Helping Business Owners Communicate Better and Sell More featuring Jim Rowe

Jim Rowe, a marketing veteran of 45 years with clients and agency positions with: Coke, Cutty Shark and InterMark. He is the best-selling author of, Get Your Ducks in a Rowe – Business Writing & Communication which teaches the 10-step formula to Think, Write, Present and Sell more effectively. His second book, Get Your ducks in a Rowe – Learn The A-D-A-P-T-E-R Method of Strategic Business Communication, teaches the holistic approach to critical thinking, communication, and execution.

 

Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Jim Rowe about helping business owners communicate better and sell more.

 

Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:

– How many mid-sized businesses need help with marketing expertise.

– Why writing and critical thinking are critical skills for business owners.

– How trademarking your work is a critical step in marketing.

– Why effective communication is vital for the success of any business.

 

Connect with Jim:

Links Mentioned:
jimrowemarketing.com

Guest Contact Info:
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/jim-rowe-8751166

Rob Kosberg:

Hey, welcome, everybody. It’s Rob Kosberg here, excited to be back speaking to a really smart person. I get to do that a lot with my podcast, so welcome to the Publish. Promote. Profit podcast. Jim Rowe is our guest today. Jim is a marketing veteran of 45 years, so scars and all, I look forward to chatting with him about that. He’s worked with clients and agency positions with Coke, Cutty Sark, Intermark, many, many others. He’s the best-selling author of Get Your Ducks In A Rowe, Business Writing & Communication, teaches a 10-step formula to think, write, present and sell more effectively. That was recently launched just a few weeks ago, and book number two is already coming out, so you are making up for lost time, my friend. Book number two is Get Your Ducks in A Rowe, Book 2 Learn the A-D-A-P-T-E-R Method of Strategic Business Communication, teaching the holistic approach to critical thinking, communication and executive. Jim, thanks for being on the podcast today.

Jim Rowe:

It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Rob Kosberg:

Awesome. I’d love to start with a little bit of what you’re currently working on and doing. You’ve been in the marketing business for a long, long time. You, of course, have your marketing company. Tell me, are you serving clients currently in coaching? What’s business look like for you right now?

Jim Rowe:

Well, I have kind of two roles. For many years, I’ve worked on the client side, then switched to the agency, and then I retired in 2016, and I found I was bored, so I ended up starting my own little agency out of the house, Jim Rowe Marketing. I got a couple of good clients and wasn’t looking to work 70, 80 hours a week anymore driving into Manhattan. I usually work with people 12 to 18 months. I help reposition them, rebrand them, and then move on because they don’t need to be paying me for managing social media posts. That’s probably not my strength, anyway. So, what I’ve done is I have this agency, and now I’m down to one client, which is perfect. We’re about to launch a new business in the next week or two. It’s a new live-streaming music, live music streaming site. I’m a musician since I was 12, so to me, it’s great, and then it’s given me the opportunity in the time to work on this book, although this takes a lot of effort still, too, particularly self-publishing.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, it does. Well, any kind of publishing does. I mean, if Hillary Clinton needs to go on tour and go on podcasts and television shows and do speaking engagements, and everybody in the world knows who she is, then certainly you and I need to do that, as well because people don’t know us as well. You’re certainly making the rounds. Your books are very, very well-done. Of course, I was on your website looking at your books. I know one has just launched. The other is going to be launched soon.

Jim Rowe:

In April, yeah.

Rob Kosberg:

We’ll get into those. I want to learn a little bit more about your expertise. You mentioned that you retired, you cut back. Congratulations for retiring. After 45 years in marketing, you deserve it, although you evidently are a glutton for punishment. You came back for more.

Jim Rowe:

My wife keeps saying, “I thought you retired.”

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, I get it. I get it. I don’t know that I’ll ever retire myself, at least not fully. Tell me, what does a good client look like for you? This is a company that maybe has been around or not? Tell me who is a good client for you and what are the problems that you’re helping that client solve?

Jim Rowe:

You mean for the agency side?

Rob Kosberg:

For your agency, yes, for what you do, correct.

Jim Rowe:

Typically, it’s a small to mid-sized client. They don’t have any marketing expertise. I’m an outsourced CMO. That’s what I’ve been doing for many years. It’s interesting, or what they call fractional CMO, whatever you want. What I’m able to bring is my expertise in doing this for a long time, A. B, I found I align myself. I’ve been managing these kind of team for a long time, but I didn’t want to have a whole team that I had to pay for. I work out of my house, and I have a cadre of really, really great freelancers that I have worked with in the past, even when I was at my other agencies. It’s worked out very well. We’ll come in. We’ll analyze the marketplace. We’ll do the A-D-A-P-T-E-R Method. We’ll analyze the business. We’ll deduce what they need to do, what’s your strengths and weaknesses. Most often, we’re either renaming their business or at least redesigning their entire branding thing, and then setting the strategies to grow, because at the end of the day, I’m all about crafting brand growth.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it, love it, good, good. I think I have a good idea now. We have two books. I’d like to learn a little bit about both of them, if I could. They’re Getting Your Ducks in A Rowe, so they have the same theme. Love that, love the take on your name, of course. Talk to me about the first book itself, which has to do more with business writing and communication. Why did you write that? What were the needs that you saw in the marketplace that you’re serving? How does that kind of fit in with your own business consulting/coaching, et cetera?

Jim Rowe:

Right. Well, it started, frankly, in the early 2000s when I was still at the agency I co-founded, MME. What I noticed was that the young… We always hired new people right out of school sometime around the spring. I was finding that they were smart. They had good internships. They had good GPAs. But I found that their writing and critical thinking, structuring things, was not great, so that’s when I came up with the idea. I had an agency to run with the other two guys, so when I retired… The other thing, too, was in those days, there wasn’t a lot of research about it. When I retired, I started looking in research, and I found it’s still under the radar, but there’s a lot more out there. The biggest thing was there was these three fairly big studies and the summary is anywhere between 45 and, let’s say, 75% of managers in organizations are saying that recent grads have two major problems, the soft skills of critical thinking to solve problems and communication, particularly writing. That’s a big deal, because they’re saying those are the two most… They would rather have those than the skills in whatever field they’re in, so, that’s point one.

 

The second thing is that in those same studies… I mean, we’re talking studies from PayScale where there was 60,000 managers and over 2,000 students. 80% of the students said that they were proficient in those two areas.

Rob Kosberg:

There’s a disconnect there.

Jim Rowe:

They’re calling it the skills gap. The problem is that the current solutions, you’ve got… They’re all spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a college degree, and they’re coming out, and anywhere between half and three-quarters of the managers say, “You don’t how to do the two most basic things.”

 

That was part A. Then I started looking at where did it start. Is this all happening in college? No. There’s a study called the National Writing Project, the Nation’s Report Card. In that study, it gives four grades on levels on how good you are writing, below basic, basic, proficient and above proficient. 73% of eighth graders and seniors in high school are below proficient, 73%. Freshman, 60. Seniors, they’re 40, but you’ve still got in four in 10 coming out of college who aren’t good at that. Why? Because they don’t teach them to think anymore and nobody’s practicing writing. Writing, to me, my phrase for a long time has been, “To write is to think.” Reading, we all say we have to read. You do, but reading is passive. You read. You think from what you get, but if you don’t write, you’re not focusing, and as a marketing guy my whole life, that’s what you do. You’re constantly writing and getting… It’s a disciplined approach.

 

The impact on all that, frankly, and this is why I came up with the book, is that companies now, there’s a study that says $400 billion a year is being spent or lost due to projects that had poor communication. It goes beyond the grads. People aren’t communicating well. Then the impact on the organization themselves, the morale is down, the stress is up. It’s a real problem, so what are they doing? They’re having to spend $3 billion on training a year on remedial reading.

 

I felt like there was an opportunity to come in. It’s not the fault of the books. It’s not the communications books. They’re wonderful, 600 pages. Excruciating detail, but I couldn’t disagree with anything, but you can’t say to a new graduate here, new hire, “Read this book.” Then there’re a bunch of business books out there that are great. They’re written by smart people, but to me, they’re for the people that already know how to do this and they want to refine their skills. There is some basic stuff that isn’t being taught, and that’s why I came up with the plan, because this is what I used to teach the young kids when they got out of school, “Here, let’s work on this.” It helps them think through a process.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, I love that, interesting. One, you witnessed the problem. You witness it first-hand. You studied it after retirement to see that it’s a much bigger issue than just the anecdotal evidence that you had yourself witnessed.

Jim Rowe:

Exactly.

Rob Kosberg:

And the big disconnect is that 40 to 70% don’t have the skills, and yet those same people think they do.

Jim Rowe:

Well now, the managers say they don’t. Yes, exactly, those people don’t think they do. The managers say they do. The kids don’t even know it. That’s a real problem.

Rob Kosberg:

That is a real problem. I think I see where this is going from a stand point of marketing and how you’re going to use it, but I want to hear that in just a moment. Before we do that, talk me through how you help them. What does the Get Your Ducks in A Rowe book do and help them in kind of… This is something that they were supposed to be learning all through the first 12 years and the next four years, maybe six years depending on if it’s an advanced degree. What does your book do and what’s the system that you helped them to kind of integrate?

Jim Rowe:

That’s a wonderful lead-in. Thank you. First of all, the book being called, Get Your Ducks in A Rowe, it was inspired by Who Moved My Cheese?

Rob Kosberg:

Yes.

Jim Rowe:

Everybody knows that book. It was a fable.

Rob Kosberg:

Great book.

Jim Rowe:

It was a great book. You can walk away with that book going, “I need to learn how to adapt.” You come up with one thought and say, “That’s what I need to do. Things change.” I loved that book when I read it and that’s what really sparked this whole thing. So, Get Your Ducks in A Rowe is a fable, and it is a fable about ducks in business. I’m starting there saying, “I need to tell a story, as opposed to,” and no offense to those who write business books. I didn’t want to just do a boring business book, “Here’s my expert opinion.” That’s point A.

 

Secondly is, I decided to use a traditional marketing document that helps you lay out a problem and a solution. Some people know it as a creative brief or a marketing brief. It’s a very simple that, and I try to get it down to one page. At the end of the day, it’s 10 steps. It’s who are you talking to and what are you trying to convince them to do? What’s the purpose. What’s the situation? What do they know? What is really going on out there? Identify what the problems are, the issues, and then, what are you trying to accomplish? I walked them through these. If this is what you’re trying to accomplish with metrics, I’m trying to grow this or stop the decline, then when you go to the next step, “Okay. How are you going to do it? What’s the strategy?”

 

Once you have the strategy down, you need to be able to say why do you think this strategy’s going to work, “Mr. CEO, I want us to spend $10 million.” “Well, that’s a nice strategy. Why do you think it’s going to work. Give me some feedback.” Then you get into the tactics and some basic executional steps of cost and ROI and timetables and stuff. I try and get people to do this in one page. I got trained by a wonderful woman. Her name is Connie Humphrey. She’s still my friend, and she’s the star of the book. She’s Connie Duckfrey in the book. She’s a brilliant woman, went to Sarah Lawrence, got her third year in school at London School of Economics, another college senior. Then she came back and got a dual major from Columbia in Marketing and Finance. She had been to Colgate, traditional, classical, packaged goods training, which is what I have, and I was trained by her.

 

I worked with her, and she gave me this, and she would ride me, so to speak, on making sure I knew this discipline process. It teaches you how to think. It’s a structured approach, and it’s simple. Now, I’ve had some people, friends of mine, read the book and they say, “It’s kind of simple. It’s very simplistic. I already know how to do that.” My point is that is the point. It’s simple. It’s 10 steps. Read it, so you get a sense of how it should work. I could have made it a post or a blog post or a Tweet, but no, it needs more than that, and then I’ll build some tools around it. That’s point one. I think people learn better in stories, and I also think it’s a practical tool. You read this book, and now you can actually start implementing it. Take a piece of paper out, write it down and move on.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s good, so let me make sure I understand, because it’s interesting. You used your background in 45 years in marketing as the backdrop of how to teach someone how to think and write, right?

Jim Rowe:

Exactly, you got it.

Rob Kosberg:

They don’t have to be in a marketing department to know how to think and write or for thinking and writing to be important to them. They could be in, fill in the blank. They could be in operations or they could be in human resources. They still need to think and write in those various departments.

Jim Rowe:

That’s exactly right. As a matter of fact, the people who are in marketing are probably going to look at this and go, “Really? There’s a book about this?” Frankly, I deal with a lot of small to medium-sized companies where the CEO, they built the business. They’re good at what they do. Communication skills, I can’t tell you over the last 40, 35 years that I’ve been on agency side, how many of my clients’ presentations and letters and things that I end up writing. This is a problem that’s an issue for everybody. If you’re an IT person, you’re great at IT. I have friends that are IT people saying, “I don’t know how to do this.” Even salespeople, there are some tremendous, successful, results-oriented salespeople. They aren’t necessarily the best communicators, but they are great at convincing. They know how the close the deal, but they could be a lot more efficient. I work with salespeople great, because I’m always trying to say to them, “Structure it this way.” That’s why I think it goes beyond the grads.

Rob Kosberg:

Good, good. I love that. Okay, so moving to book two, talk to me about the ADAPTER Method, because this is always about business communication, but it is part two, I guess, of the 10-step formula, or is it? Explain that.

Jim Rowe:

It is. It’s an extension. It’s a very interesting story how it happened, and it’s very quick. I finished book one and when, “Huh, I finished,’ and then I went, “I should really add this, and then I should add this.” What happened was, I thought, “I’ll write an appendix.” First I started dry, and I’m like, “That’s not the same story. There isn’t this situation, this big problem in Duck World and in flying V-tour lines. How are we going to fix it, it ends, everybody’s happy? Now, how do I add these things that make it dull lists of appendices?” I ended up creating an extension of the story. After everybody gets promoted and kind of becomes the head of sales and marketing and all that kind of stuff, she gets invited back to her alma mater, Columba Duck University. She goes in there, and she’s invited because she was on the front page of the Duckpath Journal. She goes there, and they want her to be there. They have all these business students in there, and she takes them through the ADAPTER Method.

 

What they are is, I wrote all these different thoughts of, “I should teach them this part and this part and this part of all the things I do, analysis.” I thought, “It’s all disjointed.” I’m a branding guy. I needed to give it a brand, so I thought, “Well, what’s my holistic process that I go through?” I decided to give it an acronym. The ADAPTER Method stands for analyze, deduce, author, perform instead of present, tackle, evaluate and refine. Those are the chapters. The idea is-

Rob Kosberg:

Have you trademarked that?

Jim Rowe:

It’s in process.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, you definitely should trademark it. Well, you’re an old-time marketing guy so I would imagine you’d know to do that, but I always want to tell people.

Jim Rowe:

It’s already been submitted. Under each one, I talk to them about what is analysis and how does it go about it. We talk about things like it’s… I remember being in a meeting years ago of presenting to a CEO in the wine and spirit business. There was two different divisions presenting. We heard that ours went very well… and those are the days of three-ring binders and not PowerPoints… because when we put a chart up, we said, “Here’s the key findings and here’s what we conclude.” Well, the other division came in and, “Here’s the key findings.”

Rob Kosberg:

No conclusions.

Jim Rowe:

Then the CEO said, “So what?” Every page, he went, “So what?” There are all these different… Doing this a long time, and I started out in research. I started out as a math major until I partied too hard, so Dad said, “Switch to marketing.” It’s one of those… I just think it’s a process, and it’s a light-hearted way. I don’t mean to mean that in a demeaning way, to myself, I guess.

 

It’s a fable, but you know what? It’s such an easy read. The first book, you can through it in about an hour and 5, ten minutes. The second book is, that’s 110 pages. I have illustrations. My son did all the illustrations for me. It’s a pretty easy read. The other book is an easy read and it teaches you through. The interesting thing is that I’m not necessarily targeting the end user. I’m not targeting these 80% of the students that think that they’re proficient. I’m targeting their bosses, and I’m saying, “You have a problem out there. I have a solution for you that they may snicker, but I promise you, it works and they’ll remember it.”

 

Then the other thing is, you’re right. I think it goes beyond the marketing people. There’s a lot of people in the IT side. I have a good friend of mine who, he’s an IT guy, he said, “We can’t communicate at all.”

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, well, that’s a great segue. I always like to ask, because our listeners are authors or those that want to be authors. There are many reasons to write a book. You took 45 years in business and then wrote two within a period of a couple of months of each other, but you didn’t do it just to get the words out. You did it with a purpose in mind. You did it to help. Yes, authors always do that, but you also did it as you just said to target and do something for your business or for your target market. Talk to me. What is your goal with your book? Who are you serving? How are you going to use your book to make some money, make an impact and an income?

Jim Rowe:

Well, I read your book and I’ve heard a few of your interviews with different people. I didn’t put a million dollars into it like one of the guys I heard the other day.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, that was, wow.

Jim Rowe:

I was like, “A million bucks?”

Rob Kosberg:

I know. I mean, I thought about raising my prices after I heard that.

Jim Rowe:

Yeah. First of all, let me just also point out one thing, that I am giving a dollar… I’m not giving all my proceeds away… but I am giving a dollar per book away to a great organization called the National Writer’s Project. I found them during this last five years or so. They have been around for 20 years, and in a nutshell, they are an organization of about 189 college campuses. During the summer, it’s teachers teaching teachers to teach writing. They all get together. They’ve done research showing the children who go through these studies, relative to the students who don’t, they perform better.

 

Yeah, and I think it’s worthwhile, so they’re good people. What I’m doing to try and do this, I actually am hoping to make the book part of the teaching tool process. On my site, you can go and buy it on Amazon, and I have a link to Amazon, but in the Contact page, if you’re looking for bulk purchases, which is, frankly, the goal, contact me, and we’ll talk about it. I give a discount based upon how many you purchase. That’s part A.

 

Part B is, as I indicated before, I am in the process… and you can’t have everything done all at once or you’d never launch… so I’m in the process of putting together kind of the corporate, make this as easy as possible on your team, because one of the things you’ve got to consider is this guy, I’m going to hand out books, and he says, “Okay, do this.” No, I need to give them the tools, which could just be some charts and a PowerPoint presentation and maybe a questionnaire that gets everybody, they need to change their culture. They need to say that thinking, writing and communication are an important part of this business. When they get interviewed… It should be in the HR manual.

 

Communication is important. We need to communicate. Very few people do that. That’s not a big part of… Do you know why? Because it’s assumed. My goal is to get them to do that. My hope is I’ll be selling bulk purchases with a little bit of extra charge on, let’s say, a training package. That’s kind of where I am at this point. I think there’s a real value in that, because I’ve already been asked for it.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, love it, love it. Jim, great stuff, both from the standpoint of explaining what the problem is, solving the problem in your book, and also how you’re going to use it, which I think is terrific. I’m sure your marketing skills will come in handy during the bulk sales of your books. Let’s give a link where people can go, connect with you if they want some more information. If they want to get a copy of the book, where’s the best place?

Jim Rowe:

Well, the easiest place to find it would be to go to my website, which is jimrowemarketing.com, jimrowemarketing.com. There’s a section on the agency side. I’ve recently just redid the website. You can buy it right from the home page there. Click and it’ll take you right to the Amazon page. If you want multiple copies and discounts, the contact there will put you through to me and we’ll work something out.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it, love it. Jim, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Great to get to know you. Congrats on all your success and may your retirement from marketing be as busy and as vibrant as ever for you.

Jim Rowe:

Thanks a lot, Rob, appreciate it. It was a privilege.

Rob Kosberg:

Thank you.