Recently retired as Senior Director at Medtronic, Eric Maass helped lead and accelerate the DFSS / DRM program for Medtronic and was recognized with Medtronic’s Star of Excellence Award and as a Technical Fellow.
Dr. Maass has more than forty years of experience, ranging from research and development through manufacturing, to director of operations for a $160 million business and director of design and systems engineering for Motorola’s RF Products Division.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Eric Maass about flawlessly launching businesses.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– Why you must have a target audience when you’re writing a book.
– How you must have clients who believe in your expertise before writing a book.
– How writing a book can lead to the right speaking engagements.
– Why having a book proves your worth to your readers.
– How you can use your book to generate large amounts of money.
Connect with Eric:
Links Mentioned:
flawlesslaunches.com
Guest Contact Info:
Facebook
facebook.com/SixSigmaExperts
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/eric-maass-9304a3
Rob Kosberg:
Welcome to the Publish Promote Profit podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kosberg. I have another great guest that I think you’re going to love, Dr. Eric Maass. He retired recently as the senior director at Medtronic and has really great stories. He is the bestselling author of two books and it’s very, very interesting how he’s used his books. I think you’re going to learn quite a bit from that. He was recognized with the Medtronic Star of Excellence and has more than 40 years of experience ranging from research and development, through manufacturing, and directing operations for $160,000,000 business. It goes on and on. I am very excited to have Eric with us today to share his wisdom about his, in particular, most recent book that we’re going to be talking about, Flawless Launches. So, Eric, thanks so much for being with us on the Published Promote Profit podcast. You told me a great story on the use of your books, and I think that’s going to be relatable for a lot of people that are listening that are thinking about writing a book to maybe change a career or maybe pivot in some way. Your books, they span decades. You wrote one a couple of decades ago. You launched your more recent one, Flawless Launches much more recently. Talk me through your first book and what all that looked like.
Dr. Eric Maass:
Thank you. I happen to have a copy of it over here. Let me start with the story about my first book. I actually kind of knew that I was going to make my first career transition, 12, 15 years ago. As you said, spanning some period of time. I had been working for Motorola a very long time and I actually left there, so that’s going to be part of my story in a moment, after 30 years. I’m, if anything, overly loyal to the companies I’ve worked for in my career. I was at Motorola for many, many years and I could kind of see the writing on the wall and I knew I was not going to be the with them very much longer. I did two things. The first thing was I decided to finish up my PhD, which is why you were able to introduce me as Dr. Eric Maass. When I got my PhD, it was so late in life that for the graduation ceremony, they thought I should go into the professor’s line, not the student’s line. Then around that same time somebody had referred Prentice Hall to me to help them look over a few of their books that were very, very technical, that their own internal people did not have enough expertise to work on. I did that a little bit for free, just voluntarily. Apparently, I impressed them a little bit and they said, “Hey, are you interested in writing a book?” I’m thinking, as I’m realizing, as part of my transition to leaving Motorola, my expertise, the credibility I’d established at Motorola, that’s not transferable. That does not come with me. I need to have some way to have some credibility at whatever new company I was going to end up with. It ended up being Medtronic, but that’s getting a bit ahead of my story. So anyway, I said, yes, let me go ahead and write this book. Then there was some good things and some not so good things about working with Prentice Hall. The main negative thing was I was not in control of how things went. They were in total control, and of course they had the expertise, but nonetheless. So, I wrote the book and I finished it in January in the timeframe that actually is relevant to you as well. Rob, the timeframe when we had that economic downturn in 2008, 2009 timeframe. I finished it in January 2009 and Motorola around that time is breaking into pieces and I was in the corporate group and corporate group no longer existed. I found myself not exactly off on the streets. Motorola was pretty gentle about letting me go. They actually gave me two weeks of pay for every year. I was there 30 years and they gave me 60 weeks of pay. It was one of the gentler departures. It was actually kind of nice of them, but nonetheless, I wanted to now work at another company. I’ve written this book, but then it takes them a long time to publish it. Around this time, because of the downturn in the economy, I actually interviewed at two companies, one of them, there were 500 applicants and they chose me. I was the successor out of the 500, and then months, and months, and months go by, while they’re trying to figure out whether they can hire the head count for one additional person. Suddenly, similar things happened in other companies. It was a really bad time for getting hired, even when you were the top candidate out of 500 people. That’s when Medtronic started talking about interviewing me. In August 2009, I’m getting ready to interview. It was on a Thursday and Prentice Hall is going to get me my first copies of my new book on Saturday, which is after Thursday. So, I’m contacting them, “can I get early copies?” They said, “No, there is no flexibility in the world.” So, I’m kind of a little bit upset. I’m going to go to this interview and this credibility of the book is not going to be with me, but Thursday morning I get a call from Medtronic saying, “Would you be terribly upset? One of your interviewers has to go out of town. We want to reschedule you to Monday.” I said, “Yes! Perfect. I’m willing to move it to Monday.”. Monday comes in, I put my book into my briefcase, wear a suit, carry a briefcase, looking very, very professional or very nerdy, whatever you prefer and I come into the meeting, and as soon as each of the interviewers, I’m interviewing with them, one at a time, says something, let me show you where it is in this book I just wrote. That gave me the credibility. Of course, I got the job. I worked at Medtronic and moved up relatively nicely and finished up as a program manager left as a senior director. So, I was retiring. That gets the story to the second part, but along the way, a lot of success stories using the methodologies that I’ll talk about, perhaps later, that’s in the book Flawless Launches It kind of summarizes Flawless Launches. I worked for Medtronic for 11 years and I’m of retirement age. I’m getting ready to think about retiring and everything else. I’d like to think that after 40 years as an engineer, I’m in pretty good shape for retirement. My thought process and kind of my goal is, “Well, I’m not the type of person to passively retire, just go off and watch TV, golf every Saturday and Sunday.” You know, that’s not me, maybe other people’s lifestyles, but me, I like to be engaged with the people. I like to feel like I’m contributing to something and helping people and things like that, so I wanted to have an active retirement. My hope was to get into retirement, have enough income from my savings, from a small pension I got from Motorola, and everything else. I wouldn’t have to worry about money and just be able to do this kind of stuff, that I enjoy doing at Medtronic, of teaching and coaching people. Do it now, but just a small amount, as much as I needed, just under my entire control. In August of 2020, Medtronic is offering a one-time V.E.R.P, volunteer early retirement program. Frankly, it wasn’t all that early to me, I’m a little bit older, but nonetheless, they call that V.E.R.P. My boss let me know he was going to take it. I had to keep it confidential and I was thinking about it. I went in with my wife to talk to our very good financial advisor and he’s got everything all nicely set up in this computer program, looking at all different possible scenarios. Along the line, they’re doing Monte Carlo simulation of different possible futures. By the way, Monte Carlo simulation is something I actually work on within methods I talk about in my book, Flawless Launches, Profitable Products. I’m very much aware of the value of Monte Carlo. So, he is doing Monte Carlo simulations, and it turns out that in his Monte Carlo simulation of my future, if I retire, based on this offer for Medtronic, in most cases, things look good, but there’s a relatively uncomfortable percentage of the time of the possible futures that don’t look quite so promising, where I might actually kind of run out of money at some point, unless I cut back my lifestyle much more. This is very disappointing to me. I was downright kind of upset, to be honest with you. So, I’m thinking about that. Of course, I’ve been thinking about the book and I’m thinking saying, “well, maybe I make this a little bit more serious. Maybe I bring in a certain amount of money with my new consulting company in retirement.” I semi-retire, and I actually make some money. I’m proposing difference amounts of monies per year, 40,000 per year, 50,000, 60,000, whatever else. He’s putting him into his little Monte Carlo simulations and starting to get up to a point where it’s a number that’s a little bit high for me, 80,000 a year. I’m not sure I want to do that, but I will be good at 80,000 per year. Now I’m getting committed to. Now I actually have to earn some money in retirement, which is not exactly what my plan was. I wanted to do it for fun because I wanted to. Anyway, we go through that now, of course the other possibility was I don’t retire, and I work for another year. That one looked also very, very promising as well. I had a little debate with my boss who had already said I’d retire, but I said, “Okay, I’ll go for it.” Now I need to have credibility with new clients. Now the number one success thing for any kind of business is to have customers to have clients. I wanted to have clients and, here I’m getting ready to start this venture. I don’t know how soon I need money, but I also know that at some point I have to have clients. This is to get me credibility, get me to the difference between the book. My first book is mostly for engineers and it’s great for engineers, I guess if in a little bit long and a little bit ponderous way, but great for engineers but those are not usually the financial decision makers. They’re not usually the one who make a decision where they’re going to bring in a contractor, or consultant, or training, or whatever else. I decided I need to have a book. I realized my target audience are the decision makers. We’re using manages, executives, and some of them have an engineering background. Some do not. Of course, they’re very busy people and I can’t give them a 350-page book. I need something like a hundred pages or so. Something that they actually might read. I realized that I really actually now had a purpose to writing the book that actually tied into my plans in the long term. I worked with, Bestseller Publishing and came out with this book. That came out in January as decided upon. I guess we can kind of talk a little bit about how that fed into my retirement situation but let me get to the bottom line. So here I am, almost exactly a year after I retired from Medtronic with, according to my financial planner, no worries. I made a lot more than 80,000, my first year, a lot more and enough that now all the Monte Carlo simulations, even with inflation and whatever else and all the other concerns, we’re good. So now I’m actually back to my original intention. I’m doing this because I enjoy it, because I like to make a difference and then it’s not because, “Oh, I need the money,” which is a much more comfortable situation to be in, in some way.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, that’s a lot to unpack, but let me unpack some of what I understand. With the first book, you, in essence, used it to transition from one job to another and you used it as a credibility and authority building piece and it worked. It got you, out of 500 candidates, the top spot and then actually landed you the position, even though it was not really a great hiring season. I love that. You know, I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years of being a part of Bestseller Publishing, certainly having this podcast. You know, I don’t know that I’ve talked to many people who have actually written a book to get a job. I love that. You’re talking about getting a job that puts you in a very, very high echelon of earners, and it was worthwhile. I think you would say it was very worthwhile for you to write that book and then use that book in such a way. You came right back around after 11, 12 years with Medtronic and did the exact same thing, except now your Flawless Launches book was about growing your consulting business because the Monte Carlo simulations didn’t have the zero probability that you wanted. There was a low probability of failure you didn’t want there, or at least comfortability, which you didn’t want. I love that. Thank you. There’s some nerdiness in there, doctors. Let’s talk about the most recent book and I am going to want to talk about how you’ve used it and if you’re willing to give some numbers of how the book helped you earn, bring on clients, and do everything you’ve done in your consulting business. Talk to me about who, ideally, Flawless Launches is for and what your message is to them. Is this a chief marketing officer in a corporation? Who is this geared toward?
Dr. Eric Maass:
Well, primarily it is for two types of individuals, both on the executive level, senior director, director, vice president, even higher than that. I am getting a little bit of a preface to something in a moment, but nonetheless, so usually, the vice president or senior director of engineering, product development, kind of things, R and D research and development, development engineering, the ones who are developing new products, and the people involved in the manufacturing, those people. These are the decision makers who want to have this go flawlessly. I wanted to have a book that was going to be relatively short. I wanted to engage these executives who are very, very busy. They have a lot of distractions in their life, a lot of things they need to get done. I don’t want to be another distraction. I wanted to be, basically sharing stories with them. That’s the best way to get them engaged. It is sharing stories that they can relate to, but success stories and all them being really verifiable, in fact, verifiably real success stories. I broke it down into four sections and one section could be for the marketing people, but they’re not the primary audience, they have other books were to tell them on the marketing, but then, deciding what products to do and, and how to gather the voice of your customers, your clients, to understand what their expectations are, and then how to develop the product and have developed in a way that you’re confident you’re going to meet the customer’s expectations and your robust against things that can go wrong on the development side. Then the third section is now to take into manufacturing. That’s where the executives on the manufacturing side, how to take these new products that often have all sorts of issues being transferred into production, how you can make that a flawless transition from product development, into manufacturing, into the supply chain. Then the last section was, “Okay, now here’s the organizational aspects. Here’s how you gain buy-in, here’s how you make sure it’s accessible for the organization.” This is what’s happened at companies that have done this.
Rob Kosberg:
Did you primarily share within the book, your experience at Medtronic, or did you pull in other stories, examples, things like that? Talk to me about your actual thought process in creating case studies, and examples, and things like that.
Dr. Eric Maass:
I gave some thoughts about using other people’s case studies in there. There are a few success stories that I was not involved with and I thought about it, but I had such a rich set of success stories that I decided, “These are all my own stories and I know them deeper than anybody else and anybody asking me questions I can answer.” They’re all things I was personally involved with now. Sometimes they were the things, I was the main character on, some of the times, I was the coach and coaching somebody else in doing them. I was engaged in every single one of them, they were all stories that I knew in vast detail about what was going on, that I was able to tell the story.
Rob Kosberg:
That is always our number one recommendation to people when they’re writing a book. First and foremost, if you can show your expertise by what you’ve already accomplished with a client, with somebody that you’ve helped, somebody that you’ve coached, something that you’ve done yourself and share that case study from that first-person experience. Like you said, no one’s going to know it better than you, number two, you are going to be proving, without trying to prove, your worth to the reader and to the person that hopefully will hire you, or at the very least learn from your experience. I love that. I’m so happy to hear that you’ve done that. Talk to me. Let’s change gears a little bit and talk to me about the use of the book. As much as you’re willing to tell me and to tell our listeners about how successful it was, because I don’t even know how successful it was, but it sounds like it went really, really well. I want to know details, as much as you’re willing to tell me, how much did you earn? How did you use it? How did it work in conjunction with everything else? Can you go through some of that with me?
Dr. Eric Maass:
I’m not sure if I’m talking about how much I earned, except what I said earlier, is that I no longer have a problem in the future. So, you know that. Definitely more than 80,000.
Rob Kosberg:
Is it multiples of 80?
Dr. Eric Maass:
It’s multiple 80,000’s, to the point that, my wife is actually worried about making too much money for Medicare. I say you’re probably the only wife in the world that’s worrying that her husband’s making too much money in retirement. I mean, your first year in a business is usually, very, very weak, and actually when my wife was talking to our advisor about our Medicare, he said, “you know, I’m not used to people actually making more in retirement than they did before the retirement,” but actually I will have made more this year, my first year of retirement, more than I was making my last year as a senior director. That’s tremendously shocking to me. I did not really expect that at all. It’s a good problem to have, I guess. When I was working for Medtronic, I’m something of a workaholic, I was working 60, 80 hours a week. Here I am working a maximum 24 hours. I think last week was my longest week of the year, 24 hours because everything piled up after Thanksgiving. You know, I’m not working. I have more chance to relax, take my dogs for walks and everything else and still making a lot more money than I expected. Basically, as soon as I retired, fortunately some of the people that I knew from Motorola, but more people that I knew from Medtronic, knew of my successes. They started trying to bring me in and give some little guest lectures, and little bits of overviews at some of their companies. So, I did that. When the book came out in January, I was able to give a talk at IBM. I’m giving a talk at IBM to some of their executives. One of the guys who knew me from Medtronic is now at IBM and he’s trying to have me convince them and we order copies of the book and hand it out to some of the executives. It gives me credibility when I’m giving my talk to the IBM people. I got a contract with them, and it’s been going very, very great. Now we’re talking about extending it and going further next year, expanding it even further next year and similarly with some other companies. I think I actually mentioned this to Bob, and I think you got a wind of it as well. One person got a copy of my book, Flawless Launches, Profitable Products and in there, I also have some templates of scorecards, dashboards to show how you’re doing at these different phases of product development. He puts together a presentation and he calls me on the phone and we spend some time and he put together a presentation based on my book Flawless Launches, Profitable Products and using his own version of my template. I said, “I’ll let you have my Excel spreadsheet that I used to generate those.” He has the Excel template that I used that created that dashboard. So, he puts that together, shows me his presentation and gives it to me on a Friday. He gives a presentation to four vice presidents at his company and they love it. They said, “Wow, this is what we should be doing,” and they said, “you should present it to the CEO.” I said, “Oh, you’re presenting?” He said, “Yep. I’m presenting.” They put him on the calendar, and he presented to the CEO. The CEO says, “This is the way we need to do new products.” So a few days ago, I met with him, I got to help him work out his plan to execute. Now, this is an expectation from the CEO. I said, “should I send a copy of my book to the CEO?” He said, “not yet, in the near future, but you know, let’s keep it going.” It got all the way up to the CEO, this approach, taking some screenshots and from variations of my book. The CEO loved it. This is the way we need to develop new products. That’s the way that company’s going to be developing all their new products by order of the CEO.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s incredible. What’s revenue of that company in particular?
Dr. Eric Maass:
I think it’s around 10 billion a year. This is not a small company.
Rob Kosberg:
This is a CEO of a $10 billion company, that’s fantastic. I’m hearing a similar thread and I actually, personally think this is the absolute best way for consultants, especially consultants to the C-suite, to corporations, to grow their businesses. It is using your book in conjunction with speaking engagements, even small speaking engagements, like you said. One was just speaking to four senior VPs within the company. It doesn’t even have to be a large speaking engagement. It can be a small one, but it’s one with the right people in the room. Have you done more of that?
Dr. Eric Maass:
Well, right now it’s been pretty much all virtual. The meeting I was supposed to have last week was with that company, I just mentioned, was supposed to be in person. Now, at the last minute, with the new variation of COVID, travel was canceled. we did it all virtual. Everything’s been virtual. It’s amazing. I’ve done all this well with this year, with a book, during this time, when everything changed in terms of how you do consulting, how you do training and very much able to handle that change and still be effective. Having that credibility is really important to do that. You know, why am bothering to listen to you? You have to have the credibility, I think, to be able to get into the decision makers and have them be able to make a favorable decision. I think I lost the thread of what you were asking me though. I may have gone off topic a little. You said if there were other companies. A year and a month ago, I retired.
Rob Kosberg:
You were dead in the water, and not in a bad way. You were just starting,
Dr. Eric Maass:
Just starting, exactly, from a complete stop. Here I am, a year later and I have 10 corporate clients and just added my 11th.
Rob Kosberg:
Thank you for sharing that, Eric. I think there’s a couple of things that bear repeating. One is, it sounds like you’re working a half to a third of what you did in your corporate job. You just had your busiest week, which was 24 more hours. That’s not bad, for your busiest week of the year. You’re making more and maybe a multiple more than what you did when you were working full-time. You’ve done it with your book, and you’ve done it with speaking engagements, and you are the real deal. The things that you’ve done at both Motorola and Medtronics led to millions and millions of dollars in revenue to those companies. Now you’re just in essence, bringing your talents now to bear for other companies in very, very specific areas as a consultant. That’s perfect. Anyone that has worked 30 years or 40 years in an expertise like you, I think could do exactly what you are doing. All they need is the credibility and the willingness to go out and do a little speaking. It’s amazing what you’ve done in a year.
Dr. Eric Maass:
Well, thank you.
Rob Kosberg:
Other thoughts, if not, I’d like to direct people. I don’t know if you want to direct them to a website or obviously, they can get your book, Flawless Launches on Amazon. Where, should we send folks?
Dr. Eric Maass:
It is probably good to go to Amazon, Flawless Launches, Profitable Products. I recently dropped the price. I figured Christmas season and everybody’s dropping the price. Except for the fact that we have this inflation, that things are going up, so the price is a little lower, both for the e-book and for the paperback. I reference in the book my website, flawlesslaunches.com. You know, it’s aligned very much with the book. It doesn’t quite flow off the tongue as easy as it might. We talked about speaking engagements, I’ve given speaking engagements for universities. Arizona State University most recently, went very, very well. They want me to give it again, and that I’ve given it a couple times to American Society of Quality chapters. Now they’re all kind of spreading it out, “Hey, this guy has some interesting things to share.” I’ve been giving some speaking engagements, basically getting the message out there.
Rob Kosberg:
It is something we like to talk about. Your book is not the end of your story. It is the beginning of the story. It’s using the book. In your case, you’ve used the book beautifully with speaking engagements and as a credibility source and positioning tool. Thanks for being on. flawlesslaunches.com is where people can go to learn a little bit more, and obviously get the book. You can find the book on Amazon and hopefully you have a link on your website as well, and a way to connect. Thanks for being on the podcast today. Thanks for sharing your experience.
