Rethinking marketing and redesigning life | Episode 198

Peter: People start off thinking of execution before they build out the strategy, right? You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint. You shouldn’t do marketing without a blueprint either. That’s kind off the top. Probably the most frequent mistake that I see. Second mistake that I see is they, you know, people believe marketing should be able to solve everything. If you have an average product, an average service, you have average follow up, right? Marketing cannot compensate for that.

Stacy: Welcome. Welcome. Today we are going to talk about a topic that makes a lot of people really anxious and that is marketing. Early on in my business, I had a really hard time even having a positive mindset around marketing. I really saw it as a chore, as something that I didn’t want to do, but had to do. And I have really come a long way in how I think about marketing as a tool to serve audiences.

Stacy: And the other piece that has been an area of growth for me, which is going to be a big topic for today’s conversation, is marketing that actually works for you. So it’s generating revenue, it’s creating impact in the world. So rather than just being pretty and being consistent and, you know, high quality, it is actually on the other side of that having clear roi. So that is a lot of what we will get to talk with today’s guest about. So let me introduce you today’s guest. Peter Murphy Lewis is a fractional CMO documentary filmmaker and former TV host who once ran one of South America’s top travel companies until civil unrest wiped it all out. He rebuilt from scratch this time creating a business that values freedom, family and sustainability over flashy metrics.

Stacy: When he’s not helping CEOs simplify their marketing or filming on the road. He’s often teaching his son business strategy on a long walk or planning their next backpacking trip. His life has proved that you can be both wildly ambitious and deeply grounded. Peter, welcome.

Peter: Thanks. Excited to be here.

Stacy: I’d love to start with your, I guess, founding story for the work that you do today because as I said in the introduction, you lost everything. You lost your business, your home, your direction. And as anybody listening, I’m sure most of our listeners, our viewers, have had experiences maybe not that dramatic, that drastic, that big, but certainly we’ve all had moments that really shook us to our core. And I imagine that part of that experience rocked your confidence a little bit and had you really having to rethink everything as you move forward. I’d love to hear that story and how that led into the work that you do today.

Peter: Yeah, happy to the I’ll give it the abbreviated version and then we can dive into whatever is interesting to you and your audience. So started a travel company in South America in 2007. I’m from Kansas originally, but moved to Chile because I got a scholarship from Rotary Club to study my masters anywhere in the world. I’d studied Spanish in high school and then college and then traveled around Central America, knew that I loved Latin America. Got down to study my master’s and realized I didn’t want to leave Latin America and I had to do something about it. I applied for a bunch of jobs and, and I was already kind of pigeonholed myself as an academic. Good in college, good my Master’s and then studied my PhD. So who’s going to hire kind of that scholar? No one.

Peter: So since I couldn’t find a way out and to make enough money to travel back to the US and do what I wanted and own my own schedule, I started my own travel company in 2007 with a person I’d never met before blindly. And that company grew pretty quick. We got in New York Times twice within a year and a half. We had well known clients like Paul McCartney, Beyonce, Aerosmith. And in 2007 they had some civil unrest, just kind of a socialist revolution in Chile where they burnt down lots and lots of subway stations in one night. October 19th. And I lived downtown with my three year old, my wife at the time.
Peter: And I knew within 24 hours that everything that I had built over the previous 12 years to four cities, to almost 50 people working with us hit seven figures quickly, was going to die very quickly. I saw the protests, I saw the fires, my office, I thought my office was going to be burnt down. As a sociologist myself, I said, this is going to last for a while. This isn’t a one day an out thing. And I told my business partner, I said, fly back to Chile. He was on vacation. He flew back and we knew. We started to lay people off. We started to sell all of our physical assets. We closed down the office and I moved with my 3 year old back to the US because of the danger in downtown where I was living.

Peter: And my first job was I was hired as a marketing consultant, which is kind of my first fractional CMO job at a zoo in Wichita, Kansas, which is where I am speaking to you from right now. I live inside of the zoo. They gave me as part of my compensation a home. And I still live in that home with my wife. My wife followed me thereafter and had to reinvent myself. I went from working in travel, owning a company with, you know, lots and lots of clients, the seasonality, the growth, to being a freelance consultant with a three month contract without a house and without a car.

Stacy: That’s massive. And I’m sure that just required you to really kind of take stock also of what really matters. You had all of the success that you had built and the bigness of it just was wiped out like that. What did you do next? So once you got into this next phase and on US soil, can you tell me a little bit about what you built from there and how you serve people now?

Peter: Yeah, there were two kind of professional moments in the following six months after that. The first one was when I got hired as this marketing consultant inside the zoo. I remember saying out loud to my wife who worked with me at the travel company, I said, I’m going to try to grow this zoo’s revenue so quickly that they will recommend me to more people and I can build up a business, build up a portfolio, build up some clients. And I also want to pick up a couple skills along the way that make me stronger, that make me more indispensable. And the very first thing that I started working on was ads. Became very good at all meta ads within a couple months and grew their revenue, you know, a million, $2 million, very quickly.

Peter: And then the second thing was, I remember the contract, my contract got extended from three months to six months, partially because the success were having. And I told my wife that I was really struggling figuring out how to take our family to the next level. She didn’t have her green card yet. We were living off my one salary. We couldn’t afford to send my three year old to daycare or anything. And I didn’t know how to get that. I hired a personal coach and the personal coach showed me some of my limiting beliefs. I was undercharging for my services. I didn’t understand how I could help people grow and give them an ROI on their marketing, how I could be in the boardroom and be an executive on people’s teams. And that was a game changer.

Peter: It was a coach who lived in Vietnam and I remember because of his schedule, I had to wake up at 4am in Kansas and it’s like 5pm for him and it was just horrible. Wednesdays at 4am but it was a game changer. And soon after that, I got recruited to work for a private equity company who had acquired a distressed software company, a SaaS in the healthcare space. And that changed everything. First of all, I was being sought after. Second of all, I was given the reins to start my own team. I build up a team with a bunch of interns. I grew from the first marketer to 10. You know, they fired a bunch of salespeople and we turned the company around and I was part of that exit package. And that just changed my confidence.

Stacy: Today I know that you work as a fractional CMO and your key focus in the marketing that you do, and I know you have some other offerings as well, but that’s part of what you do is really around true ROI from marketing. And I know also some of your messaging is taking marketing from marketing chaos to creating these true results. And that can often take the place in revenue, but also for our listeners, an impact, you know, in having a mission and a message you want to get out and really being able to have a true impact through the marketing.

Stacy: Can you tell me a little bit about what is different and how you think about marketing and what has led you to be successful in helping people actually get results from their marketing rather than just kind of like throwing things up at the wall, hoping some of it sticks. Sometimes getting results but not knowing why, not being able to replicate it.

Peter: I love this question. To answer it, I usually need a little bit of context for where the company is at. So I’ll answer the question. Thinking about a company that’s doing, let’s say, two to four million dollars in annual revenue and then I could talk about a little bit more startup afterwards. I. I need to understand where they are in their maturation, where they are in the product and services and quality, where they are in terms of team and what I usually do. The very first thing that I try to do is I try to determine what can we cut. And that doesn’t mean people, it means what can we cut from our busy day. I think that you can always do more with less. So focus one important channel.

Peter: Clean it up, set up SOPs, set up processes, put the right person there to then handle it. Make sure that you guide the strategy and then move to your next channel. I try to spend, when I’m with that type of client, I try to spend about 50% of my personal energy as a fractional chief marketing officer in exploratory channels or exploratory campaigns or strategies and the other 50% building up what’s already working for them. And that’s how I move through the first two, three, four quarters with them. The at the more entry level, I usually try to start off with something very basic. Like I think there’s a fair famous marketing book out there like marketing plan in one page or something.
Peter: I can’t remember it’s trendy right now, but I read it and just so that I could dumb things down very simply to someone almost kind of like what we used to do with. I’m sure you remember the business canva that was popular for the last 20 years. Just start with something very basic and also think what I add on to that I think is a little bit different than, than other people’s approaches is I like to use the Eisenhower matrix. The Eisenhower matrix is based off of what President Dyke Eisenhower did and he has four quadrants. And the most important thing that you need to learn from the Eisenhower matrix is what is the one thing that takes the least amount of effort, that will give the most amount of impact.

Peter: If you are beginning, if you’re a C level moving over to your own company or you’re. You have your own company and you’re hiring your second employee or your third employee and you don’t know what to do. If I’m marketing, write out everything that you think that you need to do. Put them in priority. Now move them over to the Eisenhower matrix. The number one priority is not always the thing that you should do. The number one priority might be create a website. I don’t know how to do a website. I’m not graphically inclined. Number two priority might be video content. I’m great on video. I don’t know how to do so I don’t, I don’t know how to build a Website. I don’t know how to hire a freelance designer or anything like that, but I know how to turn on my camera.

Peter: So the Eisenhower Matrix will let you figure out which is the priority that you should focus on because it’s already within your wheelhouse.

Stacy: That’s really good advice because I know with the authors that I talk with, they often struggle with just getting started and knowing where to put effort and energy. So usually the scenario with the authors I work with, they are, they have a business. Usually either they are transitioning from corporate into starting their own business, or they are a business owner and have been for several years, and they’re really looking to uplevel move to the next revenue bracket, move to bigger impact because they all have mission or true mission in the world. And then when they go to step into this authority world, it can feel really overwhelming to now need to truly market in a way that they’ve never done this before. And certainly that feels really overwhelming. Right.

Stacy: Because if you look at the people that you follow already on social media or the thought leaders in your space, they’re at least, it seems like, doing everything. Like they’re everywhere. They’re doing everything really well. And so that can create this feeling of paralysis of like, well, I can’t do all of that at that level, so where do I even start? You know, and maybe they’ve been doing some marketing, a newsletter, blogs, things like that. And then moving now also into that video space, getting their face on things that can. That can feel really overwhelming. So I like the way that you broke that down. And, and also it’s like, what can only you do? What are you the person? Like, you have to be the person to do this. In this example, I have to be the person to record this podcast, right?

Stacy: Because I can’t slot somebody in to be me and have this conversation with you. But we have Rita here in the background who is going to produce and publish this, get it on YouTube, get it on Spotify for podcasters, and disseminate the information. But that took me a long time actually to get there in my own business.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, Just kind of riff on that. You know, behind me is I have a project manager or general manager of the team, Claudia, and she can go in, I go into meetings. I’m good at, I’m good at people, I’m good at leading, I’m good at running things and saying what the strategy is. But she knows how to take all of that and put that into a project management tool and then has agencies or Contractors doing all the execution. So, you know, like, if I were going to start a new agency today, the number one thing that I’m going to have the most impact on with the least amount of effort is finding another Claudia. Right? Because then I can start to pick up clients and I can tell her what to do and the team can get it done.

Peter: I’m really good at minimizing complex situations and know what to focus on. Some of the execution, maybe not. And that’s where you. And so like going back to the Eisenhower matrix, you know that specific example, Rita doesn’t show up in the Eisenhower matrix. Claudia doesn’t show up in the Eisenhower matrix. What shows up is Stacy should be using her face and her voice to communicate, to resonate, to connect with her audience and her ideal client. How does she do that? Well, she figured out it’s a podcast. She knows what she’s missing on the podcast. She’s missing a Rita. So just translate something that is intangible over to the next step.

Stacy: I like that because it is really also focusing on what is that next most impactful step that you can take. And we’ll try to find a link to that and put it in the show notes so that people can take a look at that matrix and be able to visualize it while you’re talking through it. But it is really helpful. And also I found when I use, I don’t even know if it was the Eisenhower matrix, but I’ve used one like what you’re describing. It also often identifies the places that you should just stop doing it at all. It does like just stop. It doesn’t need to be done, which is very helpful.

Stacy: So when we’re thinking about marketing as a whole and a lot of people that are any kind of wide range of marketing efforts, from small team, minimal marketing to maybe in that 2 to 4 million like you mentioned, and they have a lot of things going on. What are the reasons that marketing efforts often fail to produce anything that’s actually useful on the other side?

Peter: A couple different reasons. I’ll start with the easiest. I think it’s because people start off thinking of execution before they build out the strategy. Right. You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint. You shouldn’t do marketing without a blueprint either. That’s kind off the top. Probably the most frequent mistake that I see. Second mistake that I see is they, you know, people believe marketing should be able to solve everything. If you have an average product, an average service, you have average follow up, right Marketing cannot compensate for that. Right? Like I can build you a brand new website. I can make you look amazing on YouTube. If you don’t answer your phone calls, you don’t handle complaints appropriately, you don’t make people’s experience amazing, you don’t onboard them correctly.

Peter: That’ll make it back to the Internet and it’ll do more damage than anything that I can do. Third is kind of similar to what were talking about with do. Doing less is more. So be careful with vanity metrics. Focus one simple, simple element. I don’t know if this, Stacy, you and I were speaking before we recorded about EOS traction and the ES methodology. I don’t know if this comes from this book or E Myth because I get my business books mixed up. But I like to think of what is one single metric, one single economic metric that I can look at every single day, one simple scorecard to know that my business is headed in the right direction. And then from there you’re going to have trailing metrics, leading metrics and so forth. Right. When I was a travel company, it was simple.

Peter:I started off with a travel company with bicycles. How many butts in a seat? I just tracked that. 17 today, 30, 33 tomorrow, the next day, 15. Right. And I’m just thinking of butts. Butts in a seat. Think of one metric and then slowly build out what are the most critical metrics ahead of that for, for leading and then behind that for trailing. And start very at the basics. And, and if you’re the type of person who blames everything on marketing, you’re not doing it. Then all of those things above aren’t going to help you. You, you need to do a reality check and you can’t blame everything on marketing.

Stacy: Yeah, I, I love that you pointed out the vanity metrics versus metrics that actually matter and drive the business forward. Forward. But I think, also, I don’t think that a lot of people mean to pick vanity metrics, but I think it’s also hard to know what to measure when you’re new into being more strategic with your marketing. And I say this also from personal experience because I’ve been through this whole journey of just getting started and trying stuff to being much more strategic and thoughtful and having a dashboard and having numbers to look to. But also I got help with that with my team because that’s not my strong suit as, you know, analyzing stuff. I can take in the information and make good decisions. I’m the vision keeper.

Stacy: But that’s not My area of strength for audience members, let’s say they’re a consultant or coach, they’re building a personal brand connected to their book and business. What are some numbers that they could be paying attention to that might matter for them?

Peter: Well, I’ll answer that, but let me think about yours for an example. So let’s say you’re starting off today as a consultant and you’re certain that the podcast is on your Eisenhower Matrix.

Stacy: Yeah. Okay.

Peter: So I think you should be flexible with those KPIs and your marketing metrics at the beginning. I would. If I were your best friend or, you know, somebody who, you know, lent you $10,000 to get started because I believed in it and I was a marketing expert, I would say, hey, I think, Stacy, your first three months, the only metric you need to pay attention to is how many episodes you record. That’s it. Simple.

Stacy: That’s very controllable.

Peter: Very controllable. You can show up. It’s not stressful for you. I didn’t talk to you about quality. I didn’t tell you about publishing because we can hire someone to do that might stress you out about the publishing and distribution. I didn’t say how many people shared it, how many people listened to none of that. And then I would say, oh, look at that. I gave you one metric. You did 90. I expected you to do 12. You did 90 episodes. Whoa. Okay, so metric two. Now, let’s not worry about listens, downloads or anything. Now let’s do a metric of how many pieces of quality content can be repurposed from each episode without you being involved. Oh, wow. So now we need either an intern underneath you, or we need a Rita who can take the.

Peter: The distribution and put it on YouTube and LinkedIn and so forth. So I think at the beginning, at the early stages, start off with one simple metric, especially if you’re a one man or one woman show. And then be flexible and you can find somebody who can walk you through this process. Right. I belong to a network called growth mentor. Growth mentor.com and I pay as a mentee on that platform to have access to thousands of consultants who give me 30 minutes to 60 minutes of their time for free. I pay the subscription, I think a hundred dollars a month or something. And after I was on it for a year now, I signed up as a free consultant. So people, you can.

Peter: And I don’t make a dollar off them, but that you can find people who walk through the same conversation you and I are having right now. Stacy, your first Example, the question you asked me was, remind me, what was the example?

Stacy: Yeah, somebody who has a small business, it’s probably coach consultant, service provider of some kind, maybe a speaker. And they are growing their personal brand alongside their book launch and really looking to kind of take that next step in their journey of really establishing leadership in their industry.

Peter: Great. There’s three places my mind goes to it depending on what’s, what specific space you’re in, what, how close you are to a big city, how comfortable you are with talking to people and doing outreach. First thing my mind goes to is what I tell my son every single time. My son’s 8 1/2 years old and I always say, hey, when I drop him off at school or I drop him off at camp, hey, try to be the most helpful person in the room today. If you’re the most helpful person, you’re always going to be needed. Somebody’s going to want to marry him, he’s always going to have a friend. When, when somebody picks on him, somebody’s going to defend him. So the exact same thing with a consultant, right?

Peter: Like whenever my pipeline dries up a little bit, I always remind myself, how can I be the most helpful person today in my network? So the one metric that I would give myself is who is an influential person within my reach that I could help today? And so my metric for the next 14 days to change my pipeline as a beginning consultant would be, did I reach out and was I able to help one person every single day with one thing? Maybe it’s their funnel, maybe it’s oversee their SDR team, maybe it’s teach them about LinkedIn, whatever it is, that’s the very first thing because those are going to turn into referrals. Some one of them is going to actually need me. Those are going to turn into clients.

Peter: The second, the second item I think would probably be, depending on where you are, I would have a simple metric of becoming a speaker. If you’re a consultant, you could probably be a keynote speaker. If you can become a keynote speaker or even just do a workshop, you are going to find clients and you’re going to be able to record all of that content and repurpose Those into your LinkedIn post to your YouTube to referrals, put those on your websites. When you do outbound next time you can say, I spoke here, I just got invited two weeks ago to speak at what most people think would be a very small setting. I think there’s going to be 20 people in there. My team sent it to me and said, Peter, hey, they don’t pay more than a thousand dollars for the speaking engagement.

Peter: I’m normally charged five to $15,000 for speaking engagement. And I looked it up and it is association of the largest universities in the Midwest. And it’s all of their presidents going to be there. I said, I don’t charge them a dollar. I’ll show up. All of those people have marketing budgets of 5 to 20 million dollars, right? And I’m in the documentary space. So go find some local place within an hour of your house that doesn’t cost you more than $30 of gas and start to reach out to the Rotary Club, to the community college for you to speak on your specific, on your specific area. I think that’s the second one. And the third one would be podcasts, right? Like if you are good at speaking, pitch yourself to be on other people’s podcasts.

Peter: Niche down on the topic that you’re going to talk about, right? So like I wouldn’t cold reach out to Stacy if she were my first person and just say, I’m a fractional cmo. I would reach out to Stacy and say, hey, Stacy, I started a travel company in South America and I want to tell you about when I lost everything, what I learned from it. There’s nobody else who can pitch to Stacy that they lost their entire business in 2019. No single person is going to get you to open it. So niche down when you’re starting that cold outreach. How’d I do?

Stacy: Those are fabulous. It’s so helpful because I know there are people listening or watching that they’re thinking I could do that today. And those are things I could start doing today. And one thing I’ll layer out on your last point about podcasting is that you can also get coaching. So if you’re not confident as a guest, you can get help with that. You can get practice. You know, you can practice with people, even ask a friend to role play with you. And there’s so many things that you can do to just build that confidence to be able to do those interviews. And, and I know for me, the first time I still have it up on YouTube because I believe you should leave all your cringy content up because that’s real and authentic.

Stacy: But you know, first time I ever did a video, I was so nervous, so uncomfortable. You know, just, you can see it when you go look at, if you go to my YouTube channel and it, it it really. Some of it just is about just starting, even if, you know, with that strategy, with that mindset of. Of getting results, but getting in it and learning, because it’s also a new skill. So sometimes people think, oh, I’m just not good at being in front of the camera. I’m not good at speaking. And it’s like, okay, we’ll. Have you been through a program? Have you been coached? Have you done it and tried to learn that skill? Because those are all things that can actually be really joyful and really impactful, and it’s the way that you. That you reach people that you wouldn’t otherwise reach.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, you.

Peter: And there’s a lot of free options out there, right? Like Toastmasters, I think is free, or maybe $10. I don’t know what it is, but it’s cheap. And, you know, some people. Some people just need to get better at acting. Asking for help, right? Going back to the Eisenhower matrix, one of the things that I am exceptionally great at is asking anybody for help. Anybody, right? So, like, a year from now, if I need help on writing a book or producing a podcast, the first person I’m going to ask is. I’m a knock on Stacy’s door. She can say. She can say no, but if I don’t ask, she’ll never know. I have, you know, I have four close friends now who. Two years ago, I met one of the guys at. As an Uber driver in South America. Uber driver.

Peter: And he and I exchanged what’s ups and cell phones, and we started talking. And a year and a half, he reached out to me and he said, peter, we need to leave the country. It’s getting bad. Is there any chance that you would sponsor us for asylum visas? My wife and I got he and his wife and two kids asylum visas. And he was almost crying when he asked. And his wife made him ask because she said, if you don’t ask, he’ll never say and anything. And I’d never met him other than one time and an Uber. Right? So go. What Uber driver are you going to ask today for help?

Stacy: I like that idea of being helpful. And I think that also just creates a more generous, kind world, which I think we could use more of in every. Every city, all around the world. So I love that. I love that approach. What a powerful story, too. I’d love to transition a little bit to talk about business, like running your business, because you had this big business that, you know, was leveled basically in a day, and then you had to come and Kind of reimagine what life, where you live, how you work, all of it and rebuild. And one of the things that aligned for me when I look, you know, when I considered you for the podcast, I was like, we have so many things aligned in our values and how we orient to work.

Stacy: Because one of the things that you talk about is really building a business that supports your life. And rather than that, I talk a lot about on this podcast how American culture values depletion. That is like a cultural value that we have. And that’s so ingrained, it’s so deeply ingrained in us from such a young age that most of us don’t even realize that’s a value that we hold as a culture. But your posture toward this is very different. And I’d love for you to talk a little bit about how you have aligned your business to support your values, your family, which you’ve talked a lot about. And creativity.

Peter: Yeah, this is still a process, this is still in making, but I am getting better at it. And I think where I would like to start is going back to the personal coach. So the personal coach that I hired back in 2020, that helped me kind of make that jump into private equity. And then now, as a full time fractional cmo, he had me write out a map about my life. I think he called it the Life Clarity Map. I bet he borrowed it from somebody else. If you Google it, you can find it or you can send me a message on LinkedIn or an email and I’ll give, I’ll share with you of mine. And I mapped out my life as if it were a business.

Peter: So if you’ve read US Traction or any of the business books, you know how to write up a business plan, treat your business, treat your life like a business plan. Mine has a couple components. It has family, it has social, not family. It has my body, it has my mind, it has money, it has wealth, it has my community. And then I have goals, and then I have KPIs around each one of those. And when I did that, you know, now six years ago, that was a game changer. There’s a couple things that came out of that process that I was already on the path to figuring out. But writing it out kind of helped me solidify that this is what I wanted to do.

Peter: When I had to lay off all of my team from the first travel company, from the first failure, I said I would never, ever have a big team again. It was very painful for me. To let go. Almost 50 people that depended upon me for salaries. Majority of them had become, some of them become very close friends, almost like siblings, some of them good acquaintances. But I cared about all of them and that was painful. So I said I would never have a big team again. And I said I would never have fixed costs 12 months out of the year. I’d never have a brick and mortar business. Even if I lived remotely and set it up digitally. I’d never have another job where I work seven days a week, travel seven days a week. And then.

Peter: So that’s kind of the things that started to come from that failure experience and then that moved into what I’ve designed today. Now some of those adjusted over time. My team now is 15, but I only truly have one direct report and I meet with her every single day. I have two or three other managers that I speak to, but they don’t depend upon me. They, they’re their own islands. And so I have a little bit of the pressure. I have 15 people who depend upon me, but not emotionally. So I freed up myself from energetically and now I get to give a lot of that to my 8 year old. I get to work with my wife full time. She works in the marketing agency with me and consultancy. So that’s the first item that’s kind of gone forward.

Peter: I’d say one step backward, two steps forward, like one step backward, like be careful with the big team, two steps forward, set it up the right way. And then the other thing I would say is I’ve gotten a lot better around energy. So I, I trend to keep my mornings, you know, 8am to about noon without meetings. That’s when I’m using my creative time. And that allows for me also to travel. Right. So if I am going to travel, I travel in the morning because I don’t have to rearrange meetings. And so that’s another thing. And I would say something very simple that I think people get wrong, especially C suite executives that I consult with or that I, when I work with a client that I can see they’re on the management team. Just be careful with your expenses.

Peter: I don’t, I, I would say that 99% of every single person I talk to doesn’t take this seriously. Right. This is not a Dave Ramsey show. Even though I dress like I’m 65 years old, like Dave Ramsey. Just be careful. My, my wife and I are so frugal and that allows for us to never, ever feel the financial stress that we had when we lost everything in 2019. And that gives me the opportunity to explain to my son some of those business principles that you mentioned in the intro. So my son knows that all of his gifts, birthday or random gifts on a Tuesday are going to be used from Facebook Marketplace because he knows that allows us to have more money as a family.

Peter: So that I’m working less or for us to travel more or whatever that is, and then to spend more time together. I. I travel four months out of the year minimum, and we go to South America every single year on Thanksgiving Day. We usually fly on Thanksgiving Day because flights are cheaper, and we fly back usually on Christmas Day because flights are cheaper.

Stacy: So New Year’s Day, that’s the other. That’s the other day you can really get good deals on.

Peter: Yeah, the whole world’s hungover and the flight’s empty and it costs half the price.

Stacy: Yeah. Yeah, I love it. I love all of what you just said and I think there’s so much goodness in there. One of the things I’d love to drill in on a little bit is that morning protection. And I talk about this a lot on the podcast as well and in my coaching when I work with authors, because, I mean, and I think this is more exacerbated these days with AI and all of the things that are going on, the easy ways that we can outsource our thinking, we can distract ourselves having that space to just be present, to do deep work, to not have meetings. I’m like you, I schedule all of my meetings after lunch, with some exceptions.

Stacy: You know, it depends if I have a Australian client, for example, or somebody in the UK that really needs a certain time, but rarely. And that consistency of having those mornings free is so incredibly powerful. Just to know that you have this space every day, with rare exception, to be able to do whatever it is you need to do, whether it’s create a strategy or create content or travel, like you said, just to have that open is everything. I think it’s so incredible.

Peter: I’ll give one other simple, actionable life hack. The Life hack works professionally and personally. And I’ve trained up all my team to think this way if they didn’t already think this way beforehand, which is never come and ask me a question, nor ever come and bring a problem without your first proposal, your first solution. So nobody sends me direct messages on Slack, nobody sends me direct emails, nobody sends me direct whatsapps. They always do it in a group setting so that one of my managers can Answer for me. And secondly, don’t ever ask me a question or answer the problem without the solution. And 99% of the time our team just says the first proposal, the first solution that they recommend is go with it.

Peter: And that saves so much management energy and stress energy because it allows your team to be empowered to be an equal, be a peer and to be just as smart as you. And that’s in, that’s empower. That’s. That is a great retention tactic because people want to feel empowered and it’s a great energy hack so that, you know, I’m not my son can ask me questions, not my team at 15, they can solve it on their own. Allows me to answer the questions for him.
Stacy: I think that’s such a great tip. And then the cure, the curiosity I have, and maybe this would be helpful for listeners would be how do you then retrain? You know, if you’ve built a environment where the norm is to come to you. And, and I will say this has also been a journey for me much earlier in my business. I would take everything on board and I usually had just. I had a very small team. I had like one, sometimes two people working with me, depending on the project. Now I have a team of five and we have a really good culture where everybody is very entrepreneurial, they’re problem solvers. So this isn’t as much of an issue.

Stacy: One of the things that I did in the kind of transition was I just stopped responding to questions and I let people because basically they would have to solve it. And I got that from Shoe Dog. I don’t know if you ever read Shoe Dog, the Nike by Phil Knight. He had this story where he had this employee that just called him like relentlessly, would not stop calling him, and he just stopped answering the phone. And miraculously, like, he solved all his problems. And so I didn’t like neglect, but if I got a question that I was like, they can solve this. They know the answer. And they will have to find answer by a certain time anyway. If I don’t respond, they’re going to make a decision. And I found that also was helpful in just getting.

Stacy: Not having to come to me for the decision maker or the person to weigh in because they’re all so capable and competent anyway, they don’t need me to come in. But what about for somebody that’s been in, you know, in an environment where they’re getting all the questions and like, it’s real energy drain. What are some things that they could do to change that dynamic.

Peter: Two. Two items. So the first. The. The first item is go read the book five Languages of Love and start to think about everybody who reports directly to you as what. How do these people want to be appreciated at work? So change. Flip the book from love language to appreciation language. Everyone wants to be appreciated in some way or another. There’s five different ways. Usually people want to be appreciated by 1, 2, or 3. We all have predominant factors the way we want to be appreciated and start to think about it that once you figure that out, then you’re going to be able to communicate to that person and the voice and the language that they want to be communicated to. Now that you understand that, next time you meet with that person. So let’s.

Peter: Stacy, as an example, Stacy asked me, hey, Peter, you know, I. I want to 10x this podcast reach and the next in the next six months or the next year. How should I go about doing it? Well, you know, like, first of all, I know that Stacy likes words of affirmation, so I’ll make sure that I’ll say something very positive. What you’ve done up to now is unbelievable. I couldn’t have done that if you would have asked me. I wouldn’t have done it as well as you. I really like to know what you did. Have Stacy map it out. I did this, this. It turned in a blueprint. I. I acted upon it this way. And then you say, oh, wonderful. That’s amazing. Before I answer the next question you asked me about, like, how I could 10x it, tell me, Stacy, how you.
Peter: You would do it. And Stacy will walk right into the trap. She’ll say, you know, this is what I think I should do. And then I would say, can you explain to me why you asked me that question when it seems like you had a good idea, and then she’ll share her insecurities and so forth, and you say, that was amazing. I actually don’t have any better advice or give one small thing, but it was much better. What? Can we set up a process? Since you’re so smart, you’re using our words of affirmation again. You’re so smart that oftentimes I feel like you’re stressing out on things that you don’t need to, when we could be using this energy to talk about your life or talk about what you want to learn outside of work or whatever it is.

Peter: Next time you have a problem, can you just write it out and tell me what you would do before you ask me the question, feel free to share it. I think you’re just asking for affirmation, but you’re already making the right decision. And then, and then, then. Trust me, that takes a while. Right. Because people are used to asking bosses, the next time she’s gonna ask you a question, whether it be in a meeting, slack, or email or text or something like that, and say, hey, do you remember the agreement that we made on June 26 about Sharon, what you think you should do? First, she’s gonna say yes, or she can put smiley face. I’m like, all right, let’s see it.

Peter: Person’s going to write it and then 9 times out of 10, 99 times out of a hundred is probably going to be right. And they’ll slowly walk into it.

Stacy:Yeah. And it’s also likely that they’re going to come up with a better solution than you would have. Right.

Peter: Because they’re the ones that have thought about it more than you.

Stacy: Of course. They, they’re the experts in the thing. They’ve thought about it deeply. They care enough to bring it to you, which means that they’ve put the energy and heart into considering different options. So, so I love that it’s something I’m going to be thinking about as well in my own work. This has been such an amazing conversation. I feel like we could have taken so many different routes and I know this will be really tangible for our listeners. I’ll ask you the question that I ask all of our guests, which is if you could recommend one book to listeners and this is one that has profoundly impacted your life, what would it be?

Peter: My answer to Five Languages of Love because it’s impacted my personal life. And then business book is EOS Traction because it set up the systems for me to have the lifestyle that I want right now to travel with my 8 year old and my wife.

Stacy: It’s wonderful because one of those is also focused on emotional relationships and really building strong connections with others. And the other one is all around systems and making everything run smoothly. So it seems like the perfect pairing. Peter, where can our listeners learn more about you? If they’re interested in working with you, how would they get in touch two.

Peter: Places you can visit my website, strategic pete.com. I have free consulting on there just like I would on growth Mentor. You don’t have to sign up there. And secondly is connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s the only channel inside of my Eisenhower matrix that I spend energy and effort on. I am the only Peter Murphy Lewis on LinkedIn. If there’s ever another imposter, I’ll track them down. So add me as a connection, Send me a message, tell me that you listen to Stacy’s podcast and I’ll accept your connection. We’d love to hear what you’re working on.

Stacy: Thank you so much, Peter. I really appreciate your time and your energy and sharing your wisdom. This was such a good conversation and also such a cool life story. It’s amazing what you’ve been able to build out of such a, you know, such a devastating experience. To be able to come out of that and do the work that you’re doing is pretty awesome. So thank you for sharing your story and your work with us today.

Peter: Thank you.

Stacy: And thank you to you, our listener, our viewer, for being with us. I always appreciate the time you spend with me with our guests. Thank you as always to Rita Domingues for her production of this podcast. As I tell you every week, she is the only reason you’re listening to this right now. If it was up to me, I would have a big backlog of episodes to publish. So I am so grateful for her production and her ability to get all of this content out into the world. If you have a moment right now to rate and review the podcast in whatever listener or if you’re on YouTube, to subscribe and leave a comment, it makes a huge difference for me in reaching more listeners with the message of living a life that’s not just better, but beyond better.

Stacy: And of course, be sure to subscribe so that you will get this content in your feed and get to hear more great guests. Just like Peter. Thank you so much and I will be back with you before you know it.