience. It is so ridiculously easy. There’s no tech involved. We don’t even need email marketing software. We don’t need Kit, we don’t need MailerLite, we don’t need Mailchimp, God forbid. We just need to send one simple email. Maybe we need a LinkedIn account to follow up. But this is one of the most straightforward things that you can do.

Now, the problem remains. I’m going to make a few assumptions about you. I’m going to guess — and correct me if I’m wrong — that you don’t want to be one of those people. You don’t want to be that person who comes on too fast, too strong, all wrong. You want to sound natural. You want to sound normal. You want to talk to people who are your people. Great, me too.

There is a way to sound like a normal — and by normal I mean awesome, obviously — individual, not some grasping desperado who’s spamming people all day long through automated software.

This is what the pitch scripts are about. And of course we need to rev ourselves up to get there, which is why it’s a party. It’s why we have a playlist. It’s why we have a private community where everybody is boogieing together.

Now, I want to give you a couple of quick tips and a little more insight. It’s super important to be unforgettable. No small task, right? And yet it is actually easier than you would think. You’re going to skip the words and skip the phrases that most people will scan straight past. If you say something people are expecting to hear, they will not hear it. Let me say that again — if you say something that people are expecting to hear, they won’t hear it. Their brains will switch off.

So your aim in that very first reach out is to be quirky, to be sticky, to leave an impression. And here the genius of being specific really comes into play. You don’t have to acquire a new personality. You don’t have to get a lot of swagger — please don’t. You don’t have to pretend to be Tony Robbins — please don’t. You just have to be a little quirky. You have to say something a little different, and you really need to center the other person rather than yourself.

I find this hugely useful when I’m feeling self-conscious. When I’m going to a networking event, or some kind of party where I don’t know people that well — my favorite kind of party, by the way — from time to time I’m just like, I feel awkward. So what do you do? It’s a really easy thing and it has a multiplier effect. The first thing is you stop thinking about yourself.

Most people when they pitch are way too much me, me, me, me, me. Instead, step out of your own shoes and into the shoes of the other person.

Now, one thing you might know about me already is that we’re not going to be doing obsessive research. You are not getting paid to do a PhD on your prospective clients who may not even be remotely interested. So you better believe we are setting timers. I don’t typically do more than ten minutes of research. I call this just-in-time research, and we need to get good at it.

What I’m seeing is a lot of surface-level surfing where people cannot focus — they’re in front of a screen and their brain goes in twenty-five thousand directions. But I also see people going in the complete opposite direction, deep in the procrasta-research hole, deep in procrasta-learning, deep in procrasta-pitching. They’ve turned it into a PhD. They are treating it like a paid client project. It is not.

So we’re going to keep it short. The pitch scripts I’m sending you are copy and paste — could not be easier. The amount of customization you’ll need to do will probably be one or two sentences. And this is where you put your quirky, sticky, unforgettable bits — your specificity, always a fun word to pronounce.

Finally, I want to end on some topics I’ve been exploring a lot lately with my Momentum Mastermind and my Audacious Masterminders. We’ve been on the same topic of control and responsibility. What I see a lot is people taking control of things that aren’t theirs to control, and relinquishing control of things that absolutely are.

They’re taking control of deciding whether the person’s ready to buy. They’re taking control of deciding whether the person can afford their services. None of your bloody business — you’re not going to know this. They’re taking control of the results they’re getting and thinking it’s some kind of reflection on them. Oftentimes it’s not. Somebody says no to you — or more often, rather than say no, they’ll say “I love you so much, I love your work, but…” when they really mean no.

Everything outside of ourselves is beyond our control — including our children, including our partners. I’ve got no idea what my partner’s thinking half the time. We’ve been together over twenty years now and I’ve got no idea what’s going on in his head most of the time. What is within our control is our thoughts, our feelings, and consequently our actions. The results of our actions? Outside our control.

So what are we taking responsibility for, and what aren’t we? When things get shaky, when you feel stress, when you feel nervous — don’t stick your head in the sand. Don’t sit on your hands and go, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just wait.” This is the opposite of what you want to do.

There is so much beyond our control. There is so much that is outside our responsibility. But what we absolutely, definitely have control and responsibility for is ourselves — our thoughts, our feelings, our words, our actions, our energy level, our identity. All of these things are within our control.

And pitching is one of the simplest things that you can do. Pitching is not marketing, just to make that doubly clear. I am not talking about marketing. Pitching works even without marketing. You can pitch as I did when you don’t have a website, you don’t have a business name, you’ve barely begun. Your business starts with a pitch.

I am so excited by the people who actually start their businesses this way. Crystal from Child Support Consultants comes to mind — she got her very first client through Life’s a Pitch, and from that moment forth, from that first dollar, she was in business. This is within your control.

And if you do have a reputation, if you are marketing, if you have put time and effort into building your professional profile, pitching is just the icing on the cake. You’re all set up and ready to go — now you just have to stop hiding from people and waiting for the cool kids to know who you are. Go over to the cool kids. Introduce yourself. Get invited to lunch. Have somebody offer you their business for sale, as somebody did to me the other day — half a million dollars for a business similar to mine. That doesn’t happen when you sit on your hands and wait to be noticed. That doesn’t happen when you wait for your work to speak for itself. That doesn’t happen when you wish and hope and pray and use your telepathic powers to send a missive to the universe.

Everything that you want is on the other side of asking. Life’s a pitch. Make sure you RSVP. We start very soon and I cannot wait to get down on the dance floor with you.

Real quick before you go — if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.