SHOWNOTES
Today, we’re talking about building a secret society.
I know…you’re probably thinking “that's a weird topic”...
…but when Michael F. Schein ( Head Hype Man at MicroFame Media, and author of the “Hype Handbook”) emailed me and shared that he had been exploring secret societies as a way of building relationships and scaling business, I knew I wanted to hear more. I mean, if you put “secret” in front of something, doesn't it kind of force you to want to know more???
So I took the bait and I'm so glad I did. Mike shares some really compelling things with us:
✔️ How he conducted an experiment of creating a secret society, and his surprising results
✔️What the difference is between building a secret society and networking
✔️ How to select the people for your own secret society
✔️ Why you might want to consider starting a secret society of your own.
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. If you have any questions about this episode, comment below or DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
RESOURCES
[00:01.630] - Gary Vee Hey, guys. It's Gary Vaynerchuck, and you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:09.890] - Jen Lehner My guest today is the Head Hype Man at MicroFame Media, a company that specializes in making consultants and coaches famous in their fields. Some of his clients have included eBay, Magento, the Medici Group, University of Pennsylvania, Gordon College, University of California Irvine, LinkedIn and Citrix. His writing has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Inc., Psychology Today, and The Huffington Post, and he's a speaker for international audiences spanning from the northeastern United States to the southeastern coast of China. His book The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets From the World's Greatest Propagandist, Self Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers, published by McGraw Hill, appears where books are sold. He's also appeared on this podcast before, and I am delighted to welcome him back today. Hello, Michael F. Schein.
[01:12.490] - Michael F. Schein Hey, Jen. It is so great to be here. I had so much fun last time, so I'm excited for this.
Read more...
[01:17.400] - Jen Lehner Yeah, me too. And I'm so intrigued. When you and I were chatting about Secret Society, I was like, I don't know what you're talking about, but I know this is something that I want to know about because just the phrase Secret Society is so juicy and so provocative that you completely lured me in. And I didn't ask you much more about it because I wanted to save it for the show. So I wanted to unpack all of this on the show. So thanks for coming. And first of all, what do you mean Secret Society? Is this tied in with networking? What's the difference?
[01:51.650] - Michael F. Schein So, first of all, it feels like I have you right where I want you. That was exactly the effect that I'm trying to go for, though. I wrote the Hype Handbook, as you mentioned, which was a book that came out about two years ago, and one of the chapters is called "Build a Secret Society". So the book is broken down into twelve what I call Hype strategies. It's these strategies based on mass psychology that people who have always known how to build big audiences for themselves and get a lot of emotion and attention generated around their stuff know how to master. And as I said, the second chapter was called Build a Secret Society, and it was sort of named in a tongue-in-cheek way. I didn't really mean create a real secret society. What I meant was sort of a hyper-nuclear form of networking where the people who are really good at creating big audiences and big markets make it seem like all of their success is grassroots, but actually have people behind the scenes to pull the strings. That being said, once the book was published, I got a lot of questions about that chapter, probably more than any other chapter except for the chapter called Make War, Not Love.
[03:13.950] - Michael F. Schein And I realized that it might be interesting to take a look at real secret societies because that term appealed to me for a reason. I think so many people, including myself, are really fascinated by actual secret societies, right? Like the Freemasons, the Illuminati, some of these college groups like Skull and Bones. So I did what I do and I started to research, and what I found was so fascinating, things that you wouldn't expect about the dynamics that make these groups so much a part of our imaginations and so everlasting that I created my own. And it's been a success on a lot of levels, so it's been kind of an interesting turn of events.
[04:00.750] - Jen Lehner Okay, so are Hells Angels a secret society?
[04:06.090] - Michael F. Schein That's a great question. I don't know. I don't know the ins and outs of them, just based on what I do know, I think that they have a lot of the attributes of a secret society, but I think they lack some attributes, too. They seem like more of a gang, right?
[04:23.910] - Jen Lehner Yeah, they are. They're definitely more of a gang.
[04:26.100] - Michael F. Schein Yeah. But gangs in secret societies have a lot of similarities. So ritual is a big part of a secret society. And I know that for gangs, I think this includes the Hells Angels, certainly the street level gangs like the Crypts and the Blood, because I have looked into this a little bit. They have initiations that you have to do, but they usually include violence, right? Like randomly picking someone out and punching them in the face, right.
[04:56.500] - Jen Lehner Like a fraternity.
[04:57.690] - Michael F. Schein Yeah. Right. And fraternities started societies that we're talking about are actually technically called fraternal organization. So that was the original vision of a fraternity. It's changed a lot over the years.
[05:10.470] - Jen Lehner You mentioned Illuminati when you were given examples. Isn't that fake? I mean, isn't that something other people are saying exist, but it doesn't really isn't that the one where there's like, what do they call them? Like dragon people or I don't know.
[05:23.940] - Michael F. Schein You'll never know, will you? It's funny. I did some research on this, okay? So it is kind of fake now. It was something that existed at one point. There was a group called the Illuminati that was a spin off from the Freemasons, which is kind of the secret society ground zero. And it did exist, and it did have power for a brief time, and the powers that be dismantled them and basically made it so that they couldn't exist. But it so captured the imagination of the public that there are a lot of conspiracy theories about it still existing. But what's so interesting about all of these things, right? The reason we're so attracted to stories about the Illuminati is because we think that they have these secrets that are really important and really powerful to the extent that these very powerful people are protecting these secrets. And it's these secrets which allow them to gain all this power. And so what I found that was so fascinating was at the core of why I decided to do this for myself and go beyond just research, was because we do know what goes on behind the scenes.
[06:33.450] - Michael F. Schein So in the case of the Freemasons in the 18th century, I believe don't quote me on that one gentleman was captured, an English guy, when he was in Italy by the Catholic Church, which was still very powerful there. And they tortured him because they were very antimisottic. And so they have in the Vatican all of the rituals that actually goes on behind the scenes. And what's so counterintuitive about all of this is that once you get past all of the rituals, you kneel down, you promise to tear your tongue out of your throat. And it's very ritualized language. If you give up the secrets, you wear an apron. You use symbolism. The secret is something like be good to your fellow man. And they do use the term man. It is all male. So the secret is meaningless. It is completely useless. It's the secrecy that is important. The whole point of having these secrets is it because it allows a bunch of people who are paying dues to get together and bond over this ritualistic thing. And it also creates a sense of exclusivity. It's the same reason that when they're building a new Mormon temple, not a Mormon church, but a Mormon temple, no one but Mormons are allowed to go in after it's consecrated.
[07:51.060] - Michael F. Schein But before that, people will drive from five states around to see what's inside this Mormon temple just because they know that they won't be allowed to afterwards, which makes it feel very magical. Right. So the people who created these things were really good amateur psychologists, and they figured out that if we create an air of secrecy and an air of ritual and an air of exclusivity, we can turn a drinking club into something that allows people to bond together and really make things happen for each other. So a Freemason will do anything for a Freemason. And we see this with fraternities. Right?
[08:24.030] - Jen Lehner And Sororities.
[08:25.010] - Michael F. Schein And sororities, I mean, they've become very goofy over the years. Forgiveness to anyone who's in one, but with all the beer funnels and the spring break and the shirtless Hamptons but at the core of it is this idea that you go through this kind of ritual together and it bonds you in a way that nothing else can. Right?
[08:45.630] - Jen Lehner Okay. So what have you learned? Like, how does this tie into business?
[08:51.930] - Michael F. Schein I do a lot of experiments. I guess you can say that what I do for a living fits in the general category of marketing and that I work with companies and some people to generate a lot of attention around what they do in order for them to accomplish their goals, which is usually sales. And in that world, and in the business world in general, especially the business-to-business world, people do what you refer to as networking. They go to cocktail events, but they start mastermind groups, they join networking associations, they go to conferences, and there's some enjoyment that happens in this and that. You find people that might become friends, but really it's a business activity. For all of the stuff that people say about, I do this because I like to help, I like to put good out into the universe. Yeah, some of that's true, but if you didn't have a business imperative for doing all of this stuff, you'd be home with your family or you'd be doing your hotties, right? So people feel that by networking, they're forming the kind of plan around themselves that's going to help them accelerate their goals and make sales.
[10:04.520] - Michael F. Schein The problem with that, while it is useful and I've done it, it's a chore, right? I mean, there's no magic around it at all. You go because it's something you need to do for work. Maybe you have a few drinks, which is a little bit fun, but it's another work task. So if you're going to the Sheet Metal Association mastermind group, you're doing it because it's a work task. And yeah, I know we all love our work, et cetera, et cetera, but it's work, right? That being said, people used to go to these secret societies after World War II and before sort of the rise of the baby boomers. Everyone was part of one of these groups, right? The Elks, the Shriners, and they were all off the shoots of the Freemasons. And it was fun for people. It was the center of their social life. They wore funny costumes and funny hats and all of this stuff. But so much business get that done. They didn't need to network, right, because they paid dues. They worked with these people. So I said, why don't they take a page out of their book? Why don't I try to create instead of doing another networking event or what have you, why don't I try to create my own little secret society as an experiment?
[11:14.250] - Michael F. Schein So I created this email, just started with an email. So I have an email list that's pretty large and most of the people on it are just people, right? But because it's large and because I had a book that was published with McGraw Hill, some of the people are people whose names you'd recognize, right? And that's for no other reason than that. It's a popular and a large list. So I went through the list and I found those people, those really prominent people, just a few of them, and I sent out this sort of really exalted sounding email that had some graphics in it that said, basically, we'd like to extend an invitation to the Ludic circle. Now, all that means is the magic circle. But if you throw a little bit of Latin in there that makes things seem exalted and sad. And I use kind of this playful language, right? I used ritualistic language and kind of with a wink and a nod and I didn't know what would happen. And it turns out a lot of people in this little small circle said, oh, that seems really cool. I'm honored. I'd love to.
[12:15.890] - Michael F. Schein And the thing didn't even exist before I sent it out, right. Which is common. Nothing exists before it exists. So I started kind of running slowly at first, these meetings and we don't tell anyone who's in it, it's invite only. And people started really enjoying it. People who took part in it really sort of business got done both for me and other people, but also it became something that people really had fun with and they liked the secrecy, they liked the exclusivity. So it was just a neat experiment both for our business and for me and also as a model for things we might do with clients in the future and maybe that all right about I'm thinking there could be a book in this.
[13:02.070] - Jen Lehner OK, I have so many questions. Okay, so first of all but did you do a ritual or can you not tell me?
[13:12.870] - Michael F. Schein I can tell you in general, but yeah, really we are taking seriously the idea that no one knows what goes on except for the people there.
[13:20.670] - Jen Lehner Fight Club. What is the number one rule of Fight Club exactly? I really don't know. What was it? Didn't I watch the whole movie? It was like don't talk about Fight Club. Right. So then if you can't talk about it, how are you going to use it to hype yourself up? You know what I mean? If it's a secret.
[13:37.150] - Michael F. Schein Yeah. This part I did write about in chapter two of the book. The idea is that what hype artists do very well, almost every single one of them. And when I say hype artists, it's typically people who aren't professional marketers. They don't own a marketing agency, they don't call themselves marketers, but they're probably better than any actual marketer at generating a huge amount of attention for themselves and making things happen. What they all tend to do is they make it seem and I alluded to this before, but just to give some more detail, they make it seem like their home movement is being created by grassroots. Right? So they have some new book service products movement, whatever. And it just spontaneously because it's so good, hundreds, then thousands, and then millions of people just start magically finding it and becoming excited. And they do build some of that grassroots, but what they almost all do as well is behind the scenes they have people that they are very close with who have followings of their own, who accelerate the motion for them. So to give you an example that some of your listeners might be familiar with, there's this group of friends that includes Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, James Altucher, Tucker Max, right?
[15:07.270] - Michael F. Schein And they really are all friends. They're not just networking partners, but they're all in similar businesses. They're all writers. They're all sort of they sell kind of information type products and services. So when Tucker Max shifted his career from being basically a guy who wrote about his antics picking up women and drinking to someone who created essentially a publishing company, he talked to all of those people. He talked to Ryan Holiday, he talked to James Altucher, he talked to all these people. They all have big podcasts, big mailing list, big followings, a lot of dedication. And he said, hey, do me a solid and tell everyone about it. And they all did in a one month period. And he didn't announce that. He just said, hey, we're buddies. Make it happen. So they did a million in revenue in the first month without him having any track record in that. So that's the idea. It's a network of string pullers, right? So all of the remember, the purpose of the secrecy is the secrecy, the ritual. This is something I will talk about. The ritual is there for the sake of being ritualistic, right? I mean, there's no great secret underneath it all spoiler alert.
[16:17.300] - Michael F. Schein But because we're all having fun with this and because we're all keeping it secret, I can assure you, the next time a member has a new business venture and they go to these prominent people, they don't have to come with hat in hand or offer to pay them a percentage. They'll spread the word because they're a fellow Ludic Circle member.
[16:37.570] - Jen Lehner Okay? So the idea of the Oprah effect or just having someone who has a much larger following than you being able to amplify your reach and shorten the path to, you know, mega success is like that's like nothing new, right? And even with, like, I think Amy Porterfield and James Wedmore, who all of my listeners know who they are, I believe and they can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Amy had the association with Tony Robbins. But it wasn't Tony that helped her with her business. She had that as sort of like a feather in her cap, right? But I believe I don't know if she was working with Louis House or friendly with him, but I think she and James were both sort of in his little mastermind in his world, and he put them on a webinar, and they just completely hit the stratosphere, and it was out of nowhere, like, bam. Not that they didn't work like crazy. I'm not saying that. But what I love about what you're doing is that this whole secret society thing that is just getting me so hyped up over here is that this appeals to the part of us doesn't matter how famous we are, we want to be a part of something.
[17:55.220] - Jen Lehner And we want to be connected to people in a meaningful way. And it's not since college, those days when you kind of have the time to explore the clubs and all of those sorts of things. And even as young parents, I would say there's an opportunity sometimes to be in play groups. We form friendships at those stages of our lives professionally. And this is my next question, and then I'll finish this up. Do you charge for them to be in this group?
[18:25.680] - Michael F. Schein No.
[18:26.210] - Jen Lehner I didn't think so. The fact that I can join a Mastermind and pay, I can join lots of things and be part of a community and ultimately make friends there, and I can have this effect because I do. This happens for me and a lot of the Masterminds that I've joined. In fact, that's one of the major reasons for joining a lot of Masterminds is the relationships that you make and you get on each other's podcasts and yada, yada, yada. But this is altogether different because it's just special and there's an element of mystery and bond. It's really cool. Michael, I really like this.
[19:02.470] - Michael F. Schein And can I chime in with one other kind of dynamic that I think is at play with this? Because you were talking about some of these paid Mastermind groups.
[19:10.610] - Jen Lehner Yeah.
[19:11.650] - Michael F. Schein These groups are great. Right. I think of groups like the Genius Network, Joe Polish. What he did was really revolutionary, at least from a marketing point of view. Right. You pay a huge amount of money, but you're with Richard Branson sometimes. However, I can't take credit for this idea. There's this gentleman named Mike Michalowicz who is great, and he has a book called Get Different, which is a marketing book, one of the few ones that I like. And he talks about differentiation, attract and direct. And the idea is that it's not about tactics when you want to be a successful marketer, as I call it, hype artist, it's about when everyone is moving right, move left, but do it in a way that attracts people instead of repels them and then direct them to your sale. And what I think we do instead that seems so obvious, right? That should be Marketing 101. But I think what we do instead is we go with what we think is the tested path.
[20:13.960] - Michael F. Schein So Joe Polish or Amy Porterfield or whoever does one of these Mastermind groups, and so all of the other people following on their tails does a similar paid Mastermind group or joins a similar paid Mastermind group, thinking, well, if it was good enough for Amy Porterfield, it's good enough for me. The problem is, you're not Amy Porterfield, and she got there five or ten years before you did. So you're just getting swallowed up. Right? And if you've gotten a little bit of business from it, of course you have, but you're getting the niblets, you know, you're getting the leftovers. So what I'm talking about is doing something that plays on a lot of the same dynamics. But hey, everyone else is charging, we don't charge. Everyone else is being very businessy in their talk. I mean, listen to the language people use in these mastermind groups. We're here to serve, we give without expectation of return. Everyone says the same exact thing. And I've said it myself. So just as a general rule, whatever you're doing to play with this dynamic, conduct experiments, be playful. You have more to risk by doing what everyone else is doing then by trying something kind of weird.
[21:34.090] - Jen Lehner Okay? So in this group, when you're selecting members and you want to get you basically invited a bunch of A players, right, understanding that it might not really be worth it for them to be the smartest person in the room, right? And so I think getting the first person and it's secret. So you can't say to the second person, Seth Godin is joining us. You can't, can you? Right? Because it's a secret. Do you see what I'm saying?
[22:10.120] - Michael F. Schein I do.
[22:11.390] - Jen Lehner You're not going to get a superstar. You're going to have to have people who are, I guess, at the same place. Or do you.
[22:21.710] - Michael F. Schein You'd be surprised how much packaging can accomplish, right? So first of all, again, this was an experiment. I have a certain understanding because of what I do and the research I've done of mass psychology, but I never know if one given experiment is going to work. So when I did this, I thought kind of like how you thought. I was like, I'm expecting maybe no one to respond and that'll be fine. But they did. And I think what they were attracted to was the packaging was the fact that I used exalted language, that I used a certain exclusive type of graphic. Now, a few things helped with that. One is that I'm able to say once the first person, first one or two people said yes, I'm able to say, hey, we have this kind of person, we have X type of producer, et cetera, right? So we're able to stay without naming. So that's the first thing.
[23:20.700] - Michael F. Schein The second thing is I use whatever hard work I've done before as a starting place. I happen to know people, right? I still do, for example, regular dinners as well. And there's this guy I know, Vivek Towari, who's a very successful entertainment entrepreneur and Broadway producer. I knew him in my twenties when neither of us were anywhere doing anything near what we're doing now. And I've been inviting him to dinners, my regular dinners for years and he just is always busy. And the last one he was like, yeah, I'd love to come. Why? I don't know. You know, he likes me. He saw that I wrote a book, he noticed that other interesting people were coming.
[24:01.580] - Michael F. Schein So use the cache you have. I have written a book. I do own a business et cetera, et cetera. But you don't need to have done that. Use some arbitrage. Right. What is a skill set for an area that's impressive? Maybe in another field. That's not impressive in your field, right? Like maybe you've, I don't know, served in some technology organization that would be really impressive in a group of literary agents who have no knowledge of technology at all. Use that. Right. We have a story about yourself without lying the way you would in a resume. And that sort of packaging can go a long way. Used common interests. Right. I mean, I knew nobody when I got into what I do, and no one in my field.
[24:50.900] - Michael F. Schein I was in the contact center business. That's something I fell into, which is completely disconnected from what I do. So what I would do is I would use social media. I go on Twitter, which was what I used at the time before it became a Political Cesspool, and I would look for interesting people that I wanted to meet and wait until we had common non-business interests. So I like a lot of weird bands and so do a lot of middle-aged people who are successful. Right. So I would notice if they were into certain bands and I would bring that up and they'll talk to you in a minute because they get taken back to their childhood and it's not someone hitting them up for a favor for business. Right. So just kind of be a human being. Package yourself properly and conduct experiments and you'd be surprised.
[25:38.450] - Jen Lehner I really want to see the letter.
[25:42.530] - Michael F. Schein No.
[25:43.510] - Jen Lehner I know, but you do like a template of the letter because you're going to have to for your book anyway. Like a template of the letter, but it's not the letter. Like you substitute everything and make up something completely different just so the template is there.
[25:58.160] - Michael F. Schein So I'm going to pull the curtain back. I'm not sure what my next book is going to be yet again. I always conduct experiments, but one idea that I have that I think that's really a contender is I'm thinking of taking an A.J. Jacob's approach. So he's a guy I happen to know who is a pretty successful author. What he typically does is he lives according he's very well known for a book called The Year of Living Biblically, where he followed every law in the Bible. Don't mix your fibers, don't shave. It's a show, like kind of honestly how cookies some of these things are if you tried to take it literally. And then he wrote about it. Right. So I'm thinking I might take a journalistic approach like that, which is very different than my first book, where I actually create this thing and then without revealing the details to tell my story of how I did it and what it did. So that's one idea. The other idea is, yeah, I'm always putting out new modules for our business. Right? So we have a business where we basically turn companies into hype artists.
[27:07.690] - Michael F. Schein We set goals for them and then we work with them. They do a lot of the actual experimentation, but we arm them to do it. We build the experiments for them. We test the experiments until they're working. And so we're always building new modules and new templates. So this may be one of the templates I build. Actually, you just gave me that idea, so I might feel that. So I'll certainly show it to you once I do that.
[27:28.360] - Jen Lehner Okay. Yay. Okay. I love it. Also, let's talk about the Hype Handbook for a second. So, listeners, if you didn't hear the first interview with Michael, definitely I'll link to it in the show notes. We talk all about the Hype Handbook. It's really an outstanding book, and I think the name is good, but I think the name could also be misleading because and you're a guy, so people don't know you. I think it could be easy to think that this is like a bro marketer kind of book, and it is so not. It's very smart, it's very intellectual, it's very well researched. It's like such a great book. And in fact, I pulled it out before our interview again, of course, because I wanted to read the chapter about secret societies, and I was like, yeah, it's just reminding me this was such a great book. How has your business changed since you released it?
[28:17.500] - Michael F. Schein It's been really game-changing. So it was released in 2020, and as some of you may remember, that was kind of a strange year. Yeah. So it was released in the midst of the pandemic. I had tried to make this book idea happen for like, five years. I had the idea five years earlier. I was convinced it was a good idea. It went through two top literary agents who couldn't sell the thing, who came close, finally found my agent, Heidi Krup, who did, and it just so happened to come out in 2020. So what I thought I would do is, okay, I'll put this book out. I had a marketing agency, not a traditional agency, in the work we did, because we always use these strategies, these unorthodox strategies. But the way we work with clients, it was we do the marketing for you, we build a campaign. We had a staff that ran the accounts, all of that. So I figured the book would come out. I would go around and do a book tour. I would do a bunch of speaking gigs that would lead to leads for our agency. We would sell books, whatever.
[29:22.900] - Michael F. Schein But the best laid plan so the world shut down. The first thing that everybody closes down in a financial crisis is their marketing budgets. Right? So I temporarily, for about six months, thought I was going to go out of business. It was very scary. And I may have if the book hadn't come out, because no one has a marketing agency employed when they don't know if their stuff is going to be open for five years or two years, or one year, six months. So what basically happened was the book came out, I couldn't speak, I couldn't go on a book tour. So what I did was I reinvented the business around the book. It started to get attention. I booked myself on about 75 podcasts in like a two month period.
[30:14.760] - Jen Lehner What was your strategy of doing that?
[30:16.870] - Michael F. Schein I had a couple of strategies. It may be the way that I reached out to you. I only found podcasts that I thought were really good ones, that I was either fans of or that I did a bunch of research and liked. And at the time I was writing articles for Psychology Today and I did a roundup article on the best podcast and I told the people that I was doing a roundup article on the Desk podcast. And then I just threw into the email, hey, I happened to have a book out. I never asked for a tit for tat. In fact, I put a line in there that said, hey, either way I want to write about you, but I guess the law of reciprocity kind of came in, right? So a lot of those people did end up booking me and did end up reading the book. I tapped into my network. I used my own secret society method. I had spent years sort of building these connections, and I said, look, if you've never done anything for me before, put me on your show. And some of them were big. I mean, I got on Cheddar, which is a TV station, things like that, and Unmistakable Creative, which is a very big show.
[31:21.420] - Michael F. Schein I got on Second City. It's called getting to. Yes, and it's the president of Second City who hired Tina Fey and Poehler, he had me on his show. So yeah, it worked really well. So I got a lot of attention for the book. And what happened was instead of calling me up and saying like people used to do, hey, I need marketing services, they say, hey, I need this hype stuff, I had kind of successfully redefined the word hype, meaning something even better than marketing that gets the same result. So what I did is I built a system around the book. So now what we do is we go through hype strategy by hype strategy. There are twelve, and we dig in really hard. We sort of embed the strategy into your DNA and we build what we call Gambits, which are experiments to execute that hype strategy. We come up with the ideas with you. We give you all of the tools customized, and you go out and put 1ft in front of the other to execute. Then we observe tweak. Observe tweak until it's working, and then we document everything. So you basically have a customized handbook that you can disseminate through your company to make sure that the hype is really spreading through your DNA.
[32:32.730] - Michael F. Schein And what was really interesting about this is that the model was great. It's a little more scalable, but what we found was clients got far better results. And I think the reason for that is when you're outsourcing something like your marketing, especially when it's not a physical product or when it's an idea based product, when it's not Coca Cola, which is really just sugar water, the people behind the company need to be involved, right? They need to get out and spread the word. They need to be the face of it. And when companies would hire us and say, hey, you do our marketing, no matter what we said to them, they wouldn't really show up. Right? It's just human nature. They'd sort of abdicate and as a result, we'd always be having to have these sort of hair pulling, difficult conversations. Whereas now we make them just them having that little bit of skin in the game, they go out and just blow it up. Ironically, one of the companies that we had the biggest success with, this tech startup called Pop Up that had just raised a bunch of money from a VC. They were my favorite client ever.
[33:37.680] - Michael F. Schein And I love all my clients. Forgive me, but these people just took what I did and ran with it. We came up with a certain idea. They turned it into a giant conference that booked all these huge people like Chris Dove from the future. We came up with this concept of a platform as flexible as you. They created a TV channel where the founder of the company was an address in a fetish place to show that their service was for everybody. So they just killed it. And what I realized was a certain kind of venture-funded tech startup is really the ideal client for us because they're very risk-taking by nature. They have a budget and they have a staff and they also the word hype is already used in the tech world. You said grow marketing, but it goes beyond that. It's that these people know that if you have a good product, the ones who have the most hype and that's the word they use, become unicorns. And the ones who don't become very slow growth companies. So even though you said in the beginning that we work with consultants and coaches, which we still do, we've really opened up this market to venture funded, venture funded tech startups.
[34:46.780] - Michael F. Schein And it's been just the greatest. It's been my favorite group of people to work with.
[34:51.340] - Jen Lehner Okay? I love it. What I want to say about bro marketing is this is that I'm talking about the guy in front of his Lamborghini. Gross. And then the other guy I bought a copywriting course for a very well-known copywriter and I could have died. It was literally all the examples he gave were how to pick up unsuspecting girls and basically trick them. You know what I'm talking about?
[35:17.240] - Michael F. Schein Those people are funny. It's very ironic with those people because on one hand, what motivated the book and what motivates a lot of what I do is that I often find that those kind of people are usually selling garbage. However, they're usually the best students of mass psychology. So I'll just give a name because I think that this person sells bad stuff that hurts people. This guy, Tai Lopez. He's terrible. He actually, I think, is immoral in that cryptocurrency becomes big. He sells a crypto. Course, he doesn't know from crypto. He didn't know what it was three weeks ago. Like he wise. He says that he reads a book a day, which isn't true. If you dig in, you find out that he skims a book a day, sort of like reading title and the table of contents. So he rents his mansion and says to people that they can make what he makes. He's selling garbage to kids who will never have the money he has. Right, right. But he has such a great knowledge of mass psychology, he gets all these kids to follow him. So what I thought to myself was, what if I could study these sorts of people and run them through an ethical filter?
[36:36.090] - Michael F. Schein What if I can take out all of the nasty stuff that they preach and look at what are the dynamics as long as you're not lying or making people's lives worse, that you can reapply to really good products and services. And it's worked. It turns out you can do that because the people who have the greatest stuff are usually the worst at generating attention because they're kind of like they find it distasteful to attract attention. So one of the things I often do is I study the scummiest of the scummiest. I watch a lot of those pickup artists because even though they're really manipulative and they're really nasty and I wouldn't want my daughter in a hundred foot mile radius of any of them, they know how to get resistant people and groups of people to follow their way. So reapply that for good without harming people and you can go a long way.
[37:33.850] - Jen Lehner Which I refer people back to the Hype Handbook because there's a lot of that in there. It's really great. Okay, the other thing I want to talk about real quick is I love okay, so you found your really super ideal client are these tech startups. They're perfect. They got the budget, they've got the willingness, they're risk takers, all of that. So great.
[37:53.680] - Michael F. Schein Venture funded tech startups. There's a big difference between those and people calling themselves a tech startup. But that's another story.
[38:00.330] - Jen Lehner Yes, understood. Thank you. But what I was thinking when you were talking about these twelve steps and I just love steps. I love a framework, I love a roadmap. I know I'm not alone in that. And I think that you should create for all the coaches and the consultants. So you have a third offering. So let's say you have a smaller offering for people who are really solopreneurs, they don't have a huge budget. And then you have the middle people who are maybe more like small businesses who you work with one on one, who you can tweak with and do the back and forth with that you mentioned. And then you have your mega ideal person, which is the tech startup. For the first tier, I think it would be so cool if you put together a simple online course. You could just have it on Evergreen that goes through these twelve steps. And of course we don't get the benefit of getting your feedback on this stuff. And I haven't looked at what that content is, but I think if you don't already have that, I think that would be so great.
[39:11.830] - Michael F. Schein I've considered it and it's obviously a very scalable model. The reason I stayed away from it so far, and this may change, is that, remember I said before tacking left when everyone tacks right? Everyone is starting an online course. And I understand that that's just the mechanism, and I understand that good ones still do very well. But at the same time, I know what my strengths are and what my weaknesses are, right? So I often find I say to people, I could never be a good enough business person to run a pizza shop, selling slices of pizza for $3 a shot and making a living seems really hard, right? So what I found is that generating a lot of attention around myself and my business and then being personally involved with really premium companies and people that can make the investment to frankly afford my time has just been something because one of the things I'm really good at, I'm so bad at so many things. I mean, I'll get lost at some point today, and I'm not saying that to like drift around, like I will literally get lost at some point today, but I'm pretty uniquely good at connecting the dots and coming up with really strong ideas to generate attention, creative ideas around a product.
[40:34.020] - Michael F. Schein And so far, making that kind of a scaled thing, I've done that with the book. Now, if there were the right partner who had a unique way of doing that and came to me and said, look, all you have to do is create the content and generate the ideas and we'll package that into a new kind of course that's doing something that no one else is doing, then I'd be open to it. But so far, I haven't wanted to jump on that train quite yet.
[00:40:59.630] - Jen Lehner Well, much like the template, I'm doing this for completely selfish reasons. I want the course, but I get it. I hear what you're saying and I respect that. Well, this has been so much fun. I'm really on fire about the idea of the whole secret society thing. I think that's so fresh.
[41:19.270] - Michael F. Schein Thank you.
[41:19.890] - Jen Lehner And I can see why people said yes, so I can't wait to learn more. Keep us posted. Come back anytime, especially when you figure out what your next book is going to be. I love the idea of you taking sort of a journalistic approach. I think that's great. So, yeah. Thank you so much, Michael, and we'll see you soon.
[41:36.450] - Michael F. Schein Thanks, Jen. This is always so much fun.
[41:38.840] - Jen Lehner If you'd like to connect with Michael or buy his book, you want to go to Michaelfschein.com, and that's Michael F, as in Frank and then Schein.com. And you can also, of course, buy the book on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. And I'll link below to our previous episode where we talked all about the book. It really is so good. And if you aren't already a member of my free online classroom, The Front Row, head over to frontrowclassroom.com and join us. See you next time.
