Jeremy Weisz 17:19
You created, like, just, I guess this scarcity that made people want to go out and get people right, because if you gave them unlimited, no big deal. But that scarcity, I mean, we know it’s kind of one. I know one of my favorite books is Influence by Robert Cialdini, and he talks about that as one of the things, um, that on that note. I want to get into eventually you obviously decided to start your own business. We’ll get into that, but I do want to circle back to the framework a little bit, because this kind of relates to all the stuff that you’ve learned over the past couple decades. And just talk about the Mi6 framework.
Chris Herbert 18:09
Yeah, can you expand the browser so you can see the framework over top of the text? Yeah, that’s good. So this, this came out of a lot of the work that I did at Unis Lumin, actually is I was learning about the things that I thought were key components that would make for a really good, sustainable marketing program. And there are six components that we implement all the time, or we’re cognizant of. So for example, value exchange is really simply just, oh, I can go down into, yeah, I’ll go to the value exchange piece first, which I think is really important. So value, from a business model perspective is about how do you create, deliver and capture value. And creating value means, what do you offer, and then delivery is, how do you offer it? So, for example, in your case, you offer turnkey podcasts for organizations so that they can get quality podcasts done, probably faster and better than if I did it myself. This is an example.
So for us, it’s — we want to be able to deliver marketing programs, you know, so that it helps, helps entrepreneurs start to grow and potentially exit at some point in time. But the business model, any business really has to be built on three things. How do you create, deliver, capture value? So that’s the one piece in terms of value exchange, the. Other part of value exchange is relationships, right? So, and this is something that I think is really an integral part of our framework and just the way to do business in today’s day and age. It’s not just transactional relationships. So our relationship is not yet transactional in the sense that we’re Mi6 is outsourcing podcast development with you at this stage, but it could be in the future. Instead, the value that’s being exchanged is my knowledge and my experience and things through this podcast. So that’s a different form of value. It’s cultural and network. It’s who do I know. It’s what do I know, sort of thing.
So value exchange is really important from a business model perspective and relationships. I won’t go into any more details about the value exchange part, but that’s really important, right? So, and the other part to the framework is, you know, today it’s around a search-optimized website and content. Content is something that should be used at various stages of the buying cycle, and if you can, it should be search engine, engine optimized, so that it’s geared towards search results or search intent, right? Just as an example. The next couple pieces are, are important too, is stakeholders and channels. So today, stakeholders are your customers.
They’re your partners. They’re your prospects, they’re members of your network. And the channels are the routes in which you communicate to whether it’s through social, through email, through, other ways in which you can reach people. Very important part, and that never changes what channels you use, is really determines on who your audience is, that sort of thing. So for some people, it could be Facebook. For some people, it could be LinkedIn. It depends on who their target audience is, etc, etc. The last, the next part is really the frameworks, methodologies and principles. So our framework is one, but there are lots of frameworks out there that we will look at and implement and methodology, standard operating principles. I mean, you were telling me about somebody.
Jeremy Weisz 18:42
Adi, yeah.
Chris Herbert 19:39
Well, yeah, where, there are these recipes, these best practices that you can implement. I mean Ash Maurya, I don’t know if you know him from Lean, the Lean Stack and Running Lean, he has a really amazing set of frameworks for startup founders to use, including the Lean Canvas, map, customer, factory, interaction, road maps, these are all frameworks that sort of help short circuit you and help you get further ahead faster, if that makes sense. And principle, this is it, right? Yeah, yeah, perfect. Yeah, yeah. So those three things, you know, value exchange, search, optimize website, and stakeholders and challenger kind of the front end of the business, these are things typically that people would see and experience, right? They’d see how you’re exchanging value.
They’d go to your website, they consume your content. And then stakeholders are, you know, your customers, and the channels in which you communicate. The back end is do you have a marketing system in place that helps you manage everything? So for example, if you’re wondering what type of traffic is coming to your website, do you have analytics in place that tells where your traffic’s coming from, who’s converting from, what source is that sort of stuff. So these systems and tools need to be tied into how you go to market? And we call it a marketing system. And then the last part is the marketing Integration Program, which is what people buy from us. So, we’ve slotted that into the framework as well.
Jeremy Weisz 24:02
And talk about that, that piece.
Chris Herbert 24:05
Yeah, so essentially, the way we like to work with our clients is, you know, we’ll work with an entrepreneur, and we’ll say, tell us about where you want to go with the business, and then we’ll apply the methodology or framework into putting together a program that’s integrated into the way they work. Too often entrepreneurs kind of see marketing as an afterthought, or something that I did, men should do whereas it should be integrated into their meetings. It should be discussed all the time in terms of how they’re going to market, in terms of what their value proposition is and it needs. It’s a mindset thing as well as a systematization of marketing into the organization. It’s difficult to sort of describe in 30. Seconds or less. But essentially, the way that a business needs to go to market is they need to integrate marketing.
So the example we talked about in terms of the events, if you just look at an event in and of itself, but don’t integrate it into the sales process or recognize that there’s a constraint. In this case, the constraint was we have a very what I called a big honking carrot, which was this guy who everybody wanted to meet and learn from, and the sales rep to a cloud clamoring for his attention. So let’s integrate him into the way we want to market the business. But let’s do it in a way that he’s in front of 30 or 40 or 50 people at an event, so that you as a sales rep can put more people in front of him who are in the sales cycle. See what I mean by in terms of integrating, you’re integrating all of these things into the way you need to do business.
Jeremy Weisz 25:57
Yeah, 100% and we’ll give an example, because I know you did work with SAP, and then maybe an interesting example there, but when you say constraint, Chris, it makes me think of the book, The Goal, I don’t know, yeah, you’re nodding. That’s one of my favorite books, the process of ongoing improvement. And it’s literally, I’m the and I’m pulling it up over here so I can see it, but it’s the Theory of Constraints, right? So you read that book or seen that one?
Chris Herbert 26:34
I tried to read it. It’s extremely, extremely technical.
Jeremy Weisz 26:40
I listened to it so it was easier. It was easier. Yeah, I don’t know if I could read it, but I love the story there.
Chris Herbert 26:49
Yeah, and that’s really something that I think entrepreneurs don’t think enough about, is, you know, what are the constraints that are in place, and how do we, you know, address them, but maybe take advantage of them. So in the case of SAP, one of the constraints they had with the influencer program that we ran for them was that they couldn’t pay influencers, nor should they to write and talk and advocate their software in such a way that CFOs, who were key decision makers in terms of buying their software, cared about saps value proposition. So, what we had to do is we had to find influencers that had the ears and respect of CFOs and ask them to write about, learn about, maybe, advocate about what SAP software could do for enterprise customers, and, you know, get sap into the conversation at the CFO table. So we had to figure out a way in which, why would an influencer really care about SAP and what would they need? What would they want in a relationship with SAP?
So, and hopefully this answer your question, we said, okay, so here’s one person she has access to hundreds, if not 1000s, of CFOs that respect her, and she writes a lot about the CFO role, generally speaking, she would get value out of knowing and talking to a very, senior executive at SAP. As you go up the chain of command, it becomes harder and harder and harder to have a relationship with very seasoned senior-level executives. So we put that in place, we said you can talk to the SVP of governance, you know, and compliance, and you can get an exclusive interview with him, for sure. For another one, it was an influencer who had a following of CFOs, and she was an analyst at a small independent ambulance.
So she was out on her own. But again, she didn’t have a strong relationship with SAP, and she wanted to establish a stronger relationship with the same sort of thing. You can talk to the product manager of this suite of software and get into the nitty gritty, and then you can go back to your CFOs and sort of have a more intimate discussion with them about what that software does, what it doesn’t do, that sort of thing. Yeah. So that was really important. The other thing we learned in that, I’m not sure, necessarily a constraint, but we found one guy, he had 450 followers on Twitter. This was back in the day before it was an X.
Jeremy Weisz 30:24
I still call it Twitter, but yeah.
Chris Herbert 30:26
Yeah, yeah. So generally, the counterintuitive thing would be, well, he doesn’t have a lot of followers. You know, how much influence can he have? And what we learned was he had a serious amount of influence, because the 450 people following them were all CFOs.
Jeremy Weisz 30:43
It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.
Chris Herbert 30:45
Yeah. And then it was about, whenever he talked about things, the amount of virality in terms of what he posted was traveled further than something that I would post. And back then, I had about 12,000 followers. So that was very interesting learning experience in terms of what we were able to work with. And the other thing was, we didn’t need a lot of influencers. We didn’t need hundreds. We only had seven.
Jeremy Weisz 31:13
Love it, Chris, this is what I glean from what you said, and I love that. You identified kind of the ideal client, customer decision maker right for you, as CFOs at the time, and you kind of reverse-engineered the people who had really strong followings with those people, in this case, CFOs. And then you just looked at, what can you do to deliver as much value as possible to that person? In that case, they probably wouldn’t be able to get access to a senior executive, or whatever it is. And it kind of goes back to what you said before, earlier in the conversation about delivering value, and like you did the same thing with the influencers, as you did with potential customers or clients too.
So yeah, going back to SAP for a second, talk about, okay, you have a successful career Director of Marketing in a lot of these companies, talk about getting your first strike it out on your own, because you could have kept that route and been very successful. Your first client you got as your own entity, or whatever for it could be. Doesn’t the actual first but, like one of the first milestones a client that you got after you started.
Chris Herbert 32:54
Yeah, so this is a good thing to chat about. I’ve always said that the most important asset that any individual has is their network, and that has always been the case for me. So what happened with Mi6 is when I left Unis Lumin, I was on good terms with the owners. I had established through success, a pretty good reputation amongst folks at Cisco, which is a large telecommunications company. Some people may not know because they kind of run the internet. They probably still do. So I already sort of left a good impression with the people at Cisco, and Cisco became my first client,
Jeremy Weisz 34:00
It’s a great first client. What were the services you were offering?
Chris Herbert 34:05
So, what they wanted to do is they wanted to tell they wanted to help other integrators, Cisco resellers how to launch a social media strategy. What this whole social network thing was about and train them on how to implement integrate social media into their business from a marketing and support perspective. So if you go back to the framework, you know, those are key new channels that were emerging that many of the system integrators had no idea what to do. And the same with content. Content and blogging back then, was starting to become a thing. So, word of mouth and just what started it. And, you know, having a good success criteria and strong connections with people helped.
And from there, focusing on building a strong network going forwards. You know, has always been something that individuals and brands need to think about and implement. And the biggest problem I find right now with companies and maybe jumping ahead here too much, but is that they really still haven’t figured out how to build a network around their brand. You know, in a community, they think they’re followers of their community, but they’re not, and that’s where we’re trying to help some of our clients now is, if your top sales rep leaves, is their book of business going with them, or they’re going to stay with you, which has always been a problem.
You know, if your top sales reps leave, you know, are you gonna lose those customers? Because that sales rep is pretty much the only reason why the customers stayed with them, because they could probably get the same type of thing elsewhere, but they want the relationship right.
Jeremy Weisz 35:52
What did you decide, Chris at the time, how did you decide to charge? Because I could see you don’t want to charge too little than Cisco. I mean, Cisco, right? You also don’t want to charge too much because, like, this is your first client. I want to get this business right. So how do you navigate what to charge?
Chris Herbert 36:19
Well, back then, it was kind of like a sales conversation where I kind of knew how much I needed to earn to keep the lights on. I had some funds in the bank that we were using as seed capital, but I didn’t really want to use it. I wanted to be customer-funded, which is something that any entrepreneur really should think about, is how to be customer-funded first. But I just picked the number out of the air, but I thought, this is probably worth $5,000 bucks, and I need to earn this much, in the next six months, if I’m going to do it for a six month period would the follow on be, you know, around $2,500 a month to continue it, to continue to do them so. And I always knew that I wanted to charge something by the month, as opposed to by the project.
So fast forwards of today, we sort of positioned our pricing so that you can buy a service from us at, as low as $2,500 a month, and you’re going to get a team of people, including a marketing manager and a CMO that you would never, ever be able to get If you hired them, because it’s the quality of the person, and their ability and competency to execute. And execution today is a combination of speed and quality, unfortunately, and those two sometimes are a bit of an oxymoron, but speed and quality are very important. So we’ve sort of priced.
Jeremy Weisz 38:00
There’s some saying, Chris, I don’t remember what it is. It’s like, you can’t have all three. It’s like, what is it? Speed, quality, and there’s something else. Yeah, I don’t know what it is.
Chris Herbert 38:10
I remember that, yeah, yeah. I remember that.
Jeremy Weisz 38:13
And you can choose two of the three, but you can’t have all three, but I can’t remember what the third one is.
Chris Herbert 38:19
I know what you’re referring to, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 38:21
I’ll look it up as you’re talking a bit.
Chris Herbert 38:24
So I always like the idea of SaaS models, how do you charge on a monthly fee, as opposed to project based? And it’s easier to sort of predict cash flow that way. So that’s time we run the business today.
Jeremy Weisz 38:35
It’s speed, cost or quality. Yeah, you could choose two, not all three, yeah, speed cost or quality, anyway.
Chris Herbert 38:47
Yeah, maybe I’m trying to do all three with speed cost and quality.
Jeremy Weisz 38:51
Well, that’s I guess, why you’re successful. But it’s tough to do, very tough to do, right? So that’s interesting from the charging perspective. And then you mentioned team. How did your team evolve throughout the year? So obviously, it started out as you. What the team look like throughout the years?
Chris Herbert 39:22
So, we’ve deliberately focused in on, when we have to expand the team, that the concern I’ve always had is, the cost of employees, right? So it’s not that I don’t want to have employees at all. It’s just I wanted to sort of work with other entrepreneurs as opposed to have an employee, and we’ve been doing that for the past 10 years, is whenever we need additional support, we will bring in a partner to do various things. So we had a fintech company, for example, and we were charging $10,000 a month, and it was a full outsourced marketing program. So it was content, web, HR, events, all of it. And the goal was, we were brought in by venture capitalists. And the goal was, we want to prepare this business for exit. And all the people we brought on board were all specialists who own their own companies. So we had an event management company come in, and they didn’t have an Mi6 agency address, email address. We didn’t hide anything. So that’s been our model ever since.
Jeremy Weisz 40:50
Yeah, you bring in a team of experts, really, for the projects. Yeah. Maybe, if you look at, I guess, I think of it as almost building a house or something like that. I mean, there’s someone who’s kind of managing everything, making just orchestrated make sure it all go together. But all those people are typically individual company. It’s not one company typically. I mean, there’s, I’m sure there’s ones out there, but the ones I’ve seen, they have this expert who’s an expert electrician, they bring them and they have the expert plumber, they bring them and they’re not all under one company. Is that kind of a fair comparison, or?
Chris Herbert 41:28
Yeah, general contractor type of thing, yeah. And it’s worked so far. Will it work in the future? I don’t know. I don’t know. I think iteration is important. I took on a partner for a while, and it worked for a while, but then, well, the good news is it allowed me to take a six-month walkabout where I was thinking, hey, do I want to continue to do Mi6 or, there’s this other thing that I want to look into. And she was able to run the agency while I was figuring out what I wanted to do next. And it turned out that I wanted to continue on with Mi6, in launch area 81 so, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 42:17
Yeah, there’s two things I want to touch on before we finish the interview. One is AREA 81 and the other one is KPIs, and it’s not what people think of as KPIs, right? Obviously. Let’s start. I want to end on AREA 81 and what that is, and talk about that. But talk about KPIs, right? What that means. I find that kind of intriguing on your site. I’m going to pull it up in a second so people can see it. But, yeah, talk about that.
Chris Herbert 42:57
You talking about the key person of influence experiment, exactly. So this is probably one of my this is an experiment. I love experimenting. And the fact that you talked about person of influence the book, what was the book that you were mentioning? The influence? Keep key influence.
Jeremy Weisz 43:19
Oh. Robert Cialdini, yes, Influence.
Chris Herbert 43:23
Yeah, this whole notion of influence has always been interesting to me. And you know, we ran the influencer program for SAP. And influencer marketing is seen as the in thing today how do we get people to create content for us and advocate for us, and maybe pay them, maybe not pay them, that sort of thing. And it’s sort of grown into a very large industry. And I stumbled across Daniel Priestley’s methodology, which is his key person of influence methodology. And this guy is running multiple businesses.
Jeremy Weisz 44:03
I never heard of this book until I was looking at your website and I found it. So, yeah, yeah.
Chris Herbert 44:11
So part of my experiment in this is trying to figure out whether this is a framework that I can implement myself. So I thought I’d try to implement it myself, and I’m going through the motions until March of 2025, finding out whether this methodology can work for me, and if it does, or when it does, whether I can implement it for other people through a marketing program. So if you take a look at an entrepreneur that wants to influence, have influence in a specific industry, for example, this Daniel’s methodology could be a framework to implement as an example.
Yeah. So I thought, Okay, well, I’m going to do it a little different. I’m not just going to do a book report or talk about it, a blog about it. I’m actually going to implement it and ask people if they want to understand and learn with me, and then sign up and have access to my lessons learned. And again, you’ll see that you can access that one because you have to subscribe. So I’m testing to see whether anybody will subscribe, and my goal is to get 100 subscribers by March 2025, and I have four so far.
Jeremy Weisz 45:25
It’s free, so.
Chris Herbert 45:26
It’s free. But I haven’t achieved traction, and I’m not discouraged.
Jeremy Weisz 45:33
Well, it’s been nine days.
Chris Herbert 45:35
Well, no, it’s been a month and a half. Okay, whatever. Yeah, yeah. So it’s fine. I mean, I like to experiment and I like to learn, so I’m going to invite you to participate in it.
Jeremy Weisz 45:48
Yeah, I’ll sign up. Yeah, I’ll be number five or whatever.
Chris Herbert 45:54
Yeah. The idea behind it is that every week or so I basically will share what I’ve done and how it’s working, where it isn’t working, what my goals are, and people can follow along and learn with me. Yeah, so that’s what that is. I did it years and years ago, something similar, where I wanted to really learn something and apply it, not just read about it, but actually apply it. Really important to be able to, even you read a book. I mean, a lot of people say I don’t have time to read, which is a weird thing to say, but I understand we’re sort of pushed and pulled in so many directions. So I said, you know, well, I want to learn how to apply this, and I’m going to apply it while I’m learning it.
Jeremy Weisz 46:45
Yeah? So, no, I love that. Yeah, AREA 81.
Chris Herbert 46:52
Yeah, it’s my new baby.
Jeremy Weisz 46:57
And you could see, if you’re watching the video, you could obviously see it behind, yeah.
Chris Herbert 47:00
Yeah. And so first of all, AREA 81 stands for a rural entrepreneurship accelerator. And 81 is, there’s a certain meaning to the numbers eight and one that are geared around being a warrior, working hard, pursuing your dreams, that sort of thing. There is sort of this subtle reference, or maybe not so subtle reference, to AREA 51 which is, you know, what’s in that building, or what are they doing? They’re doing unique, innovative things. You know, there’s some of these weird technologies, new technologies, that sort of thing, new things happening. So we’re going to play up on that a little bit. But what I’ve noticed since I moved out of Oakville, which is to set aside of Toronto, is, there’s a need, really, to help entrepreneurs improve their chances of success.
This is actually across Canada, the success rate of entrepreneurship is dismal. It’s really tough to be a successful entrepreneur, very tough, but there’s been progress in understanding, you know, what it takes to be successful. And you start to see that through accelerators like Y Combinator, they seem to have a success formula. And it’s a combination of things. It’s access to people who have been there, done that. It’s a common understanding of the steps you should take in order to start, grow and scale your business.
There are new frameworks coming out in terms of business model, Canvas, maps and other methodologies, but we don’t see them enough in terms of them being common. And then the other thing is, just not knowing the right people at the right time, and being able to get free advice from people who want to give it, who have been there, done that, these things are all missing. So AREA 81 is going to bring everything together for rural entrepreneurs who are kind of faced with some challenges that urban entrepreneurs tend not to experiences in terms of quantity of contacts, number of access to customer markets, not really knowing how to expand into other markets, that sort of thing. And what’s interesting is we’re applying the Lean Canvas and Lean Stack methodologies from Ash Maurya, who wrote the book Running Lean. And we’re running AREA 81 through it as if it’s a startup itself.
So we’re learning as we go. So this experimentation, thing that I do with the KPI experiment, I’m also doing with AREA 81, and trying to figure out, how do we get to the business model growth stage within 36 months, applying their methodology and utilizing all the tools that they offer? So I’ve become a level one coach, and I’m going to level two and level three certification right now. And it’s interesting, because he brings up this concept of constraints, right? An entrepreneur needs to identify, what are the constraints that are making my business, not successful? And how do I limit those constraints? And that’s just one example, but AREA 81 is really designed to, you know, if somebody wanted to say, well, you know, how would you compare it to something else? It’s the Canadian version of a Y Combinator for rural entrepreneurs.
Jeremy Weisz 48:11
Is this for Canada and US, or just Canada?
Chris Herbert 49:44
Just for Canada right now, and just for gray Bruce, which is the region that I’m in, but eventually we’ll want to go to other rural markets in Canada once we’ve got traction for gray Bruce.
Jeremy Weisz 51:16
Chris, this has been hugely valuable. I really appreciate you sharing your expertise, your knowledge, your years of experience with us. I want to encourage people to check out. You can check out the website, mi6agency.com, to learn more. And you can check out more episodes of the podcast. And also point out where people can find your podcast?
Chris Herbert 51:44
Yeah, so it’s on the website. It’s called the Rural Entrepreneur Podcast series.
Jeremy Weisz 51:54
Yeah, so everyone could go to mi6agency.com and navigate to the podcast from there.
Chris Herbert 52:00
Yeah, if they just do a search for Rural Entrepreneur, it will pop up.
Jeremy Weisz 52:06
Any favorite episodes or guests on that one.
Chris Herbert 52:14
There’s 18 of them so far. Yeah, I would say there’s too many. I’d rather not pick one.
Jeremy Weisz 52:28
I want to point someone to one of them. Just they could start somewhere, right?
Chris Herbert 52:32
Okay, one of them is about ginger. Yeah, Ginger Bugs Arise, a tale of resilience, community, and innovation and entrepreneurship. Very interesting story about a rural entrepreneur that has built a consumer packaging company a beverage basically, it’s a sort of a more nutritional source of drink. And she’s building a company around it. She was on Dragon’s Den, which is Canadian’s version of Shark Tank. Yeah, really, I’ve watched it, yeah. Interesting woman.
Jeremy Weisz 53:17
What kind of drinks are they? Are they like? I don’t know why I’m pitching kombucha, for some reason, but…
Chris Herbert 53:23
Yeah, yeah. So that’s within the same category. It’s ginger. It’s made from ginger root. And it’s a drink that is designed to be more healthy for you. It’s carbonated. They’re in Whole Foods. In the story behind how they got into Whole Foods was about her meeting somebody at an event in Meaford, which is a small town. And that whole colliding with somebody, meeting somebody who was a buyer at Whole Foods in small-town Ontario is such a cool story. So now she’s trying to raise capital, and we really want her to continue to, we’d like for her to make all of it here right now, she has to source ginger from from another country, so we’re talking to farmers in the area to see if they’ll grow ginger. So again, you know this idea of kind of figuring out ways to network people together and exchange value, create value within a network, that’s kind of what I like about what AREA 81 could be, is who within this network of people can build something bigger for everybody and then sell it to the world.
Jeremy Weisz 54:45
Love it, Chris, I want to be the first one to thank you. Check out Mi6 Agency, more episodes of the podcast, and we will see everyone next time. Thanks, Chris.
Chris Herbert 54:56
Thanks all the best. Appreciate it.
