Esther: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and my guest today is Jeffrey Hayzlett. He is the author of The Mirror Test an awesome new book. It's sweeping the nation. It's on every list you could ever imagine and actually I read some of the reviews today and they are just pouring in phenomenal reviews. It's getting great reviews. It's awesome. Congratulations.

Jeffrey: It's cool and sweeping the nation. I hope it sweeps many nations at some point.

Esther: Yes.

Jeffrey: But it's doing really well. We just got number one on Inc Magazine and number four on USA Today and I hear the Wall Street Journal as well.

Esther: Congratulations.

Jeffrey: Yeah; even big business is reading about small business.

Esther: It's fabulous and actually I think big business can learn a lot from small business and how they are doing things. I actually remember Barrack Obama reaching out to a lot of small businesses -

Jeffrey: Oh yeah.

Esther: And was bringing them in and seeing how they're doing it in their processes.

Jeffrey: Well and that's a large part of our economy here in the United States and we're wise based on small businesses. Small businesses have to make it for the big businesses to succeed. That's just the nature of the game.

Esther: That's a great way to lead into your book because your book is really about how to help small businesses scale and grow and how to avoid some of the pitfalls of just starting a business in the first place. There's so much to consider. What would you say are the main things that small business owners when they say yes, I'm starting this business; now what.

Jeffrey: Well it's that passion. The passion gets in the way of really thinking. I've gone out and tried to start pheasant farms. I was gonna -

Esther: Pheasant farms?

Jeffrey: Pheasant farms; it's in the book. I tried to corner the market on pheasants till I figured out there wasn't one because my passion for loving pheasants, eating pheasants, hunting pheasants, seeing pheasants, I thought they were beautiful, led me to a big turkey basically. That's what it is.

Esther: Ah.

Jeffrey: So a lot of businesses they actually listen to everybody, which is important, but they put too much emphasis on what their family tells them or what the people around them tell them. Get out and really talk to the audience that's gonna buy and find out will the dog eat the dog food, will they buy it, will they want to use it, will they pay the price that you think. You get in your old little story about that as a small business and not even a small business, even big businesses. I've even done that where I've gone out and launched mobile campaigns in movie theaters till I realized why wasn't that working. Well, that's because you turned your phone off in a movie theater. Well duh.

Esther: No one's gonna be texting during the movie -

Jeffrey: No one's gonna be texting during the movie. So you learn, but you get yourself into these stories and that's what happens. We get this Johnny Vega syndrome. We're doing deals to do deals or we're doing things because we think it's right and we don't always know what's best. So it's good to stand in front of the mirror and really ask the hard questions and that's what the book's about.

Esther: Awesome. So now you're out on your own. We had you on the show once before. You were with Kodak at the time. Now you are out on your own. You're doing your own thing. You're consulting all over the world.

Jeffrey: Carrying my own bags, booking my own plane tickets and doing everything.

Esther: Yeah; it's awesome.

Jeffrey: But I love it. This is what I've always been about. I stayed at Kodak, was the longest period I've ever stayed at any one company.

Esther: How long was that?

Jeffrey: Four years. Four years and about a month -

Esther: That's a long time in this new changing world.

Jeffrey: Well in the CMO world it's a very long time. The average life of a chief marketing officer is like 18 to 23 months. So to be in a job for four years was a big thing. So I was part of the turnaround. I was getting antsy. I went to the boss and said, 'Hey, I gotta get out of here. I've done my job. We're turned Kodak around. We've raised the profile of Kodak. Now everybody remembers who it is, what it is and what it's best known for in the innovation, the new products. I need to go back out and restart something. So The Mirror Test was a way for me to do that. I thought businesses were gonna be ready for growth and they wanted to get out there and start growing their businesses again because we were in this nasty depression and economic recession. So I said let's start doing something that's positive, upfront for businesses and really force businesses, ask hard questions about yourself and get out there and start running your business.

Esther: That's so cool and I see that you're using all the new tools that a lot of businesses are using. You've been really successful through Twitter and Facebook and all kinds of social channels. So what do you think has been the reason for that? What's your main reason for big success there?

Jeffrey: Well I think the biggest thing is using the tools in your toolbox. So finding the right tool at the right time. I'm selling books through ads on Facebook. I'm selling through Tweets and people are Tweeting about it. It's wonderful to open up an open up a Tweet deck or Seismic or whatever I'm watching and to see people talk about my business. Talk about me, talk about the book. I love it and wouldn't small businesses wanna have that, too? So why aren't they using it. About one-third of everybody gets it, one-third eventually get it and one-third will never get it. That's just the nature of anything. So as your listeners and the watchers who are paying attention to the show know, it's the same thing for them. So Twitter is a new tool. It's not a fad. It's gonna be around for awhile. Microblogging and blogs are gonna be around and Facebook and other tools. There'll be even more tools that come, but utilize those to your advantage. I call it OPM, other people's money. So use it. It's free.

Esther: Absolutely. That's such great advice. What do you think about small businesses though?

Jeffrey: It's easier. It's much easier because you don't have attorneys breathing down your neck or HR departments looking over to whether every Tweet's okay. You can do these kind of things on your own. You don't have to check in with all these people and boards of directors. You can just do it. Be yourself and that's what you want. A brand is nothing but a promise delivered. Usually the business owner and the key people that are involved in that business are the ones that really hold the promise. So get out there and start making some promises. Get out there and let people know. I can't tell you the number of times I walked in a business when I was a printer and picked up a brochure from one of my best friends and he picked it up and he looked at it and I said, 'I didn't print this.' He goes, 'Well I didn't know you did that.' So you need to let people know you do that and the best way to do that is by evangelizing it a little bit.

Esther: Well I'm just meeting you for the first time, but I've read several places, not only are you the celebrity CMO, we know that, but you really live up to that. You have been described as having this effervescent personality and just being a guy who says what he's gonna do and does it and means it and kinda' no BS attitude. So my question really is how important is that to small business? How important is it for someone to say they're gonna do something and actually follow through?

Jeffrey: Well I think it's the most important thing they can do. Again, a brand is something that's a promise delivered. So when people see myself walk through the door - now I used to be that's the Kodak guy or if I'm on Main Street, Small Town, Texas and I see a business owner come through the door, I don't always think it's John or it's Fred or it's Bob. I think of it as his business. There is the person that represents that business. So the two things are never separable. So, they're one, they're interchanged with one another. So I think being that person and being a personification of the brand is important. In fact, I talk about that in Chapter 9. Sell yourself; sell the business. If you're selling yourself, you're selling the business. If you're selling the business you're selling yourself and for most small businesses there's no difference.

Esther: There's so much truth to that because in this area of personal branding you are what you sell and what you do in and out of the office. Isn't that important to you?

Jeffrey: And transparency I think is what you're really getting to and transparency is so important for small businesses and for big corporations. There's no difference between a small company and a big company. Just zeroes. Twenty-seven employees over here; 27,000 employees over here. Same problems and opportunities here. Same ones here; just more of them. So that's the way you wanna keep things. I try to keep things very simple. I'm from South Dakota. So just the two of us sitting here is population density to me. I just try to think things very simple and if you keep things very simple you can get a lot more things done and it becomes a lot faster to get them done, which is really good when you're in business.

Esther: That's awesome. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and we'll be back with more with Jeffrey Hayzlett after this.

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Esther: We're back with the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and we are back with Jeffrey Hayzlett, the celebrity CMO and author of The Mirror Test, which is right here in front of us.

Jeffrey: That's the book.

Esther: It's great. It's great to have you here.

Jeffrey: It's good to be here and talking about the gospel of business so to speak.

Esther: Absolutely. So I want to know about your failures because I don't think CEOs and CMOs and just people in executive positions really talk enough about how they failed and learned from it. So what would you say is your biggest failure?

Jeffrey: Oh, I got a lot of them. I don't know if I can pick out the biggest -

Esther: Tell us about them.

Jeffrey: -- one, but almost every day you do something wrong. You try not to and you try to minimize them as much as possible, but I go with the philosophy is no one's gonna die. I'm not doing anything. I'm in marketing for the most part when I was at Kodak as the chief marketing officer. So I blow it. I blow something. I've blown them big. I've gone out and done campaigns and no one went out and bought anything and I go back and realize oh, well that was a stupid idea, but you don't think of it at the time. So the biggest failures that I have is not doing the proper planning, not thinking it through. Let my passion get in the way. Let me being too busy get in the way and not just really questioning things. I think it's important for people to have a healthy debate and trust of their other people and to say hey, boss, is that the right thing to do. So those are the biggest failures I normally have is not doing those things.

Esther: Is that something you encouraged in your employees or still encourage is to be honest with you and tell you their opinions about things?

Jeffrey: Oh absolutely. In fact, even at a company like Kodak we put that in place with our FAST program and T stood for trust or healthy debate, but you can imagine a hierarchy organization and you're one of the top three or four or five officers in the company. It's like you say this, people start jumping. Well you have to have a culture and at least an operating procedure or philosophy that says hey, just because I say jump doesn't mean you have to. If you think it's the wrong move, question me. Now after we have a debate about it, now this isn't a vote on it. It's not a democracy. Then let's make the move 'cause I want people to question me 'cause if they question me quite frankly I get something better out of it. After a period of time if they can get my mood about don't question me because I know this is the right thing, I've been through this and I've hunted this dog before so to speak, then they need to move on, but those are the kind of things you wanna make sure you have a very open atmosphere. I want people to bring bad news to me. I want them to bring things. I wanna know those things. I don't want them hiding them and shoving those underneath the covers. So yeah, you want that. You want it and you want it bad.

Esther: What would you say is the biggest mistake that small business owners really make after they've started their business. They're in there, they're in the trenches, they're working really hard. Where do they get in their own way the most?

Jeffrey: Focus; they're losing focus. You got a heart problem, go to a cardiologist not a general practitioner. What is it that they do best in that business? Go do it. A lot of times they think, especially if you look at the evolution say of an entrepreneur or business. It's one man band to begin with. Then they add develop followers, then they add skill technicians and experts. So during that process they did all those jobs and they think they're good at all of them. They had to be at least competent at most of those jobs, but now when they start getting to that higher, more successful level they really need to focus in on the things that they do best and let the other people play their positions. It's like imagine if you're a quarterback on a football team and all of a sudden everybody's running back in the huddle going, throw me the ball, throw me the ball, throw me the ball. Well you can't have the lineman who's the guard who's supposed to be blocking saying throw me the ball. You shouldn't even look at the ball. I don't want you touching the ball. I want you blocking that big guy over there so that this guy can run the ball or this guy can catch the ball. Of course you're open. So owners need to make sure that they know their proper position and know their proper play and then go get it done.

Esther: What about hiring? Is that also a major part because once you get enough money to hire a couple people that's when I think maybe sometimes there's some issues with the CEO or even the officers wanting to get involved and do everything.

Jeffrey: Sometimes I think firing people's more important than hiring people because I don't think we let people go fast enough when we know they're not gonna work out. After you get them in and let's say you do the due diligence and you should be, but pull the trigger. Not all of them are gonna be great. So you're gonna get them in. You're gonna find it doesn't work. It doesn't work. No one died. Move on. I even talk about that in the book. That's one of the key questions in The Mirror Test that owners really have to face is do I have the right people. Sometimes I've gotta fire my kids or my wife or my husband or whatever it might be. You need to really take a hard look. That's a leadership. That's the test around leadership. That's one of the three tests that I talk about. It's very important that you can look in the mirror and say what is it I do best and then what do my people, do I have the right team. That's a tough one for a lot of business owners.

Esther: Yeah; I completely agree. We hear CEOs struggle with that all the time is letting people go that have been there for years.

Jeffrey: And you need to treat your employees as well as you treat your vendors, by the way. So, I talk about that in The Mirror Test as well about how much time you need to invest in your employees because they're the biggest brand ambassadors that you've got.

Esther: Absolutely. So something else I've been hearing a little about is this elevator pitch that's coming out of your book. I'd love to hear more about that.

Jeffrey: Well I think it's time to jazz it up a little bit. We're living in a digital world so let's have a digital version of it. Elevator pitches have grown into these 30 PowerPoint slides and then by the end of it I can't still figure out what the businesses do. So an elevator pitch is supposed to be something you can tell somebody while you're riding on an elevator and we've lost touch with that. So I made it easy. Made it specific. This is what it is; 118. That's the new elevator pitch and it's been being written up about everywhere. Eight seconds is the average attention span of an adult. So watching this video, listening to us here this morning or this afternoon or this evening, eight seconds is the average attention span. A hundred and ten seconds is the average elevator ride in New York City from the time you press the button, get on it, ride it up, ride it down and get off of it. So in essence you have eight -

Esther: Did you do that? Did you actually get in an elevator and --?

Jeffrey: I actually Googled it and found out that that's the actual ones, but overall if you ride enough elevators that's what it is by the time you wait and so forth. So basically you've got eight seconds to hook me and 110 seconds to sell me. You've got 118 seconds. That's a tough ride. Eight seconds to hang onto the bull; 110 percent to make sure you can do it.

Esther: And not be praying that you can get off the elevator quicker.

Jeffrey: Exactly. Use the time, but 118 seconds. If Moses can do it in two tablets and five bullet points each, we can do it a lot sooner than that. So that's the way I describe the elevator pitch and it's catching on. People now are writing about it saying yeah, I gotta have my 118. Most business owners don't focus on it. They steal somebody else's mission statement or vision statement and take out their name, put their name. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about give your value in 118 seconds. If you can do that you're a long ways towards being successful.

Esther: Do you think even well established businesses -

Jeffrey: Absolutely.

Esther: -- should be formulating this?

Jeffrey: All the time. You should be changing and altering - if you have different vertical markets your 118 is gonna be different for each one of those vertical markets. What's the unique selling proposition, your catch. What's the hook? What's the value proposition that you're gonna give each of those target audiences? As we become more fragmented and more digital with social media and everything else, we're becoming much more cocooned. So we wanna feel more like a segment of one; not grouped in with a whole bunch of people. So you need to be able to really fine tune that. That's the new Elevator Pitch 2.0.

Esther: Awesome. So is that something that you would help people formulate? If they were to bring you in as a consultant is that something that you help them do?

Jeffrey: Oh certainly. I had to do that at Kodak. As we moved from a more traditional company to a digital company, which it is. As we move from a film based company now to a digital company, from a $15 billion company to a $10 million now new digital company with double digit growth, we had to reformulate who it is. It was we help make your memories. Film, stock up on film, buy film during your holidays to it's around make, manage and move images and information. Kodak uses emotional technology to make those memories. So in essence you have to define it for different people.

Esther: Clearly you have done a very good job with Kodak in getting that 118 down to a science -

Jeffrey: Really quick. It's gotta apply to Kodak's perspective, both the B to B side and a B to C side. So it's gotta be for consumers as well as business owners. Now luckily most business owners that are listening to this don't have the complexity or the breadth that we had to cover at Kodak, but you can certainly cover it in your own business where what it is you're gonna deliver to that customer and how do you say it as succinctly as possible with the greatest value that they want to get off that fence and buy your product. That's what you wanna be able to do. By the way, I shouldn't be able to put somebody else's name in there. It's gotta be your name. It's gotta be your statement. It's gotta be your elevator pitch that only you uniquely own and then you gotta know it and every employee in your company's gotta know it.

Esther: By heart.

Jeffrey: Oh, by heart. You gotta live it -

Esther: Absolutely.

Jeffrey: -- breath it. You gotta drink the Kool-Aid, baby. It's the 118 Kool-Aid. Mix up a batch of it and drink it down. That's what you have to do.

Esther: That's great advice. I think a lot of companies stick a plaque on their wall and say this is our mission statement and this is what we do -

Jeffrey: And then we're done.

Esther: And they don't really know how to instill those values. It starts from the top up so how do executives trickle that information down and help employees feel that passion, too?

Jeffrey: Ask them. So tell me about your recent encounter with the 118. Who was the last one you gave the 118. What do they like about it. What didn't they like about it. Ask questions. Managers, leaders should be walking around saying hey, how can I help you do better. How are you delivering the 118. How many people did you deliver it to yesterday. How can I get you to double that. If I can get them to double it I just maybe doubled my potential for sales. That's the things business leaders should be doing. So as a CEO, as a CMO, as a CFO of a company I should be going out and taking a look at where my employees are having problems and what walls can I knock down because then they can do their job better. By them doing their jobs better I get to do my job better.

Esther: Absolutely.

Jeffrey: So that's really where you want to have a lot of that focus.

Esther: That's really cool. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and I'm here with Jeffrey Hayzlett. We'll be back with more after this.

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Esther: We're back with the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at the BusinessMakers.com. I'm back with one final segment with our guest today, Jeffrey Hayzlett and I feel like I've learned so much already from listening to you talk. I have ideas I'm gonna run back to my business and tell our CMO actually.

Jeffrey: Read the book.

Esther: I will. Oh, I already bought the book.

Jeffrey: Well good. Fantaz. Well let's get it for everybody in the company and then they'll know and they'll have a head start -

Esther: Absolutely. That's a great idea. We actually have a business library at our office so I'll definitely get a couple copies and put it in there.

Jeffrey: That's a great way of doing it and sharing it. That's one of the things I do a lot of times as a business owner or as a business leader. I find books like the last one was What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis. I got a copy of that and gave it to everybody. I read the book about Bernie Madoff called Betrayal and how he did it. Now I was fascinated by how he could sell and how he used the sales process to get all these people to give him money when he was obviously cheating them from day one. Although they didn't know it until a little bit later, but there were signs. So a lot of times I will grab books and hand them out to people all the time. It's a great way of, one, retaining the knowledge that you just read and then another way is to get other people to go the right way.

Esther: So tell me who your favorite authors are as someone who's now an author himself, who would you turn to, your go-to author?

Jeffrey: Well in the back of the book I have a list of every must-have book in your library. Things like I love Lee Iacocca. I can remember reading his very first autobiography. Of course he's updated it since then. I love the old tried and trues, Dale Carnegie, books like that. The Art of War. I also love some of the classics. So Napoleon, Hill, Augmendino. So those of you if you're in the sales and marketing, you know who I'm talking about. There's another book I loved called The Goal, which is a fantastic book. It's one of the all-time best sellers. Most people haven't heard of it, but those who are really in business leadership should read that. Harvey McKay, Swim with Sharks. There's a ton of those kinds of books that I love and I love reading. I read on average two books a week. I might get four books in a weekend and read or over the holidays or so forth, but you always find me with a book or a Kindle or a Nook now 'cause I'm plugging them all 'cause they're all selling mine. Now the iPad, of course. I got the iPad.

Esther: My last question for you today is what about actually writing the book? How did you even get inspired to do this?

Jeffrey: Well it's been a 15-year process basically where I've always been wanting to do it. Finally an agent came to me and said, 'You gotta write it and the time's right now. Would you come and do it?' I said, 'You sell it; I'll write it.' So she went out and sold it and so we started. I got a ghost writer with me because he knows how to write well. I know how to tell stories and as you've read the book, you know it's a story. I tell stories in the book. That's the way in which I give knowledge and it's a natural thing for me. So I basically just sit down every night for many months and just dictated. Then next day would look at the stories and then alter them and so forth. So for me it was a pouring out of the businesses that I've worked in and all the experiences I've had and how to show small businesses how to get big, how to do it quickly, how to avoid some of the mistakes and how to ask the right questions by looking at the mirror and taking The Mirror Test.

Esther: Awesome. Well thank you so much for being here. This has been very informative.

Jeffrey: Thank you.

Esther: Everybody please go out and buy The Mirror Test. Phenomenal book. You're gonna see it everywhere. If you don't already know about it just open the newspaper. You'll be seeing all about it. So thank you very much for being here. We appreciate it.

Jeffrey: Thank you.

Esther: You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at thebusienssmakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and that wraps up another episode of the BusinessMakers Show.