Hey Reader,

Is going barefoot the key to having a top 5 podcast on Spotify?

This idea has been stuck rent-free in my brain all week...(continued in the Messy Middle).

We Wrote That

You Don’t Hate Sales, You Hate Confusion

As a creative service provider, I’d bet you started your business because you enjoyed the work not because you wanted to sit on endless sales calls, or bang your head against a keyboard trying to find leads to even sit on discovery calls.

Even if your offer is amazing, if you don’t know how to talk about it in a way that resonates with your ideal customers it can feel like you're a sleazy car salesman trying to convince someone to buy a car they don’t actually need.

In The Breakroom this week we hosted PitchFest, our version of Shark Tank. We were surprised how many times we heard, “now I want to work with you,” from our members after someone finished pitching their offer.

People resonated with their pitches so strongly because they understood the problem, how the offer solved it, and why they were the best person to work with.

There’s 9 things that we asked them to include in their pitches, and below we’ll break down those same 9 things (as a checklist) across 4 common red flags that’ll make your sales pitches easier.

Red Flag #1: You haven’t earned the right to pitch yet

There’s a common example used in business school that goes like this: “What’s the most important thing to get right if you want to run a successful hot dog stand?”... (read the rest on the blog)

Overheard in The Breakroom

Each week we have one member do a "Tool Tip Tuesday" aka: a 5-10 minute demo of how to do something in a tool they use for work. We've had tutorials ranging from Canva to Notion, all the way down to how I (Lyndon) made our 180 client goal tracker mountain that's in the back of all our zoom calls - see the details for the Breakroom here.

The Messy Middle

This week I saw a clip of Stephen Bartlett getting interviewed on the Hot Smart Rich podcast (which his company recently did a 7-figure investment in). In the episode, Maggie asks him why he doesn't wear shoes when he records Diary of a CEO (#2 podcast in the world).

His answer:

He goes on to say that taking his shoes off is his way of physically showing that he has no where else to be...he's fully present.

My big takeaways is that to be the best in the world you have to start paying attention to the really little things and how they make your customers feel.

Resource of the Week

If you were to take someone arguably at the top of their game in entrepreneurship right now and and point all that knowledge at someone starting out who doesn't have a lot of money yet... that's what Codie Shanchez's podcast interview on The Burnouts was.

I sent Joelle a half dozen texts while listening to it with my takeaways...

What's been stuck in your head rent free this week?

See ya next week,

Lyndon

Ps, if you sign up for The Breakroom in January, you'll get this custom Breakroom Hydroflask Tumbler.