PODCAST: Mind Tools to Grow Your Business with Lisa Larter

In episode 29 of The Marketing Umbrella Podcast, our CEO Itamar Shafir interviews Lisa Larter who develops strategies to help businesses grow. She has built and sold companies and generated millions in sales.

Lisa has a lot to say to digital marketing agencies. Her clients say she not only understands business strategy, but knows how to leverage social media by turning connections into paying customers.

Learn Lisa’s advice on

• Main areas businesses need to work on to grow
• How a digital marketing agency can determine the best number of products to handle
• Accountability and getting things done with others
• Books to read to help your business grow
• Considering the entirely of a client’s business not just marketing

The transcript of the podcast follows. You can also

Listen to the podcast or Watch the povideo

Transcript

Itamar Shafir:

Welcome to The Marketing Umbrella Podcast, where we talk with successful marketing experts about ways to build and grow your digital marketing agency. Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur and a leading business coach. She is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, Pilot to Profit: Navigating Modern Entrepreneurship to Build Your Business Using Online Marketing, Social Media, Content Marketing, and Sales. She helped thousands of business owners grow their business to six, and seven figures, and beyond. I’m excited to say hello to Lisa Larter. Hi Lisa.

Lisa Larter:

Hi. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Itamar Shafir:

All right. It’s my pleasure. And I always like to talk with people that have a ton of experience helping other people, because that’s exactly what this podcast is about, right?

Lisa Larter:

That’s great. You’re helping other people, help other people.

Itamar Shafir:

Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes. If we can help our fellow marketers who have a small agency trying to grow it and they’re helping their SMBs, and we’re helping other people grow as well. So I wanted… Before we jump into how we can help the listeners in different ways from your experience, maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are? You got to start to helping businesses grow?

Lisa Larter:

Well, I mean, I was a bratty teenager and I dropped out of high school my last year of high school, and I got a job in retail and turns out, I’m a pretty good salesperson. So of course in retail, if you can to get promoted, and promoted, and promoted. And I ended up working for a large Canadian wireless company, and I was responsible for about $100 million in retail sales across the country.

Lisa Larter:

And I pretty much reached what I would call the glass ceiling for a couple of reasons. One, I’m a high school dropout, and so when work for a fortune 50 company, and you don’t have an MBA from the right university as a woman, it can be hard to progress in the organization. And I wasn’t willing to move from where I lived at the time.

Lisa Larter:

So a colleague of mine said you should open a retail store because that was the channel that I was responsible for. He’s like, you could do that in your sleep. And I had always aspired to help business owners, I always wanted to be a consultant, I wanted to get in and show business owners how to grow their business. And I always felt like business owners work really, really, really hard, and they don’t often get the payoff that they deserve because they don’t understand business.

Lisa Larter:

And so I thought opening this Bricks and Mortar Retail Store would be a great way for me to learn how to run a business in order to have the credibility to advise other business owners. And little did I know that I already knew way more than the average small business owner from all of my corporate experience.

Lisa Larter:

And so within, I think 90 days of opening my bricks and mortar store, I had my first consulting gig, and I just continued to network, and build my retail business, and help small business owners to the point where one day a woman’s tapped me on the shoulder and said, “If you would teach us how to do the things that you know how to do, we would all be willing to pay you.”

Lisa Larter:

And I was a little bit shocked at the time, this is like a fish in water, right? They don’t realize that you’re the only one breathing in the water. I thought everyone knew what I knew, I didn’t realize that what I knew was different and special. And so that was basically the shoulder tap that got me to step out boldly and say that I wanted to help people on an international level. And I started attracting business just like that, as soon as I started asking people, if they wanted to work with me.

Itamar Shafir:

Wow. And today you’re a business consultant, you’re a coach, you also have a team of marketers working for you, doing the marketing for the different businesses that you advise, right?

Lisa Larter:

Yes.

Itamar Shafir:

And in many ways, you’re like a bigger version of many of our marketing agencies listening to the podcast today. And I think the listeners are also very much like the people that you coach. So I want to ask you, if you can share, what are the main areas that you find that business owners need to work on to grow their business? When you tackle, having advised so many businesses, do you see a pattern? Does it usually fall under three buckets or some sort of blueprint?

Lisa Larter:

I would say that most people come to me and they say, they need help with marketing. They need a marketing strategy, because they want to attract more business. And to me, that’s like the outer layer of the onion. And when I start peeling things back and I start asking them questions about their business, it’s not usually marketing that they need.

Lisa Larter:

Yes, they may need marketing, but before they do marketing, they need to understand first, what their business model is. A lot of people are throwing anything in everything they can at the wall, hoping something will stick. They’re chasing money instead of getting real clarity on the way that they generate income inside of their business.

Lisa Larter:

And so I will see people that have a million different offers and not one of those offers is generating $100,000 a year in sales. So they’re expending all of this energy far and wide instead of going deep on a couple of things that they’re really good at. And so business model is always the first thing that I look at.

Lisa Larter:

And the second thing that I look at, is what I call pricing for profit. There’s a lot of… And I see this with men and women, but I see it more so with women than I do men. People just arbitrarily pick a price and they don’t actually think about how much money they want to make when they’re pricing things.

Lisa Larter:

So they don’t understand the financial aspects of running a business, they don’t understand how much they’re going to pay in taxes on what they just charged, how much are going to pay for the technology that they use in their business, what their operating costs are. And so I really try to look at what the model is and how the model is being priced so that you can generate the profit that you want. And then, we look at the messaging and the marketing to see, does it support this bigger business school?

Itamar Shafir:

So if we take it back to agencies, if I’m an agency and I’m doing 9,000 things, like I have 9,000 products, like you said, I do website building, and Facebook advertising, and PPC and blah, blah, blah, and like 15 other products. And you’re looking at my PNL and you’re actually saying, “Hey, but 50% of your income is coming from these two products.” Why don’t you just take it easy right and focus on these two, maybe one more. Is that kind of the approach?

Lisa Larter:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can tell you because I am an accidental agency owner. I mean, it’s funny. I got an email from someone on LinkedIn to my inbox this morning, telling me that they could help me get 30 more leads for my agency. And my response was I have more business and I know what to do with, I don’t need leads right now.

Lisa Larter:

Like, “Please, no, I can’t support the leads, we’ve got way too much business.” So I think what happens is when you are in that agency model and you are a generalist who is good at a whole bunch of things and a client says, “Oh, can you do Google AdWords for me too? Oh, can you do Facebook ads? Oh, can you do a book cover? Oh, can you do SEO?” You end up saying yes, out of a desire to be helpful, when you might not be the right person to actually do that work.

Lisa Larter:

So I’ve had to get really clear on what are we really good at? What are the things that we should do that we’re good at, we enjoy doing, and are profitable? And what are the things that I should actually raise my hand and say, “We are not the best team to do that work.”

Lisa Larter:

But these guys over here, we’ve worked in partnership with them before and they’re excellent at it. And so I think that is something that agencies need to learn how to do, but it requires a certain level of confidence and cash flow to be able to do that. Because if I’m saying no to, I don’t know, 10, 20, 30, 100,000 dollars in business, because I don’t think that our team is the right team, I’ve got to be okay with that and know that my business is still okay.

Lisa Larter:

But there’s this… I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the rule of three and 10? So I heard about the rule of three and 10 on a Tim Ferris Podcast years ago, interviewed the founder, I believe it was of Evernote, and it comes from someone in Japan, but they talk about the fact that, every time you triple the size of your business, it breaks.

Lisa Larter:

So you go from one person to three, the way you communicate changes because when you’re one person, you know how to do everything. When you’re three people, you need to communicate with the team. But when you go from three to 10 and then you go from 10 to 30, the processes and the structure that you need in place to be able to communicate and do things well changes.

Lisa Larter:

And so what I see happen with a lot of agencies is there are afraid to invest in the infrastructure that they need at 10 and 30, they’re still trying to operate like they’re a team of three. And so they become a Jack of all trades and a master of none. And they’re constantly trying to get new business because they can’t retain the business that they have, because they don’t have the right infrastructure to deliver.

Itamar Shafir:

Okay. So I think that’s you’re 100% [correctly 00:10:21] from what I saw with agencies. So that requires some sort of mindset shift, right? When… Okay. I’m hearing Lisa and I’m saying, okay, but like you said, I want to make that extra $30,000, I want to make that extra $50,000, I need to do those things, or I think I need to do those things because my mindset is already geared to working in a specific way. Do you have some tips or ways of how I can work on myself to shift my mindset towards what you’re saying?

Lisa Larter:

Well, I think you need three things. I think you need money, I think you need mindset, and then I think you need courage. So I think you need to look at the long game. So you are always going to be chasing money if you don’t have money. So if your bank balance is at $5,000 and payroll is next week and it’s $5,000, then whatever comes your way, you’re going to grab it because you don’t have the cash flow to run your business properly.

Lisa Larter:

So in order for you to have the mindset around investing in your business, you also need to have access to the funds. Because you can’t just go hire a person and not pay them, you have to have the money to do that. So I think money, this is why I say pricing for profit is so important, if you don’t have money in the bank to pay someone, can’t go hire that additional resource, unless you’re going to put it on credit or line of credit.

Lisa Larter:

So that to me is first and foremost. Mindset for me is really looking at the runway of how long it’s going to take to wrap up. So I’m in a bit of a pivotal area in my business right now, where we grew at a rate of 50% a year, three years in a row. And so we are literally like busting at the seams and we are in that stage where everything is broken and we’re trying to fix it.

Lisa Larter:

And so I’m looking at over hiring right now. And I know that when I overhire, and I spend that money, in the short term, it’s going to affect my profit margin because in the short term I’m investing in getting the people that I need so that I can grow to the next level. But what people do is they try to grow to the next help level and then find the people, and you can’t do it that way.

Lisa Larter:

That’s why it requires courage. And so I think that when you break it down. So if I look at hiring somebody new on my team, and let’s say it’s a $50,000 a year commitment. I don’t look at it as a $50,000 decision, I look at it as $1,000 a week decision. And I ask myself, how can I generate an additional $1,000 a week in revenue, if I need to, to pay for this person’s salary while we grow and fill them.

Lisa Larter:

So couple years ago, I put somebody into a copywriting role on my team, and because I was outsourcing all of my copywriting, and I felt like there was an opportunity to build that area of the business, I knew the first year I was going to lose money.

Lisa Larter:

I knew the first year I wasn’t going to have enough copywriting work to do that. I also knew by year two, I would probably break even. And by year three, it would be a profitable role inside of the business. It requires the cashflow to fund it, and it requires the courage to actually stay in it long enough to build a profitable team member out of the role that you add.

Itamar Shafir:

Right. So you really need to have a very strong feeling that this is going to work because a three year vision, when you’re a small business is a very long away future. Okay. So one of the things that also happen when people make those shifts is, and I’m sure you’re aware of it when you’re helping other businesses is okay, cool, Lisa, I get it, I’m going to do it, I have the money, I’m going to do it. Now, I’m working on it. A month or two down the road, zero-

Lisa Larter:

You still thinking about it.

Itamar Shafir:

… accountability. No, no, zero accountability. I made one move out of 100 that I need to do, but the day to day business takes over and you forget about it. How do you deal with accountability? How do you deal with getting things done? How do you do that for yourself or getting somebody else to do it?

Lisa Larter:

Well, it’s interesting, you say that. So there’s a couple of things that I would say, as a business coach and/or advisor, I always look at my number one role as holding the space for what you tell me is most important. And so if you tell me that growing your business to $100,000 is most important, or a million dollars is most important, or a new website is most important, whatever that thing is, that is most important, I need to check in on it, every time I talk to you.

Lisa Larter:

So how’s this going? I need to keep that vision in line of sight for you. In the Strategy Lab, which is an online program that I run, it’s a membership program for business owners. I host quarterly planning sprints, and I do it exactly for that reason, because entrepreneurs get distracted and they get busy and they forget what they said they wanted to do.

Lisa Larter:

And so by reprioritizing your strategy on a quarterly basis, and committing inside of a community to a group of people, what you are going to do, there’s a little bit of pressure and accountability because people are checking in, how’s this going? How’s that going? And then we have learning labs twice a month. And the learning labs are designed to help people with business growth.

Lisa Larter:

So there’s accountability in those labs as well in terms of the action that people are going to take. And then the third thing that I would say, and people always say to me, “I feel like I’m such a loser, I shouldn’t need somebody to sit with me in order to get stuff done.” Well, I got to tell you, the smartest business owners know themselves well, and they know whether they can rely on themselves to get something done or not.

Lisa Larter:

And if you’ve been trying to get something done and it’s been 30, 60, 90 days, and you’re not able to get it done, then hire someone to do it with you. Even my own podcast, I got to tell you, I do solo episodes in my podcast that are teaching episodes. And then I interview people, interviewing people is easy, I just get to show up and ask questions.

Lisa Larter:

But when I’m teaching, I need to prepare, I need to have talking points, and I need to have all this stuff ready in order to do a good job. So I actually have someone who does that work with me and I joke, I say, “I need you to babysit me for an hour, so that I record my podcast,” and literally she’s on screen, and I’m going through the stuff, and I’m talking to her, but nobody knows she’s there. Because I know that if I don’t make an appointment with someone to do it, it’s not going to get done because I’ll move it to the bottom of the priority list.

Lisa Larter:

So I think that business owners who get on the treadmill or the hamster wheel of all the other things that have to happen, they need to know themselves and they need to invest in getting somebody to do it with them in order to really make the giant leads that they want to make in their business.

Itamar Shafir:

So that somebody can be a coach, it can be a community like you have, can it be a friend or that doesn’t work?

Lisa Larter:

My experience as friends don’t work so much, unless it’s my girlfriend that I walk with in the morning, because I’m going to meet her and I’m going to walk, and so I’m accountable to walking. But I think that the woman that meets me with my podcast is a former client of mine that I coached for seven years, I helped her scale her business, and I helped her sell her business.

Lisa Larter:

And the beauty of having her sit with me when I’m planning and recording my podcast is she is so indoctrinated with how I think of about business, that it’s like, she holds the mirror up to remind me that what I have to say is important. And she reminds me of other things that I’ve said to her that have made an impression that I don’t even realize have made an impression.

Lisa Larter:

So I think it’s better to have somebody that you’re paying, not just a friend who’s hanging out, like I pay this person to do this with me, because I think when you have skin in the game, and they have a vested interest because they’re also getting paid, you have a greater likelihood of it working. A friend will let you off the hook.

Itamar Shafir:

I agree. I think that’s a convenient place to go, but 100% somebody that you pay, shouldn’t let you have the hook and-

Lisa Larter:

Exactly.

Itamar Shafir:

… if they’re a good coach, so can you share a few examples with us of… And you and I talked before the start of this podcast about going in and helping businesses in the marketing back versus listening to this right now, or going and helping business with the marketing. And how important is to look beyond marketing and look at the business as a business and become a little bit of a business consultant. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lisa Larter:

Sure. I think marketing is… First of all, I think you’re doing a disservice to your clients if you only understand marketing and you don’t understand business. Because the function of mark marketing is to support business growth. And so marketing is to really help more people know you so that you can grow your business.

Lisa Larter:

And if you don’t understand the fundamentals of business, then it’s going to be hard for you to really help your clients. So I think when you go in and people are presenting with a marketing problem, it’s your job as a marketing expert to really ask more business-oriented questions so that you can gather as much information as possible to really advise them on the right way to move forward.

Lisa Larter:

I mean, if I look at my business, I get paid a lot more for my business advisory services, my time, and expertise, then what my team, what I bill out for my team’s time on marketing implementation. Strategy is very important, strategy can help you move the needle and really make a significant impact in a business.

Lisa Larter:

Whereas, a lot of times, people who present with marketing only, they get almost pigeonholed into, “Oh, I can do pretty designs in CAMBA,” marketing consultants and social media marketing people, there are a dime a dozen today. So if you’re not differentiating in some way, then you are going to be competing. I think in a pretty commoditized low revenue space.

Itamar Shafir:

Right. So yeah, differentiation is a big thing we’re talking about again, and again, and again, and you’re raising a new point. We have other people saying you need to go niche to build a brand, and that will create a differentiation. Other people are talking about USBs, and you’re also talking about a USB, but from another direction saying, “Hey, you’re not just a marketer, marketing is related to business, come and help that that business grow.”

Itamar Shafir:

On the strategic level, also more money, more differentiation. So can you give us an example of a business where they called you up, maybe to help with marketing and it kind of involved into something more that you helped them grow their bottom line.

Lisa Larter:

Psychology Practice. Psychology Practice, the founder called me, she needed help with marketing to grow her business. And when we started to really peel back the layers… And because I wanted to know how the business worked, I wanted to know, I was looking for what the Heath brothers would call the bright spots.

Lisa Larter:

So I literally made her pull out a calendar and write down her sales for every single day of the year, so that I could look at what was happening in her business. And I noticed this trend there, every so often there was a day where the sales were over $2,500, but most of the other days they were below that, way below that.

Lisa Larter:

And so I wanted to understand what happened on those days. And by understanding what happened on those days, we were able to develop a strategy that has essentially helped her to quadruple her business, and have multiple offices, and multiple clinicians now, because what was happening on those days is they were doing testing. And in a Psychology Practice testing leads to therapy, and testing is a higher priced I item.

Lisa Larter:

And so generic marketing wouldn’t have worked for her, but specialized marketing, marketing to schools for kids that need testing, marketing to parents who have kids that they want to have tested, marketing to pediatrician offices that are looking for psychologists specialized in testing, positioning them as the best in class testing service in their city, became a differentiator that allowed them to grow.

Lisa Larter:

So what I made her do the first year is I made her write her sales down on a calendar every day, and circle how many days out of the month did she beat $2,500? Because it used to be once in a blue moon, I think when we did this, it was like four or five days out of the whole year that we had $2,500 days. Well, all of a sudden it became one a month, and then it became two a month and then it became one a week, and then all of a sudden it was well, 2,500 is way too low, our baseline now is 5,000.

Lisa Larter:

And so by focusing by really peeling back the layers, and looking at the business, and understanding what is the driver of the business growth, then you can align the marketing. But if I just went in, and I put a pretty little bandaid, and said, “Oh, you need Facebook, and you need Instagram, and you need Twitter ads, and all,” it wouldn’t have worked because we wouldn’t have known what the right thing was to do.

Lisa Larter:

So I want to tell you a story about a man named Jackie, and my husband and I bought a home or cottage years ago on the ocean in Nova Scotia. And we bought a shed, because we wanted to be able to store our lawn tractor and a bunch of different things in the shed.

Lisa Larter:

And so the home building guys delivered the shed, and they put it on cinder blocks, and my husband goes into the shed after, and it’s not level. So he is like, tomorrow I’m going to need to go to town, I’m going to need to get a jack, and some shims, and level it, because if we put stuff in and it’s not level, the floor is going to bust, right? We’re going to ruin our new shed.

Lisa Larter:

So Jackie is this guy… And bless his soul, he passed away last year, but he was an older man who did yard work and odd jobs for people, and he was just the nicest guy. So he shows up and he’s like, “Oh, you’re building a deck and oh, you got your new shed.” And my husband’s like, “Yeah, we need to go into town tomorrow and get a jack and put some shims down, so the shed is level ,”

Lisa Larter:

And Jackie is like, “Ah, you don’t need to do that.” He walked over to our fire pit, he picked up a great big Boulder, he carried that Boulder over, set it beside the shed, went and grabbed one of the two by fours that my husband was using to build the deck, stuck it underneath the shed on top of the rock, walked to the end of it, stepped on it and lifted the shed up with one foot, and said, “Here you can shim it now,”

Lisa Larter:

I look at the business strategy in the exact same way. You got to find the lever, you got to find the thing that makes it easy to lift your business up. And too many people are just trying to work with what they have, they’re trying to just put a new code of paint on that broken shed instead of figuring out what is the lever that’s actually going to make this work.

Itamar Shafir:

Right. Excellent point. So I don’t know, do you have any pointers though? How do you start that transition? Because like you said, many people come to the marketing industry and they’re good at maybe a vertical, maybe a bunch of marketing abilities, they know social, but maybe their business acumen is not so deep to understand how to approach it. Is there… And I’m segueing into something else.

Itamar Shafir:

Is there a book that you can recommend for them to read? Because I know that you are a big advocate of business owners need to read, and you also have a program around it, which I also want you to talk about a little bit, because that really picked my curiosity. And I find it very interesting that you’re choosing different books to help businesses grow together with training around it. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lisa Larter:

Yeah, for sure. So I think that understanding the financial fundamentals of how to run a business is absolutely necessary in order for you to have business success long term. And the one book that I give to every single one of my clients, my new coaching clients is the Success Blueprint… Is that it right there? Hang on one sec, let me grab it.

Lisa Larter:

It’s this book, Ultimate Blueprint For an Insanely Successful Business, and it’s written by Keith Cunningham. You can see there’s a bunch of different flags in it. I read this book probably once a year. Have you ever heard of the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad?

Itamar Shafir:

Yeah.

Lisa Larter:

So Robert Kiyosaki wrote about his rich dad and his poor dad. Keith Cunningham was his rich dad. So this book is a fantastic book to help you really think about your business differently. I would say that if you find this book intimidating or overwhelming, Mike Michalowicz book, Profit First, is another really good book to read it.

Lisa Larter:

I’m going to say it dumps things down a little bit more. This book is a little bit more sophisticated, which is why I like it. I like Mike and I like the whole Profit First concept. I always say you should move your profit to the top instead of the bottom. But I’m not a fan of the complexities of all of the banking systems that he recommend in profit.

Lisa Larter:

First to me, it’s a little bit too much. So I really like that book in terms of really, really understanding business. Joey Coleman wrote a book called How to Never Lose a Customer Again. And he’s got this whole series from acquisition, to retention, to referrals, this process in his book, which is fantastic as well.

Lisa Larter:

I think that business owners should read a book a month. I think they should dedicate themselves to reading a book a month. And I think that when they’re reading, they should be looking for one thing, not everything, because otherwise you’ll never get past one book, but I think they should be looking for one thing, what is the lever in that book that is going to help you do something in your business, that will help your business to grow?

Lisa Larter:

And if you can find that one little thing and you can take action on that one little thing, it can make a really huge difference. So I’m going to give you an example. This is Dan Sullivan’s new book, The Gap in The Gain. And the last book that he wrote with Benjamin Hardy was, Who Not How. And I read Who Not How a year ago.

Lisa Larter:

And when I read Who Not How, I realized I needed some whos, because there were some things that I wanted to do in my business that I hadn’t done yet. One, I wanted to write another book. Two, I wanted to start a podcast. And so I immediately found two whos that would help me.

Lisa Larter:

I reached out to Alan Weiss, who is a client of mine. And I asked him, would you consider writing a book on marketing with me? And he responded instantly and said, “Sure, send me the premise and the outline by Monday.” And this was a Saturday. So I busted my butt all day Sunday, and I sent him the premise, and I set up the outline on Monday. The next thing you know, Alan and I have a book proposal, the next thing you know, Alan and I have a publishing deal and we have a book called Masterful Marketing coming out next year.

Itamar Shafir:

Nice.

Lisa Larter:

That was a result of me taking action. Because I asked myself who could make me write? And Alan scares me enough, that I knew that if I had to write with him, I would do the work. So again, having that person sit with you to do it. And then I literally enrolled a team of people on my team to help me get my podcast off the ground, and that worked too.

Lisa Larter:

So when you read, it’s like you’re masterminding with the author. And if you just take action on one idea from each book, you can do a lot of significant things over the course of a year.

Itamar Shafir:

So you also developed program from this concept, right?

Lisa Larter:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Itamar Shafir:

Can you talk a little bit about how that program works?

Lisa Larter:

Yeah. It’s called Thought Readers, and thought readers is a result of a client of mine saying, I have a business idea for you, I’m always trying to catch up with what you’re reading, I always want to read what you read because I learned so much from what you share about the books you read. I think you should start a book club.

Lisa Larter:

And I thought nobody’s going to pay to be in a book club with me, it’s just not going to happen. And so then I just floated the idea on Facebook, something, I call invitation marketing. Is there anybody that would be interested in doing this thing? And 75 people said, yeah, I’d like to do it.

Lisa Larter:

So that was year one. So essentially people invest $100 a month or $1,200 a year and I ship them a book. Well, I don’t, my assistant does every single month, and we read the book together, and I share with them what my insights, and ahas, takeaways are from the book. We have a books and business call every month where I say, it’s the cheapest deal in town, if you want to pick my brain about business.

Lisa Larter:

And we spend 60 minutes talking about the book and talking about business. And in a lot of cases, the authors will join me for an additional call to talk about the book. So when Who Not How came out, I asked a couple of colleagues if they knew anyone that would introduce me to Dan Sullivan, because I wanted to interview Dan Sullivan, and I was told flat out, there is no away you are going to get Dan Sullivan for an interview. Wow. Guess who got Dan Sullivan for an interview? And guess, who’s coming back to talk about this book?

Itamar Shafir:

I love this program, I love it. I absolutely, I think it’s an awesome idea. First off, it would create some accountability about you actually reading a book, which I agree everybody needs to do once a month, and you really go and pick your brain, and it’s an insight, getting some insights, getting that lever that you talked about. I think it’s an amazing idea.

Lisa Larter:

Mm-hmm (affirmative) And I’m thinking about doing things a little bit differently next year, I’ve started using Evernote to capture all of my ideas. And so I’m thinking about giving people, basically my Evernote file for each book that I read, because I literally type up what I’ve underlined, the page number, and then my thoughts on what I just read.

Lisa Larter:

And so it literally could be a resource, you might want to read the whole book, but you might read my notes and you might go, “Oh, I want to learn more about what that is about.” And that literally allows… It’s like I’m pointing to the pages that you should read in a book.

Itamar Shafir:

That’s smart. I’m actually going to join this. I love it, I think it’s a great concept. Yes, we are closing in on the end of the podcast. But before I let you go, we have a section called rapid Q and A. I ask you a few questions, I need quick answers. The questions are in no way edgy, but if you feel uncomfortable with any of them, just say pass, okay?

Lisa Larter:

Okay.

Itamar Shafir:

So did you get along with your parents growing up?

Lisa Larter:

Yes and no. My parents were divorced. My mom, yes. My dad, not so much.

Itamar Shafir:

Okay. Do you have siblings?

Lisa Larter:

I have two sisters from my dad’s second marriage.

Itamar Shafir:

Do you have a pet?

Lisa Larter:

I have two miniature wirehaired dachshunds.

Itamar Shafir:

Nice. Do you have kids?

Lisa Larter:

No kids, Dogs. I like dogs better.

Itamar Shafir:

When do you wake up?

Lisa Larter:

Between six and seven.

Itamar Shafir:

When do you go to bed?

Lisa Larter:

Between nine and 10.

Itamar Shafir:

Ideal vacation?

Lisa Larter:

Probably, a whiskey tour in Scotland.

Itamar Shafir:

Nice. Are you a woman of faith?

Lisa Larter:

Yes.

Itamar Shafir:

Awesome. That’s it? That was wonderful, Lisa. Thank you very, very much for being on the show and helping all the entrepreneurs. All your answers were excellent, and I’m sure everybody got a lot from it.

Lisa Larter:

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was great. [It] felt like we could talk for hours.

Itamar Shafir:

Completely. I’m just respectful of your time, but maybe we can have you again.

Lisa Larter:

Yeah, that would be great.

Itamar Shafir:

Awesome. Thank you very much, Lisa.

Lisa Larter:

You’re welcome.

Subscribe to The Marketing Umbrella Podcast

Each week, we interview some of the world’s leading marketing experts on The Marketing Umbrella Podcast. Keep your digital marketing agency on the cutting edge and subscribe.