Best Selling Author And Thought Leader Anthony Butler Shares Why Effective Storytelling Wins The Day And Boosts Profits (#226)

[00:00:00] Jeffrey Feldberg: Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast where you learn how to extract your business and personal Deep Wealth. 

I'm your host Jeffrey Feldberg. 

This podcast is brought to you by Deep Wealth and the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience. 

When it comes to your business deep wealth, your exit or liquidity event is the most important financial decision of your life. 

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Let the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience and the 9-step roadmap of preparation help you capture the best deal instead of any deal. 

At the end of this episode, take a moment and hear from business owners like you, who went through the Deep Wealth Experience. 

Anthony Butler is the founder of the digital marketing agency Can-Do Ideas and the creator of the Primal Storytelling content system. He is the author of Primal Storytelling Marketing for humans and is a highly regarded expert in brand storytelling and digital marketing. 

Anthony graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and the US Army Ranger School. He is a combat veteran and commanded an infantry company in Iraq during the invasion of Baghdad. 

He is also a Brazilian jujitsu black belt. And currently resides in Montana with his wife and two sons.

Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast, and for you listeners out there who want to get the edge in your business, you want the art side of business that you're not taught in business school, you want the edge, you're gonna get that today.

And we have a terrific guest who not only has been of service to the country, just a remarkable individual with a wonderful message. But I'm gonna stop it right there, Anthony, no pressure for you. Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast. An absolute pleasure to have you with us. And Anthony, I'm curious because there's always a story behind the story.

Anthony, what's your story? What got you to where you are today?

[00:02:49] Anthony Butler: Well, Hey Hi, Jeff , I appreciate you having me on. I really started into marketing at a startup in New York City.

And you know when interviewed there, I was completely unqualified. They were kind enough to hire me. I think they just needed a body who was energetic, is kind of how it started.

And you know, as you know, at a startup, you're always trying to figure out how do we get more leads? How do we grow. economically? How do we maximize our spend? And money's really tight. I started down the marketing path for some personal selfishness where I was just trying to get more leads cuz I was a sales guy and I wanted more leads. And that really led me down to a deep study into marketing. And so since I came over from the sales side, you know, and when I left that startup I went over to some other businesses and helped them scale.

And you know, really from the marketing side, but with a sales minded approach. And this is for me, like I always have this kind of pushback on this idea for small businesses.

Oh, we need to do branding, we need to do brand marketing. I was like, unless you are a Fortune 1000, and you have a giant wheelbarrow of money to burn. You should not be thinking about branding is you know, you're not Coca-Cola who's running Super Bowl ads, so everyone buys some sugar water this week.

That's not how most businesses run, is like you want real people to come to your website to learn. Can they solve an issue that they're having for themselves or their business and that's it. And that kind of led one thing led to another, which led to another. And as you know, the path of entrepreneurship is not straight.

It's a zig and a zag. And nine years ago I founded this agency and I just never looked back.

And that was kind of how I got started.

[00:04:41] Jeffrey Feldberg: And right away, Anthony. There's so much we're gonna be unpacking today, but right off the bat, you put something out there that most business owners don't realize. And for our listeners, if you got nothing out of today, and you're gonna get a whole lot out of today, but if you got nothing out of today other than what Anthony just said right now in regards to branding, and you know, I like to use Anthony, the example of the Goodyear Blimp.

Everyone knows it. They spend a gazillion dollars at all these sporting events and other events. I'm not so sure that it gets them any more sales, and that's the challenge with this big dollar advertising, it's not so easy to track. Does it get sales? And I would argue in fact, that it probably doesn't, it's probably costing you money.

And so to your point, you're spot on with what you're sharing. And so let me ask you this, because with what you're focusing on and with your book, and for our listeners in the show notes, there'll be a link and I encourage you to go get the book, Primal Storytelling Marketing for Humans. You know, It's so basic as humans, storytelling is what we've done for eons.

Anthony, before we get into the nuts and bolts of your system and what you're doing and with the agency, I wanna go back to your days in the service and again, publicly. Thank you so much for having served the country and making such a difference for everyone and allowing us to do what we do. And I'm wondering in the service, the ability to story tell, did you see that?

And if you did that make a difference for you? What was going on there?

[00:06:03] Anthony Butler: It made a big difference. And It's where I really got my start in understanding, like the deep connection between being able to communicate well and not really able to convey feeling and emotion by just giving people information.

I had an odd career. I was enlisted for three years and then I went to West Point directly from the ranks. And then after the academy, I was an infantry officer. 

One of the things that I learned during that time was, you know, I'd lived in the barracks. I'd been through what it was like to be in a really poorly ran place with leaders who don't understand what's happening. And then when I got to war and bad things started to happen, I started to really deeply understand the emotions that people are feeling. One of the things that an officer does during wartime, especially in the infantry, is you manage the emotions of the men. When bad things start happening and people are dying and you know you are fighting battles, where it's difficult to describe that experience is that the men go through a rollercoaster of emotion.

You know, and it's anger, it's fear it's loss, it's sorrow and it can cause you to really do some bad things. It can cause like the wrong kinds of decisions to be made. And early on, what I, things I realized was I gotta tell these guys the stories on why we have to stay above the anger.

One of the things said to them was forget about the rules of engagement. Forget about the law side of the war. Don't do anything you can't tell your family about. Don't conduct a mission in a way that you wouldn't be proud to tell your spouse about it, to tell your mom about it. 

And it just gave them this thought process to help them walk through this minefield of where every day you're making decisions that can change lives and take lives. And that experience, it helped me understand the extremes of emotion.

And then when I got into the marketing side, I start thinking deeply about, it's like, you know, the extremes help you understand that. Yeah, there's primal urges. There's those primal emotions that we run in, but there's something deeper. And we make decisions emotionally, and then we justify them with logic.

[00:08:16] Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely.

[00:08:17] Anthony Butler: And it's one of these epiphanies that we've all heard it. It's almost a cliche in the marketing industry, and yet when you look across the graveyard of corporate blogs, they're written for bots, they're written for Google. You know, Everyone's trying to do this kind of dry SEO, and there's all these SEO companies out there. You hire those companies, you spend $30,000 and you get nothing. It's a nightmare.

 Right now I'm doing a consult with this startup, I call them a the startup. They've been in business for six years, but they just haven't really been able to scale, even though they're profitable. And we looked at their blog and they had spent tens of thousands of dollars on seo and I printed off some copies of things that were on their website and it showed it to the CEO and I asked them, I was like, would you love to read this at bedtime?

As a human being, would you really read this? You know, and some of the sentences are, they're all written in English, but they're not really comprehensible. It's not something that a real person would wanna read, even though it was SEO friendly. And they were getting traffic from it.

I was just like, that's just the wrong way to go. It is.

[00:09:19] Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, it's interesting. It's, the amount of clicks, the number of clicks mean nothing unless it translates into sales. And Anthony, what you're sharing right now is especially poignant as we get AI on the scene that can now write articles and we're hearing about books being written entirely by AI.

But when you read this stuff, to your point, more times than not, it's okay, this is putting me to sleep in the wrong way. I don't want to read this. Let me find something that I'm going to enjoy more. Now I'm gonna go to your book, and again, for our listeners in the show notes, you'll have a link to Primal Storytelling.

And Anthony, I mean, my goodness, each chapter could be an episode on its own, but I'm gonna combine a few of the chapters and you already referenced this, so in chapters three, four, and five, you're talking about primal allergies, primal emotions, and then you bring in the storytellers. And so for our listeners who aren't familiar with your work and what you're doing, or even in the general area of narratives and storytelling, what would you want them to know about the primal urges and emotions in terms of both what to do and not to do.

[00:10:19] Anthony Butler: So what you should really think deeply about with primal urges and the emotions, ask yourself the question about your audience. What are they scared about personally, about doing business with us? In the tech field, and I've done a lot of consulting in that area is. Often when you go to a complex sale and you're sitting across the table from, maybe it's a whole team of people that are trying to make a buying decision for a business, is that some of them have their own agendas.

And maybe the office manager, she brought you in and she's thinking, Hey, if I hire these guys, am I gonna lose my job? 

Is this gonna cost me my raise? Because, they suck. And there's personal fear involved and it's not some pragmatic vulcan esque decision where it's only about, hey, are they the lowest cost and can they do everything they say?

It's not. The C F O has, he has personal fears, he has personal hopes, and if you've ever read the StoryBrand stuff, Donald Miller, he talks about, hey, make your client the hero. 

And I love that idea, but you have to understand what are they feeling during the sales process. If you start there, that will help you start to think and map what emotions, what fears do I need to overcome with the marketing?

How do we make our sales process easier By creating content that answers their questions ahead of time. That answers like, what are the obstacles of doing business together? Is it a good fit? And I'm sure, you've thought of this yourself, is that I always consult with my clients and I say to them, listen, never do business with a company that's not a really good fit. Even if you need the money, don't do it. If you can't knock it out of the park with them, say no to the deal.

Now why is that? It's because we want to be the cure for what ails them. Like we wanna be able to help them as deeply as we can. And that's why the subtitle of the book is Marketing for Humans because no business ever bought anything.

It's a real person in that business that made the decision and they have hopes and dreams and fear, and you have to connect at that level.

[00:12:23] Jeffrey Feldberg: Sure. And so for our listeners who are saying, okay, you know what, Anthony, you're saying things that are resonating, it makes a lot of sense. Where would they start, Anthony? So in terms of the primal emotions and the urges, and if they're looking out there to really entrench themselves, get new clients, or expand an existing client's business, or create a market disruption, how do they start doing that?

Knowing now what you're sharing on the primal urges, the primal emotions, what would be some strategies that we can do.

[00:12:56] Anthony Butler: Yeah, so I list those out in the chapter, and what I would do is I would pick two or three, pick their fears, and then look you know, start with their fears and understand what those are, and then start to create content and map it to your sales funnel. So top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. And then what we're gonna do is we take a look at and say, what and how does this content, how does it help them understand how it'll affect them in their tribe?

What's the social signal about it now? You're like, what? What are we talking about? Social signals. When I was saying earlier about we make decisions emotionally, ask yourself, why do you wear that shirt that you have?

Or you have a nice sweater on, like, why did you wear that sweater? Someone gave it to you or you bought it and it's comfortable and it's warm, but also it says something about you as a person. So the same thing about your car, your house, the spouse, your significant other, like all these things, they say something about you.

Like, how much does a car cost? At the bottom you can buy an old junker for 500 bucks that only some people would wanna drive. And all the way up to the other side, up to, multimillion dollar Bugatti or a custom car, some sort of super car. Everything in between.

It's a social signal. It's not, we're not just buying transportation. We're not just buying food. We're not just buying clothes, we're buying a social signal. And so as a business, what I wanna understand is if I am selling b2b or I'm selling b2c, is how does it make them feel and how does it affect their status? Because when you understand that portion of it, it makes it easier to create content that answers those questions and helps them feel better about the signals. If you remember the old adage, no one ever got fired for doing business with ibm. It's exactly what it was about. 

We alleviate their fears. You go with us. We're the 800 pound gorilla. There's no risk. No risk in doing business with us.

[00:14:50] Jeffrey Feldberg: And Anthony, I want to go back to something that you shared just a few minutes back, and for our listeners, you can't see me, but obviously you can hear me. You couldn't see me. I was grinning ear to ear because Anthony, you took the words out my mouth. Something that I say on the podcast that for many people they find controversial and you said something along the lines of people buy on emotion first, and they justify it with logic later. And I know at Deep Wealth in our Nine-Step roadmap and our entire system, that's exactly what we're all about. The power of the narrative, the incredible storytelling ability that we all have. If you can do that effectively, you can get people excited about a bright and prosperous tomorrow.

Even if you're premium dollars over everyone else, if you do it right, the emotions will sway people. And then later on afterwards, they'll figure out logical reasons why they want to go in that direction. And even to the point, Anthony, where we've had evaluators both on the podcast and I've spoken to them offline and they all say the same thing.

Hey, when I'm evaluating a company, I don't look at the financials first. First thing I look at is the narrative. How powerful of a narrative is it? And 80% of the value often comes from that. So with that in mind, and now we start tapping into your system and you talk about the storytellers and brand stories and their archetypes, what would you want our listeners to know about that?

[00:16:14] Anthony Butler: There's more than one type of story you're going to tell in a business, and they're used for different things. And one of the things that I can tell you is start with your origin story, like why you're in business. What was that kind of that startup story, you know, how you struggled at the beginning.

Everyone loves that underdog story because it reminds your audience that you're a real person and that you're human, and that you're someone that they want to do business Because we do business with people that we like. Right? And so you want to connect with them. That's why we start there.

And then when we start working on other narratives, and I outline these in pretty great detail and we work into those, the vision story. What's the vision for the business? Where are we going? Like, how are we trying to change the world, if at all? Elon Musk, he starts up SpaceX and before it's got a single rocket, before it's built anything, he's like we're going to Mars.

Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna become a multinet species. Well, how bold of a vision is that?

[00:17:10] Jeffrey Feldberg: Right.

[00:17:11] Anthony Butler: if I'm selling shoes or I have some sort of commodity, you know, I don't have that bold of a vision, but you can still have a vision that makes sense for people that they can connect with. And the vision is how we help them get excited about things that are really not that exciting.

And then that third story that you're gonna tell after that is what are the transformations that you've done? You know, Think of it like the weight loss coach. He shows everyone the pictures of, hey, I have a client who lost 50 pounds and before this is what they had looked like. And when we worked, we struggled and I helped them get through all the difficulty.

And then at the end they had six pack abs. And they look like rocky. Those transformation stories is how you pull in the audience to say, you know what, I'm a lot like that also, and if I did this, I would have similar outcome and yeah, it was hard, but they got us through it. We can do that too. If you did it. Why not us?

[00:18:05] Jeffrey Feldberg: And you know what, Anthony, as you're talking through this and you happen to bring up, hey, you can take it to any industry, any business, and you even mentioned something as mundane shoes. I have no relation to this company. There's nothing in it for me. I'm not an investor. I don't own anything. But look at Tom's shoes. Who took, you know, a very, one would call widget kind of industry or business, and came up with an interesting narrative of how they're gonna be donating pairs of shoes to children throughout the world. And that thing caught on fire. And wow, what a difference it made from a narrative, from an idea that really pulled at the emotional cords of people and their wallets and got their attention, and ultimately the buying power behind that.

[00:18:49] Anthony Butler: Absolutely look at Newman's Own. It's another one where you take really good products that are all organic and then you add in the charitable side to that. And you know, Newman as a celebrity. And you know, although I think today, this next generation, no one even knows who Paul Newman is as a celebrity.

They haven't seen any of his movies. He's not a big household name now as he was when he started. But almost everyone has tried the products and whether it's salad dressing to popcorn, to all the other things that they do. Just really high quality stuff with great stories behind it.

[00:19:23] Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely, I know I'm big picture wise jumping around your different chapters here, and we don't have time to go into all the finite details, which is why our listeners, again, come to the show notes, click on the link and get the book. Anthony, when you look at chapters eight and nine. So the Art of Marketing and Primal Storytelling in Action.

And now I'm thinking of a member of the community, our listeners who are saying, okay, yeah, Anthony, I hear you but the business I'm in, it's so cutthroat. I will lose a customer for another competitor that comes in for pennies. On the dollars less, I don't have a lot of room here. How possibly could a story make a difference?

Or the marketing, who even has money for the marketing because it's so tight. The margins. We gotta put everything into keeping the business and fighting off the competitors effectively. They're in a red ocean, what we call here a Deep. Wealth from another great book, blue Ocean. What would you say to that business owner who's in that, again, widget of a mundane kind of industry or business and doesn't think there's any room to maneuver to differentiate themselves?

[00:20:28] Anthony Butler: Yeah, so stories are a great way of differentiating you. What you'll find in a lot of those commodity type, really difficult businesses is that there's a huge amount of marketing waste.

That's put out because everyone's decided, hey, we need to be part of the social media conversation.

And you look at their Twitter feed and they're posting quotes and they're posting this, and they're posting that, that has nothing to do with anything in their business. Okay? And that's okay. I can do non-relevant content for us, but that non-relevant content has to be written clever for an audience to deliver some sort of value.

Okay. To bring them something that they need to help them understand something new, to help them come up with some sort of breakthrough in their life. And what I can tell you is that the number one thing you can do if you want to get better ROI out of all of your marketing.

Stop thinking about yourself and think about your audience. You wanna save money on marketing. You want to be really efficient. Stop thinking about yourself. I can't tell you how many campaigns I've audited.

And we're like, listen, we're telling them all the features. We're telling them everything that we can do for them. And we're not focused on the benefits and we're not focused on them as people. And we still have in our mind, oh, this is B2B marketing. We gotta be dry, we gotta be corporate, we gotta be really professional. if, If you want to just cut through the myth of dry marketing. 

Think about Geico what is more cutthroat than insurance? Okay. And now who represents Geico in the market? An animation, a Geico geko. It's like this funny little creature. And I use this example in the book for a really specific reason, is because the hardest people I've had to convince that they can use storytelling are B2B marketers because they think that, oh, we're different. Our audience is different. We're a sophisticated art, you know, our audience, we're in finance, we're a hedge fund. We're a financial man.

You know what, you're still people. We're still people on the other end, and they're gonna connect with you through stories in the same way as every other market. Absolutely will work.

[00:22:37] Jeffrey Feldberg: Exactly, and you know you're bringing really together everything doesn't matter if it's b2b, b2c, in your personal life. It's all about the story. And for listeners, let's even take it to the most basic of levels. Perhaps you went to a new restaurant, absolutely loved it, or maybe you hated it. Either way, next time you're with some friends or some family.

The story that you tell and you put your emotions into it, your passion into it. Oh, absolute best place. Anthony, you gotta check this out. You think you've eaten this kind of cuisine before. You really haven't until you go here. That's gonna have people go or, Hey Anthony, stay away from this place. Don't make that mistake that I made.

So it's all in the storytelling and it doesn't matter in my experience, Anthony, and you can tell me if I'm off base or on base here, you know whether someone's buying a business for hundreds of millions of dollars. Or it's a $10 purchase. It's that story to while up the emotions of, yes, I should be the owner of this, or I wanna buy this.

And justify with that logic later. And I know we've been talking about this kind of in, in and out throughout the conversation, but you know, for me it doesn't really make a difference the number of zeros that's involved in the purchase. The fundamentals are the same. Would you agree with that?

[00:23:53] Anthony Butler: I would agree. Numbers matter and a successful business without a really strong marketing arm is an opportunity because then when you lay good marketing over a business that is already successful without great marketing. It's fuel to the fire. It can really help accelerate things and that's why I like working with companies that are already, they've already got some, they're already a little bit established maybe, and, maybe they're just getting to revenue and they're, they found their clients and then you add good marketing on top of that.

And it really, it makes it more sound, it makes them more profitable and it helps them grow faster.

[00:24:33] Jeffrey Feldberg: And so why don't you walk us through that, Anthony? So listener is hearing the conversation. They've picked up the book, really like, what's going on? You know what, maybe Anthony can help me with his creative agency. Someone comes to you and they are now gonna work with you, with their business. What's going on with that?

Anthony? What's your process when you first start working with a business.

[00:24:53] Anthony Butler: Yeah. When I first work with the business, I think I follow the same processes as probably every agency in the world is we do. Some discovery and we look at what are you doing now? And really I like to work with the sales team. Who are you selling to? Who's buying as people? Not just industries and not just as a company, but who are the individuals involved?

And then when I start to understand that, and this is a big portion of the first part of the book when I'm talking about tribe.

As I start to understand who are the best fit clients and what are their commonalities, what are their demographics? What are their psychographics? What are their hopes and dreams?

And then what we do is we map the tribe. Who those best fit clients might be to their primal emotions and their primal urges. And then once we understand who the audience is and we understand what those emotions and what those primal urges are, then we're able to start planning content around, you know, and a long tail content.

So you have an SEO side of it where you wanna get more organic content. So some content for your website that's mapped very carefully to your funnel.

And then also some social media so that you can get more attention and you can garner more traffic. And I'm not talking about, hey let's publish pithy quotes and the news of the day.

There's plenty of companies already doing that. We don't need to do that too, and come up with something that I don't wanna throw a cliche out there, but let's create a thought leadership program of something that we can develop that no one else is doing in our industry. I've done several really successful programs with big companies in industries that, thought leadership programs where they didn't think they could, thought leadership was even an option because we start thinking bigger about our content.

So I worked with this company out in Long Island, New York, really large manufacturing company. They make really boring stuff. They make pieces and parts for robots, pieces and parts for the space shuttle, for defense industry. They got stuff that's in space right now. 

They're like, hey, what kind of thought leadership program could we do? So we looked at their cross section. I was like, you know, you guys have a huge number of elderly engineers who do business with you, and they're like, what do you mean? They're like, well look at all these proposals and we look at these people and the average age of an engineer who's working directly with your team is in their sixties.

Those young engineers that are just coming up? What's something we could do for them to help connect the next generation with your company? Cuz these guys have been in business for over a hundred years.

And so we created a leadership development system, a leadership development program for engineers who were just coming outta college, and what does that mean? We published some white papers about leadership and engineering leadership, how to run meetings, how to learn, how to be a manager if you're just getting your engineering license. And we got back links from some of the top Ivy League schools around the country that are linking to their content referring it so that a college graduate who's going in the defense industry immediately finds them because he reads a white paper on how to run a meeting for engineering, how to be part of a team, how to be more creative, how to be a better person. I mean, just amazing, amazing things that they never thought that they could create on their own.

And say well, how did that move the needle? How does that increase sales? Guess what, it's not a one time thing. It increased sales incrementally because content marketing is evergreen. I have pieces of content that I published five years ago to this day, still generates leads.

Well, how do you do that? It's it's incremental. The more you do it over time, the better it gets, the more you understand the audience, the better it gets. The more people can find you in different ways and then have the right conversation.

[00:28:34] Jeffrey Feldberg: Love that. And so with that in mind, Anthony, you're taking over a company's outreach and helping them and teaching them what they should be doing. Let's flip it, and I'll go to Pareto's Law where 80% of typically the issues, the challenges, the things that aren't getting as the results is caused by 20% of the same actions or in actions.

Are you seeing certain patterns along the way? Is there a top one or two that most companies are doing that are actually holding them back?

[00:29:03] Anthony Butler: Absolutely, I think it's a waste in ad spend. I've seen the same pattern over and over again where companies don't have really tight messaging already done, and they're like, we need leads right now, so we're gonna buy ads. And then they go out and they hire an agency. The agency spends 20, 30, $50,000, buys some traffic from Google, goes on Facebook buys traffic, but they haven't tested the messaging. They haven't tested the landing pages, they haven't tested the lead magnets. They don't understand what the stories are. They don't understand the pain. I just did an audit with a company, a hundred thousand dollars without any real revenue just wasted, gone. Just absolutely wasted.

I was like, guys, listen, if you're going to run ads, before you figured out your stories and before you really understand the sales process, you're just burning money, you might as well just put it all in the barbecue. Let's light the money on fire and we'll cook some steaks cuz we'll get more out of it than we are running those kinds of ads. 

[00:30:06] Jeffrey Feldberg: As we like to say, Anthony at Deep Wealth, when we're talking about when you don't prepare for your liquidity event, when you don't prepare your business, all that time, effort, and money that you'll waste and you'll lose when you do go to market. Yeah. You might as well go to your favorite casino.

You'll lose your money a lot quicker. At least you'll have some fun, along the way. So from barbecues to casinos, take your pick, but you're absolutely right in terms of what you're saying. And Anthony, let's flip it before we start wrapping things up here. Let's flip it now. When businesses are working with you, they're implementing your strategies and your systems, what would be the top one or two things that a business owner can start doing that absolutely gets the results.

[00:30:46] Anthony Butler: If possible, have a person, a real person who is representing the brand. Now, what do I mean by that? If you can see some really big, bold examples out in the world. Look, if you look at Elon Musk, look at Richard Branson, look at these guys, and they're the face of the brand.

And that connection brings business because people like them. No matter what they're selling, they like that person. So whether or not you think of yourself as a celebrity CEO or not, think of yourself as the face of the brand make yourself accessible and use your marketing around that startup.

If that's not possible, and you're just so uncomfortable with the idea being the face of a brand, that's okay. You can hire an actor, you can create the Geico, gecko. There's lots of ways that you can have an avatar for the brand that's not just some big drag company. You know, and that can make a huge difference. Huge, huge difference.

[00:31:42] Jeffrey Feldberg: And you know, as you're talking about this, I'm reminded, it was actually episode 57, so I'm going way back in the archives and we had Anne Fryer on and Anne was talking about brand as well. And she gave a terrific story that I'll share with you and the listeners. She said back in the day when NASA was charged with going to space, they got their story down of what they're gonna do to get a man on the moon.

That if you went in and a true story, apparently when you went in and even if you asked the caretaker what's NASA's mission, it was the same that you'd hear as if you asked the president of NASA and everyone in between. And so for all the listeners out there, here's a question for you. If a customer were to ask different people in your company what's your vision?

What's your mission? What's your origin story? What's your brand promise? Are they gonna hear the same thing or is it gonna be if they ask 10 different people or they're hearing 15 different stories? And Anthony, you'll correct me if I'm off based on this one. I suspect it's, unfortunately, it's probably the latter for most businesses where if you ask 10 different people, you're hearing 15 different stories, none of them the same, and they're all over the map.

Would that be your experience as well?

[00:32:49] Anthony Butler: Oh, absolutely. I have yet to consult with a company that really has that done really well, walking in the door, and I think that's why I would say the number one service I've provided in the last two years for companies is just helping them build a primal storytelling foundation is put together, like what are those stories, what are the themes?

What are the plots like? What is it that we're actually selling to people?

[00:33:13] Jeffrey Feldberg: So important. Easy to overlook. Absolutely mission critical. When you think about it, and not to take us off on a tangent here, I'll ask one question, not to go down the rabbit hole, but more big picture, and it's actually circling back to something I said earlier as we look at online and marketing and getting her message out there and storytelling.

I can imagine some of our listeners saying, Hey, you know what, guys, all sounds good, but I'm gonna save a boatload of money. I'll just go to my favorite AI bot and it'll write everything for me in a fraction of the time and money. What would you say to those people that are thinking about going down that path, or maybe they're already going down that path and they're filling up their website with his AI generated content and stories and articles and who knows what else?

[00:33:57] Anthony Butler: I would say be careful. Understand that just like in a workshop, the tools are only one part of creating something. You know, and you need people who can skillfully use those tools in the right way. And one of the issues that you already have, and I've done an enormous amount of testing with chat G B T and some others, is that they're very linear in that they're not making deep connections between ideas yet and really deeply creative. If you create, let's say you create a series of 20 different articles using these AI bots, the structure of each of them will be almost identical, there's some ability to change those up a little bit. But now what we're seeing is that because those structures are so similar across everyone who's using it, is that now Google is going back and they're like, okay, we're questioning how strong is this content for real people?

 And I suspect you're going to see Google penalizing companies that are just creating content for the bots. When I say the bot, what I mean is, Google, how they even rate a website is they give it domain authority. They look at like, how valuable is the content on this? And if all of it is AI generated, they're gonna question on how good it actually really is.

[00:35:10] Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely. And you know, take away, there is no shortcut, there is no magic bullet pointing the time and the effort in your stakeholders will know, the marketplace will know, do the right thing. Going back to what we said earlier, live up to your brand promise and be authentic, and more importantly, be original and not like everyone else out there.

Anthony, you know, we're at the point again, I can go down all these rabbit holes, and you've been incredibly generous with your wisdom and your insights. It's time to start wrapping up and I'm gonna ask you one of my favorite questions, but before I do, let me set it up for the context. So when you think about the movie Back to the Future, you have that magical DeLorean car that can take you back to any point in time.

So Anthony, here's the fun part. It's tomorrow morning. You look outside your window and there it is. Not only is a DeLorean car sitting curbside, the doors open, it's waiting for you to hop on in. So you go in and you're now gonna go to any part of your life. When you were younger, maybe Anthony is a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time it would be.

What would you tell your younger self in terms of life wisdom or lessons, or, Hey Anthony, do this, but don't do that. What would that sound like?

[00:36:18] Anthony Butler: I think I would remind myself not to take it so serious. Not to take myself so serious in all the things that I'm doing and to not worry about making too many mistakes.

 I thought when I was in my twenties that I needed to have it all figured out. And now I'm, in my fifties and I'm on like my fifth career and I have two teenage sons and they're like, I don't have it figured out.

And my oldest son is about to turn 19. He's, I'm not a millionaire yet. I'm like, you know what? Life is hard. Everyone has tragedies. Don't take it so serious. You don't have to have it all figured out and you can reinvent yourself. And as long as you're willing to be self-reflective and try to really bring good into the world and do great work for someone, like really add value, like you're always gonna be successful with that.

And you shouldn't have no fear.

[00:37:06] Jeffrey Feldberg: Terrific advice. Who doesn't take themselves too seriously? In particular today with the social programming and on social media, we're seeing that one picture out of probably a gazillion pictures, but it's that one picture for that one millisecond of a moment where everything was going right and it's all smiles.

But yeah, don't take yourself seriously. Absolutely love that. And Anthony, for our listeners who wanna reach out, they wanna learn more or they have questions, where is the best place online that they can you?

[00:37:32] Anthony Butler: Well, they can just reach out to me directly primalstorytelling.com, anthony[at]primalstorytelling[dot]com and I mostly use LinkedIn. I don't have a lot. I think the only other social media I even have is Instagram and use it just a little bit. But I'm very active on LinkedIn.

[00:37:47] Jeffrey Feldberg: Terrific. We'll have all that in the show notes, so we'll have your website. And for our listeners, we now have Anthony's email address. I encourage you to take him up on that, reach out to him, and again, we'll have a link to the book, Primal Storytelling: Marketing for Humans. 

Well, Anthony, it's official, it's a wrap. And on that note a heartfelt, thank you for sharing your wisdom and your insights today. And as we like to say, Deep Wealth, please continue to thrive and prosper and stay healthy and safe. Thank you so much.

[00:38:13] Anthony Butler: Thank you, Jeffrey. I appreciate it. 

[00:38:15] Sharon S.: The Deep Wealth Experience was definitely a game-changer for me. 

[00:38:18] Lyn M.: This course is one of the best investments you will ever make because you will get an ROI of a hundred times that. Anybody who doesn't go through it will lose millions. 

[00:38:28] Kam H.: If you don't have time for this program, you'll never have time for a successful liquidity 

[00:38:33] Sharon S.: It was the best value of any business course I've ever taken. The money was very well spent.

[00:38:39] Lyn M.: Compared to when we first began, today I feel better prepared, but in some respects, may be less prepared, not because of the course, but because the course brought to light so many things that I thought we were on top of that we need to fix. 

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[00:39:27] Lyn M.: The Deep Wealth Experience compared to other programs is the top. What we learned is very practical. Sometimes you learn stuff that it's great to learn, but you never use it. The stuff we learned from Deep Wealth Experience, I believe it's going to benefit us a boatload.

[00:39:41] Kam H.: I've done an executive MBA. I've worked for billion-dollar companies before. I've worked for smaller companies before I started my business. I've been running my business successfully now for getting close to a decade. We're on a growth trajectory. Reflecting back on the Deep Wealth, I knew less than 10% what I know now, maybe close to 1% even. 

[00:39:59] Sharon S.: Hands down the best program in which I've ever participated. And we've done a lot of different things over the years. We've been in other mastermind groups, gone to many seminars, workshops, conferences, retreats, read books. This was so different. I haven't had an experience that's anything close to this in all the years that we've been at this.

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[00:40:26] Kam H.: I would highly recommend it to any super busy business owner out there.

Deep Wealth is an accurate name for it. This program leads to deeper wealth and happier wealth, not just deeper wealth. I don't think there's a dollar value that could be associated with such an experience and knowledge that could be applied today and forever. 

[00:40:44] Jeffrey Feldberg: Are you leaving millions on the table? 

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