Free Traffic By Making Google Understand You with Jason Barnard
Host Brett Ingram talks with Jason Barnard, founder and CEO of KaliCube. Jason specializes in online brand management and reshaping Google’s focus on individuals and companies. From his early entrepreneurial journey in a punk folk band to developing children’s music and cartoons, Jason shares his unique experiences and the evolution of his business strategies. They dive deep into how to effectively communicate your brand to Google and AI, ensuring understandability, credibility, and deliverability. Learn practical tips on optimizing your digital presence and the importance of investing in personal development for business success. Don’t miss this insightful conversation packed with valuable advice for entrepreneurs.
Building Your Dream Business with Google featuring Jason Barnard
[00:00:00] Brett Ingram: Hey, everybody, this is Brett Ingram and this is the optYOUmize Podcast, the show that helps entrepreneurs build their dream business and dream life. Today, we’re talking with Jason Barnard, founder of multiple companies and CEO of Kalicube. He specializes in online brand management and his superhero skill is the ability to influence and reshape Google’s focus on an individual or a company. I’m super excited about this because we can all use more love from Google since that means a steady flow of free, targeted traffic. So with that, welcome, Jason, and thanks for joining us.
[00:00:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Hi. Brilliant. Lovely to be here, Brett, thanks so much.
Jason Barnard’s Entrepreneurial Journey
[00:00:44] Brett Ingram: Awesome. So I know you’re going to be sharing with us some amazing tips, but you have a fascinating personal story and background, so I really kind of want to start with that. Can you tell us about the start of your career and what led you to where you are now?
[00:01:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, well, it’s lovely because we were talking just now about the difficulties of running a business, especially solopreneur on your own, everything remote, feeling a bit out of touch, and I 100% get that. I’m in a similar position. I’m in the south of France, in an office on my own at home. My team are in the Philippines, so I feel kind of isolated from them. They feel isolated from each other because the Philippines is very big, everybody’s working from home. It’s a huge problem. I’ve found lots of solutions to that, lots of ways to make it work for me. But the irony of it is what we were just mentioning is my entrepreneurial journey started in 1991 with the music group I played in and I played the double bass, the bull fiddle in a punk folk band.
[00:01:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I created a company in order to release a record and to be able to tour playing concerts with the band. And so all of the work was remote, but we all had to go there together in the van to play the gig. So there was no loneliness at all. It was the opposite. It was too many people sitting in a van, getting very bored.
[00:02:03] Brett Ingram: A little too close to each other.
[00:02:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah.
[00:02:06] Brett Ingram: Oh, that’s really cool. Go ahead.
[00:02:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, it turns around. I mean, it’s a complete turnaround. So I was just kind of thinking, wow, I had never thought of it that way. But then I moved from there and started children’s music and we started a website for children with my ex-wife. And we were in Paris and we were working together. So there was always both of us working on it together, which made it much, much easier. But we moved to Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, near Madagascar. And so that’s incredibly remote.
[00:02:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Again, this was in 2000 when people said, oh, you can work from anywhere in the world with the Internet. And we thought, okay, let’s go to the other side of the world and see if it works. And it did. It was great. But always with my ex-wife, I had a team there, built a team. So it was remote from the rest of the world, but we weren’t remote in terms of each other. And today, with Kalicube, totally remote. I was a solopreneur with Kalicube until three and a half years ago, and then I started building a team.
[00:03:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We’re now 23 people, and the remote workplace has become the norm, and people are getting used to it. But I think people still struggle with the times when you’re not actually sitting on camera with meetings. And when you are on camera with meetings, sometimes you waste a lot of time on stuff that you really shouldn’t.
The Three Pillars of Success Behind Jason Barnard’s Music Company
[00:03:24] Brett Ingram: You know, I actually find it fascinating that you were doing things that were remote long before that was sort of in vogue or what everybody was doing. I mean, we all got forced into it with COVID and then people sort of realized, okay, well, wait a minute, we could actually make this model work. But, you know, to be able to have done that so far, you know, and so long ago is remarkable. What, so when you started the company for the actual band, the purpose of that was to release the record. So what exactly did the company do at that time?
[00:04:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, the company had three roles. Number one was record producer. Number two was music publisher, and the third one was a gig organizer. We organized tours. We’ll say, the company organized tours for the band. So it was all about the band and all about getting the band in front of an audience in concert live, getting the records into the shops, and making sure that we got the money that we deserved from the entrepreneurial effort through the music publishing. So get in front of your audience, get into the right places where they can actually purchase for you, and make sure you get the money that you deserve. It’s three fundamental parts of business.
[00:04:40] Brett Ingram: That’s great. I mean, I know just from my own experience, I’ve known people that have played in bands that despite the fact they might be really good, they just don’t have the following. They don’t, you know, they have to sort of grab onto the coattails of another band who does to be able to travel around to even earn enough to survive, basically. And they’re kind of waiting for their break or whatever. So the fact that you would have decoded that so long ago is really cool and, you know, impressive.
[00:05:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, honestly, the decoding, I just did it literally now live on air. I’ve never looked at it that way before, and that’s 33 years on. The truth of the matter in all of my company is I see something that I’m doing with or without other people. In this case, it was with the band. So it’s a group of us. Without the other ones, nothing could have happened. I see it.
[00:05:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I realized that I believe it has huge value for the world. And if we can get in front of the right people, the people will benefit from what we’re offering, and it will make sense to everybody, in this case, culturally, but also with a financial exchange that allows us to make a living. And I’m determined, once I’ve decided it’s going to work, it’s going to work, and I make it work. And that’s been the case three times in a row.
Overcoming Fear and Gaining Control in Business
[00:05:56] Brett Ingram: You know, I think, you know, two really important things that you just shared there. One is the fact that, you know, you started with something where you were filling a need and that you were solving a problem. I think sometimes in business, people sort of get the equation backward. They think about, like, how can I make money and then go look for something? And if it’s not something that’s born out of passion and born out of something that really does fill a need, it’s always going to be more of a struggle. And the other thing is, I love the fact that you said, when I make up my mind to do it, I’m determined to do it, because oftentimes, I think, as human nature, we always want an exit plan. We always want a Plan B. We always want a way out if what we’re trying doesn’t work. And while that seems comforting in some ways, in other ways, I think it actually sometimes hurts us, because if we don’t think of ourselves as we’ve got to make this work, then we can give up too easily. And say, well, you know, it didn’t get instant traction, so if you knew you had to make it work, you’d have a different perspective.
[00:07:03] Brett Ingram: So that’s, that’s really great that, you know, you, you had sort of those two inherent qualities just to begin with.
[00:07:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Well, there’s a French word for that. It’s la niac. And it’s having, it’s not drive in the American sense. It’s having enthusiasm and desire for things to work out. So it’s not pushy, it’s an inner power that makes you get up every morning and think, I’m going to do this, I’m going to make things happen today. I’m not going to push people out of the way. I’m not going to be difficult with anybody.
[00:07:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m just going to move forward with what I’m doing. And I think, for me, that’s always been the focus, is, what do I want to achieve? How am I going to get there without hurting anybody? To actually bring value to the world? And if you look at the music group, it was bringing value. It was bringing what I consider to be great music to people to help them have a good time. And I’ve had people reach out to me in the last few years saying, I remember that from my youth. It was brilliant. Then Boowa and Kwala was the cartoon we made with my ex-wife. It was valuable content for children to help them understand a complicated, difficult world that frightened them. And it wasn’t speaking down to them, it was saying, here’s the world, here’s how it works.
[00:08:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We’re here to support you and help you and teach you and bring you into a world that you are afraid of. That actually is a lot of fun. And you don’t need to be afraid once you’ve understood what’s going on. At the end of the day, with Kalicube, that’s also what we’re doing. We’re saying your brand, personal brand or corporate brand out there is at the mercy of Google and the AI algorithms, like ChatGPT. You don’t need to be afraid. We can give you back control. You want control.
[00:08:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Kalicube Process, which is our way of doing this, gives you back control. You don’t need to be worried. You don’t need to be scared. It’s all actually very simple. Let us help you. Let us explain it.
The Journey Behind Boowa and Kwala’s Impact
[00:08:54] Brett Ingram: Yeah, and I definitely want to dive into that. I was fascinated by your personal backgrounds. You were the voiceover of the cartoon also, which I just think is, I mean, it’s awesome to have done all those different things.
[00:09:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I saw a tweet this morning from somebody who tweeted out an illustration they’d done of the two characters, Boowa and Kwala, a blue dog and a yellow koala. And said, I drew this because I was thinking about them this morning. They’re from my childhood. It was brilliant. And then somebody else retweeted it saying, I remember them as well. Somebody else answered it saying, I love this stuff. It was brilliant. So I answered them and said, yeah, that was what we wanted. It was great.
[00:09:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And they said, well, thank you so much for creating the content. And that brings a warm glow to my heart, and that comes down to the passion you were talking about with the music and with the cartoons. Doing this, doing or creating a business for a passion and driving that passion forwards and making a difference to the world has always been super important to me. And I was thinking about something earlier on is not giving up.
[00:09:50] Brett Ingram: Yeah.
[00:09:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): About three years in, we were struggling for money. Really struggling. And I started partnering with somebody who said, okay, let’s set it up this way. We worked together for six months setting up a subscription system. So it was a freemium. Before freemium was a thing. The kids could visit the site for free, but there were ads. If they didn’t, if the parents thought, we don’t want the ads, we want our child to be in a safe environment, we then opened up a full screen.
[00:10:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It was like a CD ROM online, but they had to pay a subscription fee to make up for the fact we weren’t getting money from the ads. And very few people signed up. We thought everybody would go for it because parents would always say, I don’t want ads for my kids. You say, okay, great. In that case, pay a subscription, and that’s fine, but you can choose. And the response we got to the questionnaire we sent out was, 10% of parents said they would pay.
[00:10:44] Brett Ingram: Wow.
[00:10:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So we built a whole plan out based on that, which was really foolish. The actual end result after six months was 0.1%.
[00:10:55] Brett Ingram: Amazing.
[00:10:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the person I was working with just said, I’m giving up. And my reaction was, okay, that didn’t work. What do we do to get from 0.1% to 10% from here on in? And three or four years later, we got there.
Shaping Google’s Understanding of You and Your Business
[00:11:10] Brett Ingram: Brilliant. Yeah. And that’s the thing. There’s always another way if you really look at it. So, let’s talk a little bit more about Google and about the business side of things. So, what made you want to figure out how to dominate Google if you want to use that as a term or sort of bend Google to your will in the first place?
[00:11:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, I like the second one better. What I’m doing is bending Google to my will. I don’t dominate Google in the sense that my company and myself don’t appear on Google for searches. Like, how do I make more money? Or how do I buy red shoes? Or how do I buy a red shirt, for that matter? What we do is change Google’s perception of myself and my company so that it understands who we are, what we do, and who we serve. And that’s fundamental to in the future, well, right now, being presented by Google in the way we want. But in the future, with Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and the other conversational engines being introduced to the conversation by the machine. And what I’ll explain there is when you’re using ChatGPT, you’re having a conversation with the machine. That machine is educating itself on the outside world online.
[00:12:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So whatever it finds online, it’s going to be potentially able to communicate it to the person having a conversation with it.
[00:12:34] Brett Ingram: Right.
[00:12:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But it’s only going to introduce the things that it’s confident it’s understood and it believes are credible.
[00:12:41] Brett Ingram: Okay.
[00:12:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if it doesn’t understand you and it doesn’t think you’re a credible solution and a credible source, it will not include you in the conversation it’s having with its user. So if you want to be part of the conversation between these assistive engines, we call them AI assistive engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google’s AI Overview, Bing Copilot, today and in the future, you need to make sure that they understand who you are, what you do and who you serve, that you’re a credible solution. And you need to provide them with the content, the material, to be able to actually say something about you.
Google as Your Digital Business Card
[00:13:19] Brett Ingram: That’s really interesting. So I’ve actually never, I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of people that do search engine optimization and things like that, and that’s probably the first time I’ve ever heard it articulated in that particular way. So I’m curious. I’ve heard you talk about making Google our business card. What exactly does that mean and how do we do that?
[00:13:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Great question. Brilliant segue, because that’s where it all starts. At Kalicube, The Kalicube Process is understandability, credibility, deliverability. That’s it. Simple as that. And the Google business card is understandability. It’s also credibility and deliverability.
[00:14:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But we’ll start with understandability. If you search your personal name or your corporate name, what does Google show? Does it show accurately who you are, what you do, which audience you serve? If it does, then it’s understood you. Now, the Google business card part is when your audience does the same thing, they then see an accurate representation of you, so they understand you too, because the machine is simply an interface between your audience and you. And you need that machine to say what you would have said to the audience if you were standing in front of them like I did in the music group many, many years ago. So I’m using Google as an alternative to getting in the van with my bandmates and traveling all the way to see people.
Building Your Brand’s Digital Identity with Google’s Trust and Visibility
[00:14:52] Brett Ingram: So, yeah, so that’s really interesting. So how do we go about doing that? Okay, so I know from my own limited SEO experience, if I have a website or if I want to build a personal brand or whatever, I’m supposed to do keyword research, find the keywords that I want to rank for, and then I’m supposed to optimize my pages and my content when it’s online. So search engines will find that, pick it up and connect those dots. Is that the same approach that you use, or is there something different about inherently the way that we should do that?
[00:15:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, the foundation of techniques is the same, or very similar, at least. What you’re actually trying to achieve is different and the ultimate aim is the same. So the ultimate aim of SEO is find the keywords people are searching for and get to the top of the results. Simple as that. All you’re saying there is, I want Google to recommend me to the subset of its users who are my audience. Simple as that. What I’m saying is today, increasingly, and in the future, certainly, if it doesn’t understand who you are, believe you’re credible and have the content to deliver, it cannot recommend you as the best solution to the subset of its users who are your audience, which is why you can’t just create the content, you need to start with make sure it understands me. If it understands who I am, it will be able to introduce me to the subset of its users who are my audience.
[00:16:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Introduce me to the conversations it’s having today and in the future. So that Google business card, that search result for your brand name, is the foundation. If you don’t do that, nothing else will work in the future. If you don’t have that, you’re not even in the game anymore. And the technique for doing it starts with the website. And you said website in SEO, and people in SEO will just obsess about the website all the time. That’s just the starting point. It’s the first 5%.
[00:16:51] Brett Ingram: Okay.
[00:16:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You just need to make sure Google understands that that website is you, so that when you communicate on that website, it understands that it’s you saying it. To do that, you need all of the other websites that you’re present on LinkedIn, YouTube, forbes.com, your local association website, to link to that focal website, what we call the entity home, to indicate to Google this is all the same person or the same corporation.
[00:17:19] Brett Ingram: Okay.
[00:17:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you can do that, Google will understand and it will look to you for information about yourself. And because you’ve gone around, I hope and made sure that everything on all of those sources corroborates, confirms what you’re saying on your entity home, the website, Google will believe you, at which point, you have a child sitting in your hand. And like with Boowa and Kwala, you can teach it anything you want, which is where we can basically bend Google to our will. Because Google sees my website, anything I say there, it believes, because I’ve got it to trust me. So that’s the second part. I’ve got it to understand me, and now I’ve got it to trust me, and that’s taken me years, but it trusts me totally. I can say anything about myself, and it will say that straight back out to its users.
Finding the Right Balance Between Consistency and Adaptation Across Platforms
[00:18:11] Brett Ingram: That’s amazing. So does that start with making sure we have a congruent description or message or whatever on all those different platforms, make sure that title is the same or description is the same? Or should they all sort of connect together to build a full portrait? Is it more important to have everything be uniform and the same, or sort of incrementally different to build it together?
[00:18:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If it’s all the same everywhere, Google will find it much easier to understand, like a child, if they hear the same message from their teacher, the same message from the parent, the same message from the sister, the same message from the restaurant owner down the road. If it’s exactly the same message, they’ll go, okay, right, I’ve got it. Everybody confirms that. So it must be true if the message is slightly different from each of them, but it all comes down to the same thing. Or it’s partially told by the restaurateur and partly told by the grandmother and partly told by myself. Or it should always, sorry. Be fully told by myself. The child can put it all together, but you can understand.
[00:19:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You see the child going, I’m trying to put it all together, but I’m not 100% sure, so I lack confidence. And that’s the balance you need to play. The more repetition, the better it will understand. The more confident it will be. The less repetition, the more doubtful it will be about the conclusions it’s drawn. But remember that you have a human audience who are the ultimate goal. So if you repeat yourself across every single platform, number one, they get bored. Although repetition is good for people too.
[00:19:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But more than anything, the message you want to push out on YouTube is not quite the same as the message you want to push out on LinkedIn. And it isn’t the same as the message you want to push out on Crunchbase or on your own website, which is bottom of funnel. So you need to adapt and you need to find that balance. And that’s one of the specialist skills we have at Kalicube, is to understand how much of the message needs to be completely repeated and how much of the message can be adapted according to the audiences we’re trying to address. And I always like to come back to the fact that although we’re bending Google to our will, we only do that by acting in the way that makes sense to the audience on the different platforms we’re communicating with them on. And all Google is then doing is seeing it, understanding it, digesting it, reflecting it. So Google is simply a conduit and a representation of how well we’re engaging with our audience. So the audience is primary focus.
[00:20:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You can’t educate Google without walking the walk.
Leveraging AI to Optimize Your Personal Brand’s Visibility
[00:20:52] Brett Ingram: Yeah, and that’s the point I was going to follow up with, and you hit it on the head, is that obviously the different platforms, if you read how to build a successful YouTube channel or how to build a successful LinkedIn profile, obviously they are a little bit different. So that’s an interesting sort of line you have to walk in terms of having enough consistency and uniformity in messaging, yet at the same time tailored enough that you’re going to attract the right human people when you’re there. Because ultimately, as you said, while it’s great to have the machine telling people, hey, you should go here, if then the messaging doesn’t make sense to the people, you’re not going to achieve your ultimate goal anyway. So I’m curious where you see AI fitting into this. So AI now obviously is everywhere. And as we move further into the future, there’s always talk about, well, will search engines even exist? Will everyone just be asking AI instead? So how does this all play into that? If I, let’s say that I was building a brand, personal or otherwise, and I’ve got myself connected with whatever keywords I want and Google’s happy about me, does that automatically mean I’m going to be safe in the world of AI, or are there things that I need to do that are different in order to make that work for me as well, or to protect myself?
[00:22:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Which is a lovely question. The foundation there is, if Google understands, the AI will understand, but the keyword there is understand. And if you remember, we start with understandability, then credibility and then deliverability, which is the keywords and content you were talking about. So if you’ve only got deliverability, you’ll survive today, but you’re going to die out tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if search disappears from our perspective because they all work the same way. Understandability, credibility, deliverability is what it’s all about. If these AI machines understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, they believe you’re a credible solution for the subset of their users who are your audience, with whom they’re having a conversation. And you give them the content that’s relevant and helpful to that audience, they will introduce you to the conversation. They will recommend you as the person comes down the funnel, and they will say to the person, if you have to choose one, choose Jason Barnard, choose Kalicube and not the others.
Understanding the Purpose Behind Technology and Using Data to Drive Results
[00:23:20] Brett Ingram: Very cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it is important to understand. Sometimes I think that obviously when we’re dealing with technology, sometimes I think people overcomplicate. There’s a tendency to think it’s this black box and it’s all mysterious. We have to push all these buttons, but sometimes the message or the whole point of it is lost in the idea of the mechanics. Well, I know I need to do this and I need to do step one and step two and step three. I don’t really know why I’m doing it, but I was told that I need to do these things, so I do them instead of, this is the purpose I’m going after to begin with, and let’s figure out how to make that, you know, the end goal.
[00:24:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. No, no, no. You talk about black box, and I’ve been talking about this for years and I kind of not really talked about it so much recently, but it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the black box. Nobody knows what’s going on in the black box. Google engineers who built the machine, ChatGPT engineers, don’t know what the machine is thinking. Fact and scary, but that’s the way it is and we’re not going to change it. The key is to think, what do I need to put into this black box to get the result I want out of the black box, which is it is going to recommend me to the subset of its users who are my audience when I can help them. It’s an interface between me and the users.
[00:24:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then, the way to do that is to have a strategy, understandability, credibility, deliverability, and measure the output, which is what we do at Kalicube for our clients. We have 2 billion data points measuring these AI machines in Google to see what the effect of what we put in has on what’s coming out the other side. And when we see it improving, when we see the machines representing us more accurately, when we see they’re recommending us explicitly, we know the results are there. We know that what we’re putting in is working and we’ve done it with thousands, thousands of people and companies. And we know from experience, but we also can back it up with data and we can check it along the way with data. So it doesn’t matter what the black box does. I have a lot of good ideas about how the black box is thinking and for me it’s a little child and I’m looking at the data we have and I’m figuring out how it’s thinking. So it helps me to evolve our strategies. But I don’t know if I’m right until we see the changes come out the other side and we measure them with our 2 billion data points.
The Power of Machines as Influencers in Personal Branding
[00:25:46] Brett Ingram: That’s a really great approach and I think it’s a really good way of thinking about it too. So we keep it, keep it simple, but also quantifiable and measurable, which is, I mean, obviously everything when you’re trying to do this kind of thing.
[00:26:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry, you said the word simple and what I love here is simple is the hardest thing to get to. And the understandability, credibility, deliverability, you say, wow, that makes sense. Got you. Brilliant. It’s taken me ten years to figure that out. Ten years ago, when I started, I was explaining all the little details, everything that was going on, and now I realize it doesn’t matter what’s in my black box at Kalicube and in my brain. What matters to you is what do I need to do to get the result where these machines understand me and recommend me as the best solution to the problem their users are having when I can actually help that user. How can I make that machine the most powerful influencer in the world for me? They’re influencers.
[00:26:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): People use them because they trust them. They’re having micro niche conversations, billions of them every day. And people are explicitly saying to the machine, what do you recommend? You want that machine to answer as an influencer, I recommend Jason Barnard. I recommend Kalicube. Or recommend Brett, depending on what you’re trying to do.
Jason Barnard’s Advice for CEOs on Evolving Through One-on-One Coaching and Emotional Clarity
[00:27:05] Brett Ingram: Right, yeah, no, I mean, it’s again, a great way to look at it. And I think what you said there makes a lot of sense. I think the complication part is sort of the default and our starting point. And when we get to that level of clarity and simplicity that’s when you know you’ve sort of evolved and gotten to that point. So I know as CEO, you know, as a business owner and CEO, you feel as though obviously you’ve evolved and upskilled over time. What advice can you give to other CEOs or business owners out there and how to do that?
[00:27:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Invest. Invest in yourself. And that sounds like this terribly trite thing that everybody says, but I’m actually going to give you some practical advice. I’ve been in groups, masterminds. They’re great. It’s a support network. It isn’t the way you’re going to get yourself to a place where you’re going to manage your company better. What does do that is one on one training from really smart people.
[00:28:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’ve had three different coaches. A guy called Mads Singers, who’s very pragmatic. He says, this is how you manage teams, this is how you delegate, this is how you set things up. A guy called Stephen Lock, who came in and said, this is how you need to relate to people. This is the philosophical approach to what your relationship is with them and what your relationship is with your company. And a guy called Itamar who comes in with a psychological approach and says, every morning, Jason, you get up and you think, I need to achieve more. What do you do? You put your foot on the accelerator and you try harder. You do more, you stay up longer. Wouldn’t it be a better solution to take the handbrake off? Don’t press the accelerator when you’re sitting in your car.
[00:28:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Take the handbrake off. It’s going to be much more effective. And what he means by taking the handbrake off is identify which emotions are getting in the way of you doing what you’re supposed to do, what you should do for the company. Put them to one side and make the decision, the pragmatic decision that makes sense to your company without the emotional baggage. Obviously, the emotions stay, but if you can identify them, put them to one side, you can make the right decision at the right time for your company. And that combination is what’s made the difference to me. And it’s a combination of three people, one-on-one training, because they focus on my specific issues, my specific problems. In that last case, my specifical, specific, sorry, emotional baggage that’s stopping me being the best CEO I can be.
Insights on Mentorship, Delegation, and Patience from Brett Ingram and Jason Barnard
[00:29:35] Brett Ingram: That’s great advice. One of the reasons I actually started my podcast is because my journey, I didn’t really have a mentor. I didn’t have anybody that I worked with one on one and was able to share with me the secrets or some of the breakthroughs that I would have needed. I saw coaching programs and I saw advice from various people, and I’ve learned nuggets along the way, but it was all sort of accidental and anecdotal as opposed to deliberate and purposeful. And so I think that you hit the nail on the head with that in terms of that is how you do it on purpose, as opposed to sort of fumbling your way around until you eventually get there.
[00:30:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, there’s a couple of things there. Number one is I wouldn’t either say it’s either or. I think your podcast is a support mechanism. A group mastermind is a support mechanism with potential relationships with real human beings with whom you might be able to do business or might introduce somebody who can do business, which is the point of a mastermind along the way. And then the personal training is the one where you sit down and identify the specifics that you need to work on. And I think the three go hand in hand and that you need all three. The second point is, of course, somebody who’s coaching you or being your personal mentor isn’t there all the time. You’re living with yourself day in, day out, and you need to deal with it day in, day out and recognize situations.
[00:31:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the support of a group or a podcast like this is hugely important. And the other thing I would advise people is give yourself time to digest and truly understand and truly integrate new ideas, because somebody says to you, you need to be more decisive and have those difficult conversations early on. Yeah, get it. Fine, brilliant. I won’t do that for the first month. But little by little, it becomes more and more meaningful to me, and it happens over a period of time. So be patient with yourself and do things when you’re ready to do them and not when you’re told to do them. Another example is delegation. You know, two years ago, somebody said to me, delegate. Mads Singer said, delegate, you go, okay, brilliant.
[00:32:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The idea is good, and you start delegating and it all goes horribly wrong. And there were a couple of reasons for that. Number one is you’re not delegating correctly. You’re still keeping your fingers in the pie, as it were. Number two, maybe the people aren’t ready, and maybe emotionally you’re not ready to let go. And for me, literally two years later, I’ve now got to the point where emotionally I’m truly able to let go. And that’s when delegation becomes hugely powerful. So I started two years ago and I had to be patient.
[00:32:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I didn’t know at the time, for two years, to get to the point where it was truly working, the way it should be working.
The Importance of Patience and Belief in Overcoming Challenges
[00:32:35] Brett Ingram: Yeah. I mean, it can take time, obviously, to learn new skills, but I think the important message in there also is that we have to give ourselves a break sometimes. Everything is in today’s society world is speed, speed, speed, faster, faster, faster. And we’re overwhelmed by things all the time. And I think, the more that we try to keep heaping onto the plate, the more overwhelmed we get and the more discouraged we get. And I think if we give ourselves time to understand, you know, I’ve gone through that same evolution myself where I’ve known I’ve needed to do something and I’ve had the intention of doing it, but it took me a little bit to get to a point where I internalized it, to a point where I now it just became part of what I was doing. And same thing. I mean, I would try something, it didn’t go very well.
[00:33:30] Brett Ingram: And it’s not that I gave up, but I had to table it for a little bit, get back to it and come back around to it. And I developed a different relationship with that very thing just by trying it in different ways until I could find the way that it would work for me. So I think being patient with ourselves, giving ourselves enough breathing room and slack to be able to do that kind of thing, is vitally important also.
[00:33:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you know, Alex Sanfilippo, who runs PodMatch, who’s a huge, huge, huge person for me personally, talks about believing the process. And it’s so easy to see the process is going to move you forwards in this kind of jumpy line. And it’s scary and it’s difficult, and sometimes it’s on the way down. You think it’s all going horribly wrong, and sitting there and thinking, I have to believe in the process or I shouldn’t be here in the first place as an entrepreneur. I have a process, I have an idea, and I have a goal, and I have to believe that I’m going to go from here to here. The process is going to be messy and difficult, but the process is there. And I believe 100% that it’s the right process. And if you believe in the process, those down moments are less scary.
Kalicube’s Simple Yet Effective Solutions for Digital Marketing
[00:34:38] Brett Ingram: Yeah, precisely. So let’s talk about how you can help entrepreneurs. What programs, products, services do you offer and where can we find them?
[00:34:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, we’ve actually just finished a free download. The Kalicube Process has solved Digital Marketing and you can go to kalicube.com K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E .com/guides and you can download it there. And in the download, we explain The Kalicube Process that I’ve explained today, understandability, credibility, deliverability, in much more detail, what it can do for you, how it works, how you can implement it. From there, If you really get enthusiastic, think, okay, great, I want to learn the nitty gritty. We have a book, The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business. We have two courses on the Kalicube Academy, and if you understand that this is hugely important and you have the means to invest in a data-driven approach to the Kalicube Process designed by Kalicube itself, you can come to us and we’ll do it for you. So it’s a whole process that now I iterate it like that. And we literally finished yesterday morning.
[00:35:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It was in truth. The PDF that pushes people or explains the process, explains what they can do philosophically and practically, to the nitty gritty detail in the book and the courses, to the sit back. Let us do it. We know what we’re doing. We’ve got the data, we’ve got the experience, and we’ll take the weight off your shoulders. Invest in Kalicube services.
Consistency, Patience, and Trusting the Process
[00:36:02] Brett Ingram: So this is literally hot off the presses because it just finished. Excellent. So the last question that I always ask is, what’s your number one tip for success as a business owner or an entrepreneur?
[00:36:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I suppose actually it’s going to be Alex’s, which is trust the process, because those down moments can scuttle the whole thing. And you can give up. As you said earlier on, you just give up. You think it’s not working. And if you truly understand where you are, where you want to be, you have a clear process in your mind of how you’re going to get there. It’s going to be that wiggly line, and that wiggly line is fine, it’s normal, it’s how things work. But if you trust the process, you get up every morning thinking, I have the right destination in mind. I have the process in my mind, and I’m 100%, supremely confident that process is right.
[00:36:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Life is going to be much, much easier and you’ll almost certainly succeed. And kind of with that. I’ve had three companies, 66 years combined existence, 66 years of profitability, and all three of them have taken at least four years to take off. And all of them had the same process ingrained at the end as they did at the start.
[00:37:19] Brett Ingram: Yeah, I mean, you know, that’s great that you had the conviction to stick with that. I mean, I don’t remember who said it, but somebody said, yes, I’m an overnight success 20 years in the making. That’s essentially what it is. You have to understand that if it’s a labor of love and you’re passionate about what you’re doing and you have the conviction to stick with it, because let’s face it, not a lot of value or valuable things come in life without a struggle or without some effort that has to go into it. That’s part of what makes us appreciate it in the first place. So great advice. So with that, it’s just about time to wrap things up. I want to thank you again, Jason, so much for sharing all your insights and great tips with us.
[00:38:06] Brett Ingram: Visit kalicube.com/guides to download one of his free practical PDF books and get started on your digital brand optimization journey. Thanks for tuning in. And as always, remember, no matter what you want for your business and your life, don’t compromise, optYOUmize.
