#1 Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author, Krister Ungerböck, is the former CEO of a global tech company and a leadership language expert. His insights have appeared in numerous national and international publications, including NPR, Forbes, Inc., Chief Executive and Entrepreneur. Prior to exiting corporate life at age 42, Krister was CEO of a $200M global software company.
Krister is the author of the groundbreaking, viral bestseller titled 22 TALK SHIFTs: TOOLS TO TRANSFORM LEADERSHIP in Business, in Partnership and in Life.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Krister Ungerbök about using the right tools to transform leadership and business.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– Why it’s important to build strong relationships with people working with your business.
– How you want to write a book you will be proud of not one you will be embarrassed by.
– Why investing in your book early on can help you earn passive income over time.
– How leaders with a higher emotional IQ are better at leading their teams and businesses.
– How there are underlying dynamics in personal and professional relationships.
Connect with Krister:
Links Mentioned:
Krister.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@meetkrister
Instagram
@iamkrister
Facebook
facebook.com/meetkrister
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/kristeru
Rob Kosberg:
Hey. Welcome, everybody. It’s Rob Kosberg here. Got another episode of the Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast. Excited to have a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Krister Ungerböck. He’s the former CEO of a global tech company and a leadership language expert. His Wall Street Journal book, 22 Talk SHIFTs: Tools to Transform Leadership, we’ll talk a little bit about today. His insights have appeared in numerous national and international publications, including NPR, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, and now, finally, the Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast. Krister, great to have you with us today. Excited to talk a little bit about your book, and interestingly, how you’re using your book. Welcome.
Krister Ungerböck:
Yeah, it’s great to be here. I don’t know. The only thing that I’m more passionate about than writing books and helping people change their lives is maybe marketing the books to help people change their minds and change their lives.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. Well, that is certainly a big sticking point for people, and I know you’re doing a lot of things. You’ve obviously done some things really successfully. Your book’s number one Wall Street Journal. We have a lot of Wall Street Journal. My book is a Wall Street Journal. It’s not number one though. I know what it takes just to get on the list and it takes a good deal of work. Congratulations on that.
Krister Ungerböck:
Yeah. Well, actually, that week, Oprah had a new book and we were just …
Rob Kosberg:
What do you know?
Krister Ungerböck:
Yeah. I’m still in CEO groups from back when I was CEO of a software company and I’ve stayed in that group because I’m close to them. Three years ago, we sat down and we did one of those visioning, summarize your vision for the next 10 years in a tagline, if you will. After doing two or three days of exercises and thinking about it, I was already in the author world, and I said, “My tagline is to be Oprah-ready.”
The intention for me was really my message to a point that I … Not that I would ever get on Oprah show, but well, am I physically in shape that I wouldn’t be embarrassed that I’m like, “Oh, my God, that’s my one moment of fame and there I am overweight on stage.” But the thing that was powerful for me was this amazing coincidence that the week we said, “Hey, let’s do a promotion to try to get on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list,” that we hit number one, and Oprah’s book was number two on the eBook list.
Rob Kosberg:
Oh, that’s a screenshot right there.
Krister Ungerböck:
It was like, “Wow, maybe I could be on Oprah someday.” Now, I need to really get in shape because I haven’t made much progress on the physical fitness, which was the primary reason for this goal. Anyway.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Love it. Well, talk to me about 22 Talk SHIFTSs. What was the genesis of writing that book? Was it transitioning out of your corporate job and transitioning into something else? Talk to me about the genesis and also the magic behind the book.
Krister Ungerböck:
We rewrote this book five times.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow.
Krister Ungerböck:
I had quite a few editors and people who helped me through the process, and ultimately, the challenge that I was trying to crack, which was ultimately the problem that happened to me in my life, was I had read all these books on leadership and communication and business like many successful business leaders do. We had an amazing success in the business. The company was sold last year for hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m still an owner in that.
But ultimately my personal life just basically fell apart and my relationships in business, while we had great results, I didn’t have strong relationships with those people in business. I was just like, “What was I missing all this time?” What I really wanted to do and what made it so hard is I wanted to write a book that was equally powerful as a business leadership book, but also a book for people to transform their relationships with their spouses and their children.
That was one of the reasons why I wanted to hire and involve myself with people. I was a CEO of a tech company. I’m not a writer. Who is to think that I’m going to write a number one Wall Street Journal bestseller on my first swing of the bat? Right?
Ultimately, it was the fifth swing, because we literally rewrote this book five separate times, or four separate times, five separate drafts before it was published, over five years.
It wasn’t until I really found the right people to help me navigate that process that the book would’ve never been the success that it was because if it’s not a quality product, right? We, like you, do a lot of Facebook ads, but I didn’t really go for that or even consider trying to get onto the Wall Street Journal bestseller list until the book was already out and we are already getting reviews from strangers on Amazon saying, “Wow, this book is changing my life,” and people texting. Because why invest money in marketing a book or any product if it doesn’t already have some inbuilt referral capacity? You’ve got to first have a good product. You have a crappy product and everyone’s going to tell others how bad it is, then that’s not a great thing to advertise on Facebook.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. You don’t want to get a lot of eyes on a crappy product.
Krister Ungerböck:
Yeah. I don’t know. For me, I think it really is a book that I was finally … The very first version of the book four years ago, I worked with a company, and I wasn’t clear on what I wanted the book to be. But ultimately, I was like, “The only thing worse than …” I was thinking, “Well, I’m going to have some people help me because I’ll just have my first book be like let’s take a beta test, right? I’ll learn what I can and my second book will be the book that I’ll go big.”
Somebody told me, at one point. He said, “You know what? The last thing that you want is a book that’s out in the world that you’re embarrassed about.” That you want to tell people … You hold up the book and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, just wait until my next book. I don’t want you to actually buy this book because I’m afraid I’m embarrassed about it.” That was like, “Oh, yeah. That’s a really good point.”
Rob Kosberg:
Good advice.
Krister Ungerböck:
I could already see that. I was like, “I know that’s not my best work and I’m not going to be proud to put it in people’s hands because of the quality of just the writing.” I pulled it back and said … Ultimately, it was four more years before we actually published a book, which I wouldn’t recommend that. But, yeah. Anyway.
Rob Kosberg:
Talk to me about who primarily the audience is, and maybe walk me through a little of how you’re using the book, what that looks like. You have an ideal client, the audience, et cetera.
Krister Ungerböck:
Well, this is something that we’ve done the opposite of what everyone will say to do with a book. It is a book for, I don’t want to say everyone, but … I have people from … I have 85-year-old grandmothers who’ve never worked a day in corporate life in their life calling me in tears about how this book is helping their children in their 40s and then their grandchildren and things like that. Then I have entrepreneurs, like me, who are like, “Oh, my gosh, this is transforming my leadership, how I speak to people.” Then I have stay-at-home moms that are in their 40s that are using the book as a framework to transform their marriage to sometimes a man who is a professional-oriented person.
We looked at our ideal clients as really two or three. It’s the woman who’s in a troubled marriage, probably to somebody who’s a career-oriented person, like myself, like I was. Another is the aging parent who wants to recover a relationship with a distant child, or the 40, 50-something child who wants to deepen their relationship with an aging parent before they pass. Then there’s another audience, the younger leader entrepreneur who just wants to read the book as a business book to be a better leader and grow their company. I don’t have a really good answer for you, we don’t have an ideal customer.
Rob Kosberg:
You went broad with the audience.
Krister Ungerböck:
Yes. I remember. When I was losing a lot of money. I took the I’m going to go big or go home approach. Then COVID hit, and I was like, “Well, and I’m home already. There you go.” Yeah. But I don’t know, we’ve probably invested about a million dollars in this book, and we’re just now getting to a point where we’re turning it into a profitable enterprise to recoup our million dollars.
Rob Kosberg:
Nice. Okay. There are a lot of people that are listening and their eyebrows just really went up when you said you invested a million dollars into the book. Obviously, you don’t have to tell me every detail, but talk to me a little bit about what that investment looked like because that’s not a small amount of money.
Krister Ungerböck:
Well, one, we also just think about why? Right? I come from the software business and I just looked at it like, If I look purely as an investor, a book is a mailbox money product, right?
If you can get to a point where you can sell 50 or 100,000 books and this book has enough word of mouth factor that it just becomes a self-sustaining thing, if you look at that as an investor, if you could create a cash flow stream of even $100,000 a year for the next 20 years, would you be willing to spend a million dollars to get $100,000 for free?
Rob Kosberg:
Of course.
Krister Ungerböck:
For 20 years. Of course, right? I looked at it like … It wasn’t just I was like, “I want to go spend a bunch of money and be a number one on the Wall Street Journal best seller.” I was really looking at it like an investment. That was that. I’d say that investment broke down probably about … A quarter of million dollars was really research. Admittedly, it was me basically using myself as a guinea pig. What did I miss? Basically just hiring high-end coaches. Some of these coaches that’ll charge you $50,000 for coaching,
I went and I explored a lot of different avenues to find these tools that we all ultimately published. I would say another quarter of million dollars was just in any combination of editing, cover design. There was some parts … Initially, some of the first versions of the book were ghostwritten. It’s all of those things all together. Once we saw that the book was catching on, we actually did a second edition.
That was $25,000. We were like, “Hey, let’s resolve some of the problems that we know are in that work.” Again, probably about a quarter million. Then the marketing. Probably about 500,000 in marketing. I would say we probably invested about a million in marketing, but the 500,000 is what we lost. Right?
Yeah. We probably spent about a 1.5 million in marketing, now I think about it, and then we’ve gotten basically a million back. Basically, Facebook was probably the beneficiary of most of that money. But we’re not at the point where the … It’s to the point where we’re seeing that, oh, we’re just around the corner from breaking even and turning it into that 100, 200 maybe even $500,000 a year revenue stream that doesn’t require coaching. I don’t necessarily have to do any work to get that revenue back. I do want to be clear on my vision. I sold my company. I’m doing this … Every dollar of profit actually is going to be donated. I’m not taking a single dollar of personal compensation for this.
Our mission is to change the words of the world. The people using their marriages, with their children, with their parents, but also with their employees at work. I think that this book has the potential to do it with the right marketing.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. I love it. There’s a lot that you said there that I’m sure people are wondering about. I know that I am. The first part that comes to mind is the funnel stuff and the ways that you’re recouping it. But I want to hold that until just a few minutes more towards the end. Talk to me about what the 22 talk shifts are. You don’t have to go through every single one of them. How do they segment out this idea of you reinvesting so much money and doing it, not really to make a profit, but to give back means that this is something very, very significant. Talk to me about what those talk shifts are.
Krister Ungerböck:
The talk shifts are the things that I wish I had when I was a leader, running my company, is they are … There’s 22 chapters, and each chapter has specific fill in the blanks phrases, provocative questions or exercises that you can use. The moment you close that page in the book, you get immediate change.
It’s just very practical. A good example I think is emotional intelligence. Tons of research that leaders who have more emotional intelligence are more successful. I read Daniel Goldman’s book back in the 1990s, and I probably read three or four other emotional intelligence books, and I thought that I was actually an emotionally intelligent leader. But when I realized this, actually I was using words that actually fooled me into think I was talking about emotions, but I actually wasn’t, because I would use the word I feel.
There’re actually … In the book we talk about some specific things about how we can use the word I feel like or I feel that, and we’re not actually talking about emotions. We’re not emotionally intelligent at all even though we’re using the word I feel. Then we give the antidote of here’s how you speak differently that will actually force you to speak in a more emotionally intelligent way. Well, none of that was anywhere in all these best-selling books about emotional intelligence.
I’m like, “Well, I want to have tools that break it down to specific language.” I had the opportunity to open businesses in Europe and France and Germany shortly after September 11th, and I had to learn to read in French and German. Language was actually a really practical tool for bringing new leadership insights and a lot … There’s some of the stories in the book I actually get into subtle nuances between the differences between French and German and other languages in English. It’s not a primary element of the book, but there’s probably four or five of the talk shifts that were informed by subtle nuances differences in actual language where, specifically English speakers, when it comes to emotional intelligence, have a little bit of a disadvantage compared to people who speak in other languages.
Rob Kosberg:
Really?
Krister Ungerböck:
If you were to look up the word, feel in an English thesaurus, the word think is a synonym for feel, while most other languages you don’t find that. We can talk about our feelings or think we’re talking about our feelings, but we’re really talking about our thoughts. I don’t know. That’s talk shift number 18. It’s towards the end of the book. But it is said, you … That’s one of the things we get most frequently. People comment, “I opened the book, and less than 30 minutes after starting it, I already have two or three tools that I can start practicing immediately in my life.”
Rob Kosberg:
Love books like that. One of my favorite books is … What is it? What to Say Next, or it’s basically a sales tool book sold over a million copies. It sounds like your book is very similar from the standpoint of, again, leadership, but I guess leadership both in the family as well as leadership in business. How do you get that message out? When I look at it, I think of business. How do you get the message out that this is something that an 86-year-old grandma will resonate with?
Krister Ungerböck:
That was part of the strategy from the beginning is, well, publicly it’s positioned. If you go to Amazon or you see me talk at a … If I do a keynote talk at some conference, it’s usually more … It’s 80% business with a little subtle nod to, “Hey, you can use this outside of business as well.” But the way we do that is we do the end around with Facebook ads. We go direct. We target people and we have ads that allow us to … The interesting thing, I mentioned, we did a second edition.
The reason we did that second edition is because we actually had some of those 80-year-old grandmothers who were actually saying, “Hey, I bought this book off a Facebook ad, and then when I got it, it felt like something. It felt like a business book is.” They felt like they were being bait and switched. Part of that is because we organized the book that the last third of it is actually the relationship stuff. Well, let’s say, the things that apply equally in relationships as well as in professional relationships.
The first two chapters are very business oriented. What we did is we said, “Well, what we need to do is put a preface on the front, so all those people who are reading it for a personal relationship, we can essentially reframe the context to say, ‘Hey, this is a business, but the underlying …'” What I found is the underlying dynamics between a personal relationship and a professional relationship. Relationships fail is because we don’t talk about things. We’re afraid. There’s this fear-fueled silence.
Ultimately, whether it’s talking about my business partner or a key employee, if I’m an employee, I’m afraid to tell the boss what’s really on my mind because I’m afraid of getting fired. Well, and I’m going to use a traditional family role. If I’m a stay-at-home mom married to a man who’s the primary breadwinner and he’s making a good income, well, I may be afraid to talk about what’s really on my mind because how am I going to support myself if we’re divorced?
There are these tools at some level that are really conversation tools to help overcome the fear that causes people to stop talking about what bother them. If we don’t know as leaders in a marriage or in a parenting relationship or in a business relationship, we don’t know what’s bothering people, then how can we change and shift our behavior to make things better?
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. Good. Good. I love it. Well, we’ll give them a link in just a few minutes on how people can get it. Very interesting how you connected those things. Talk to me a little bit about how you’re using the book. That’s one thing that we do a little bit different on this podcast, because our listeners are generally business people, but they’re authors who are looking for to use the book to make an impact and an income. Talk to me about how you’re doing that and getting it into more people’s hands that way.
Krister Ungerböck:
We did, again, a little bit the opposite of what most people do. We started with, “Okay, let’s see if we can make money off the book. Maybe have a low-priced video course at $29, $39.” Some small products, where most people who do this effectively, they say, “Hey, let me give away the book for $5, $10, whatever, and I’ll try to get people into a coaching program at $500, $1,000, $10,000.” As you know, if you get one out of 10,000 people signing up for a $10,000 coaching program, then it works.”
We went the opposite, and we were like, “Well, let’s see if we can get this to be break even with just low-end products, knowing that we can always add high ticket $5,000, $10,000 programs later.” The interesting thing was … This is as a business person. Bumping up to 10,000 feet, when you see people who transform industries, it’s usually people who overturn the assumptions, right? You start with a set of assumptions or … Well, here’s a good example. People who bootstrap companies versus companies that get a $100 million in seed funding, right?
If you got $100 million, generally people tend to make different decisions than people who are bootstrapping. By setting this constraint of saying, “We have this book that there’s literally 100 million people just in the United States alone who could potentially benefit from this book, let’s see if we can just break even on the book itself,” took us down a very different path. Since we’re now to the point where we’re essentially there now, now it’s the easy part, which is the high-ticket coaching programs.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, if you decide to do that.
Krister Ungerböck:
We will do that. I don’t know. Personally, I have a very specific type of person that I want to coach, which is a very unique niche, a very small niche. But I also have a group of … I guess one of the nice things about all those people that I hired to coach me while building the book, I have actually a good number of people who I trust and that I could say, “Hey, I can work with other third party coaches as partners.” That’s probably more likely what we’re going to do.
Unless we can figure out how to turn an online virtual coaching thing into a reality TV show, then that’d be something I’m interested in.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, the only way something like that works is if it’s an absolute train wreck, because that’s all people want to watch on TV are train wrecks. I don’t know how much fun you’d have doing a train wreck though.
Krister Ungerböck:
No. I think that there’s a … I don’t know. I think that there could be a … Inspiring things also work. With editing, there’s plenty of train wrecks all the way.
Rob Kosberg:
I guess that’s true. I guess that’s true. Undercover millionaire, now undercover billionaire, that has worked very nicely. That is possible. Love it. Love what you’re doing, Krister. Thanks. Thanks so much. Where can people get a copy of the book? What links can we send them to learn more about what you’re doing?
Krister Ungerböck:
You can go to … The book is at www.talkshift.com. In terms of speaking and things I do, any coaching, that’s at www.krister.com. Krister with a K.com. But yeah. Then, of course, if you … We donate all our profits to charity, but if you prefer to give the profits to Jeff Bezos, you can buy it on Amazon. You can help him put a couple extra drops of fuel into his next rocket.
Rob Kosberg:
Exactly. I’m sure that the going to talk shift, no S on the end, right? Just talkshift.com is the place that people should go. Or of course, krister.com. Love that. Love what you’re doing. Congratulations. Really respect your commitment, both financial because where your money is, there your heart is as well. The fact that you’ve made such a financial commitment means that you really have your heart in this project. Congratulations on that, and look forward to seeing the cool things you do in the future with it.
Krister Ungerböck:
Right. Thank you.
