ETL 36: Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious Approach to Becoming a Thought Leader

Transcript: Rohit Bhargava and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: Rohit, great to have you on the show. Our business relationship began in about April of 2021, in the midst of COVID. I had been working on a book for a few months, and I came to you with it, and it’s been a great business relationship to me ever since.

Rohit Bhargava: It’s been great for us too. It was a thrill and a momentous moment for all of us.

Bob: Well, I hope it’s the book has become a calling card for you to attract more thought leaders. You had been attracting thought leaders before we ever met. Ram Charan had published with you at the time, and Charlene Li had published with you, and I figure that that drumbeat has continued and more and more already established thought leaders are coming to you. You are in great company, and they’re in great company.

Rohit: We have some really, really amazing authors.

Bob: Before we go into the world of hybrid publishing, I’d love to talk to you about your career, because I’ve been reading a lot about it from what you have written. Tell us about your career, how you wandered into writing books, and then deciding to get out of the advertising world altogether to be a book author and a book publisher — because that’s a pretty that’s a pretty radical change, isn’t it?

Rohit: Yeah, it was, and I guess it was an evolutionary change for me. I started my career wanting to do marketing, but not really having a good job to do it. And so I had decided pretty shortly after leaving college that I wanted to have an international career. And in my mind, what that meant was just picking up and moving somewhere. And I picked Australia because I’m a lifelong Olympics fan. I’d been in Atlanta for those Olympics, and I really got excited by that. And I thought, Well, why not go to Australia? They speak English, so I don’t have to learn a different language, and they have the Olympics, so it’ll probably be exciting.

And so that’s what I did. And I spent a year trying to earn enough money to go, and also waiting for a visa to be able to work when I went. I waited tables, and that was actually a great experience, because it was the first time where I was constantly interacting with people, studying their reactions, the micro kind of body movements, and what that meant in terms of whether they were happy or not happy.

What could I do to improve their mood? Because it all resulted in better tips, right? So it was like a business transaction, but it was also just me connecting with people. And when I finally moved to Australia, I got my visa and I moved there, I tried to take some of those people skills and turn them into a job, which I eventually did, and that’s how I got my start in marketing and advertising. I was working at Leo Burnett, a major ad agency down in Australia, and so I was there for about five years,

Then I came back to [Washington] DC, where I had grown up, and I had family here, and I landed a job with Ogilvy. And so I was in the world of marketing and advertising for a long time. And shortly after I started at Ogilvy, in 2004, we began a group that was focused on digital marketing and specifically social media. And in 2004 — this was pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter — social media basically meant blogging. And there were all these blogs that were becoming influencers. And so I thought, well, if I’m going to start working with blogs, I should probably understand it, so I should start writing a blog. So I started a marketing blog in 2004, which was among the early people to take on blogging.

His First Book

Rohit: Ad Age Magazine did a feature where they listed the top 25 marketing blogs, and I’m pretty sure there were only 25, so by default, I was on that list. That was great media, because all of a sudden I was a top 25 marketing blog, even though there were only 25 of us, right? It’s like coming in last in the race when you know you still finished, I guess. So that list led me to get some notoriety, and because of that, eventually, a couple years later, I had enough of an audience to get a publisher interested. And so that was where my journey into publishing started.

I got a literary agent, actually a superstar: Steve Hanselman, the same guy who had just pitched Tim Ferriss four-hour workweek and was coming off that huge success of that book. And so you get a literary agent like that, and every publisher is immediately interested in you. Steve pitched the book in what’s called a preempt deal, which meant the publisher that wanted it bid for it, and we accepted the bid before taking on all these other publishers. It was sort of like early admission to a college. And we selected McGraw Hill, and they were the publisher of my first book, which came out in 2008 and was called “Personality Not Included.” It was all about why we need personality in marketing, being more authentic, being more genuine. And I can say it was a cult hit…as in, it wasn’t a best seller. Didn’t actually sell that many copies, but the people who did read it really loved it.

And I had that moment that I hope every author has it at one point where I was going through a magazine article in Businessweek and they interviewed a CEO. I think it was like the CEO of Yahoo at the time, and she’s sitting in front of her desk, and she has a bookshelf behind her, and there’s my book on the bookshelf. So I’m like, oh, somebody important was reading it. This is so cool.

That was my start in publishing, just getting that book done.

Beyond Bestsellers: How Books Create Opportunities

Bob: Were you hoping when you wrote that book that it would become a business bestseller? And were you disappointed when it wasn’t?

Rohit: I didn’t really hit that point. Although it wasn’t a bestseller in terms of like, hitting the New York Times list or hitting the Wall Street Journal list, it still opened doors. It won the highest award that you can win for a WPP agency for thought leadership, which is called the Gold Atticus award. Since I was fulltime employee at that point, it was a huge credibility boost. I mean, I’m pretty sure I even got a promotion thanks to the book, because I was winning these awards, and I was making Ogilvy look good. We were using it in pitches, so professionally it was a huge success for me. It didn’t hit a bestseller list, but it certainly wasn’t a failure. I mean, it was really good for me.

Bob: I imagine there are many business authors who have the goal of writing a bestseller, and they publish a book — whether it’s with somebody like you, or a mainstream book publisher, or they self publish — and they think this book is so good we’re going to market the heck out of it. And if it’s not a bestseller, even a regional bestseller, they think it’s a failure, and they stop, and that’s the last book they ever published, the first and the last book they ever publish. You are saying people shouldn’t look at it like that.

Rohit:  They definitely shouldn’t. I mean, the thing about being a bestseller, as you know, is being a bestseller doesn’t necessarily mean that you consistently sold a ton of copies all the time. It means that you sold a lot of copies in a short period of time, which is how the best seller lists are calculated. And not being a bestseller doesn’t mean that you sold no books.

And so at the end of the day, I think people who are writing books want the books to be out there. If you’re writing a business book, you probably have some professional goals behind it. I told you, and I tell all of our authors, to just be clear with yourself about what the goals are. And maybe being a bestseller gets you to that goal. But it shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself, unless you are just writing a book to stroke your own ego.

The goal of being on a bestseller list could be that it opens doors to other things. So in my case, when I did eventually hit the bestseller list, I specifically went for it. And the reason I went for it is because I knew as soon as I hit the list, I would feel justified in raising my speaking fee by 5k and so every time I spoke, it would result in an additional $5,000 and that was a real business reason to do it, and that’s why I did it, and that’s exactly what happened. So, I think if you have a motivation like that — not just wanting a a best seller for your ego — then I think you can set the right plan in place and actually make it happen.

Writing for a Narrow Audience

Bob: One of my goals was to help raise the level of the thought leadership profession, which really has become a profession, and to enhance the business. And it certainly has done that. Certainly has done that way beyond the investment that we made.

Rohit: Your book has been huge, because it really took the ideas that you had in your head and the reason people bring you in for your expertise, and it put it front and center in a way that people could consume. What you’ve done with your book has been really strategic, and a great case study.

Bob: My audience is narrow: it’s the number of people who are thought leadership professionals and thought leaders, or aspiring thought leaders, but particularly the thought leadership professionals who are there to make experts famous. And that’s a small tribe in the wide business world. Yeah, that’s the only tribe I care about, so it’s a small tribe, and so that necessarily means not likely to be a bestseller, because it’s not a book with a broad business appeal.

Rohit: One of the things that I appreciate about your approach and your story with your book was that you wrote it at a point when you had a lot of credibility and experience and a network, and so you weren’t starting from nothing. It wasn’t like your email list had zero people and nobody knew who you were. They were already coming to you for your expertise. And when you said, I’m doing a book and I’m getting it out there. You had a core group of people who were like, “Finally, thank you. Like, when can I get it?” And that’s a great momentum to have going into writing a book.

Bob: Actually, the reason I wrote the book is because three of my business advisors at the time said to me, “Bob, you need to eat your own dog food. You know, you tell other people to become thought leaders, and you help people publish bestselling and market bestselling books. And we think you ought to do the same.”And so I wrote this book because I didn’t want to let them down.

Rohit: Yeah, it’s a great reason.

Making the Leap to Entrepreneurship

Bob: You left Ogilvy 10 years ago, right?

Rohit: That’s right. Let’s just say the writing was on the wall for all of us. I wasn’t doing a great job in the job I was supposed to be doing because I had too many other distractions. People were asking me to come and speak at an event. They were willing to pay me to do it. I went to Ogilvy, and I said, “Hey, I’ve got this revenue source over here. It doesn’t fit your business model, but I don’t want to be turning down all this money either. So, you know, what should I do?”

I was part of the brand strategy group. And then I was also on the new business team, which meant I was doing a lot of pitching for new business, for new clients. I was getting all these invites to speak, and I went to Ogilvy and I said, “Can I give you a cut? Can we make this part of my job, basically?”And they were like, “No, that doesn’t fit our thing. So why don’t you just take a day off and do those speaking gigs on your own time, and, you know, keep the money? We’ll know about it, and you know about it, but you can just do it on your own.”

And I did that for a while. The problem is that the bigger you get in terms of opportunities for events, and the larger events you do, the further in advance they book you. And so then I started running into a situation where I said yes to an event in Korea five months ahead of time, because obviously nothing’s on my calendar. Then when the event starts rolling around, we have a huge pitch that we’re working on. And now I have to go to them and say, “Look, you approved my three days off to go to Korea, do this event and come back.” And they’re looking at that and saying, “Well, cancel it, because we have this huge pitch and we need you.” And I said, “I can’t cancel. I said yes four months ago, and they’re expecting me. They have me as the keynote.” And then I had conflict, because now they said, “Okay, well, if you keep going off and doing this stuff, clearly you’re focused on the Rohit Show and not on us.”

So then eventually it just kind of became not manageable to do that.

Bob: I’m not trying to pick on Ogilvy here, but knowing a little bit about Ogilvy and David Ogilvy, it’s a little ironic given that David Ogilvy’s books, “Confessions of an Advertising Man,” and the next book after that helped make Ogilvy a global advertising agency. David Ogilvy clearly believed that book publishing was critical to growing his firm.

Rohit: I don’t blame Ogilvy at all. I had a great run there. I learned a ton. I loved the people I worked with. But at the end of the day, my last name is not Ogilvy…I wasn’t the boss. If I were the boss and I was doing this, it would have been great. Everyone would have loved it. But it didn’t work for a mid-level SVP to do this, when my bosses are sitting there thinking, “Why are you the one who’s going out and doing this stuff?”

And I understand that. If I were in the same position that they were, looking at someone like me doing what I was doing, I would have come to the same conclusion and been like, “You know, what you’re doing doesn’t really fit what we need.”

How Books Burnish Reputations

Bob: Well, I look at it differently, because most of my background has been with management consultants and management consulting firms, and the most sophisticated ones in thought leadership encourage their partners who have ideas to publish books, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain, etc. So it’s not just the person at the top, but it’s the folks who are deal-makers, who are door-openers, where having a book behind them is critical to growing the pie of the consulting firm. I think that management consulting understand why they need books to grow the business, and the books that don’t have to be authored by the CEO of the firm. I just wonder if the advertising agency world has caught up.

Rohit: I’m not sure they get that., I think that on the creative side, ad agencies are certainly used to pitching with, “This is our creative director. He or she has won, or they have won this many awards, right?” But I don’t think that it’s there on the strategy side.

Bob: My prediction is, in the future, ad agencies will discover what the consulting firms have known for a long time, and more people like you can stay at the firm to help the firm make more money, because they become famous for their little niche in marketing or advertising. The clients will want that person with the book behind them in the room, and having that person in the room can influence the deal.

Rohit: I think that might help solve an issue that I think the advertising industry has overall, which is, once you reach a certain age – I had recently turned 40 when I left Ogilvy – it’s time to leave the agency. It was a young person’s atmosphere, unless you were kind of right at the top, then maybe you would be a little bit older. And so I felt old in that environment at 40, which now I realize is not very old.

When Paychecks Are Uncertain

Bob: So when you left Ogilvy 10 years ago, in 2014, that was a big leap into your own business. You’re a company of one essentially, right? That’s a big leap, and a lot of people wouldn’t have taken that leap. I would argue most people won’t take that leap from the world of a paycheck every two weeks or every month to the world of, “Well, I don’t know what I’m going to get paid next, because it’s up to me to generate the revenue. So how if you can remember back then, how worried were you that this was a good decision?

Rohit: Well, I also had two young kids at the at the time, so that makes it even, even scarier. It’s hard to remember how worried or panicked I was in that moment, because I kind of see the success that came afterwards. One thing I could say is that I knew what my salary was at Ogilvy, and I knew what I was making speaking. And so I kind of thought that as long as I could replace what I was making at Ogilvy with my speaking in the first year, it’s sort of like breaking even. And you know as well as I do that getting paid to show up for an hour on stage is a lot less work than coming up with an entire brand strategy and being on the road for three days, working 18hour days, preparing for a pitch.

So I wasn’t that worried financially, because I knew that I could replace that revenue based on the trajectory of my speaking career. What I was a little more worried about is, is it going to be sustainable? And honestly, cash flow is another big question mark, because other thing you think about is: “I could book a speaking gig six months from now, but I don’t really get paid until five months from now and you still got to pay the mortgage every month. So, I mean, that’s the challenge.

Publishing Other Thought Leaders

Bob: So the next big career change was not just Rohit as thought leader, book author, and speaker, it’s Rohit as publisher of other thought leaders, or aspiring thought leaders. What led to that decision?

Rohit: So I did my first book under Ideapress in 2015. I had been on my own for a year. I knew I wanted to write this new book. At that point, I had done two books traditionally, and my second one was a lot less pleasurable of an experience than my first one. I became really disillusioned with the world of traditional publishing, and I was thinking like an artist: Why am I giving all my money and my IP and all of this stuff to somebody else to basically make money off my back? I was disillusioned about the lack of quality, the fact that I was treated like an employee in not a good way, and I was feeling rushed to just get something out, as opposed to doing my best work. I didn’t feel I was working with a talented team.

I’d spent my career working in creative roles with really talented people, and I knew what kind of talent was out there, and I knew that if I had done this myself, I could have done a much better job with the people that I would have hired and they could have made the book much better. I was also paying attention to culture at that time. I was writing about trends and paying attention to cultural signals. And at that time, there was a lot of media attention around artists like Beyonce and Taylor Swift who were saying they didn’t need the record labels; they would just go directly.  The audiences love us like they hate the record labels. Why do we need them? I realized that I thought the same way as an author.

And so my first big challenge was to figure out, what is publishing like? How do you publish a book and not give up the things that make it a “real book,” such as beautiful printing, distribution in bookstores, foreign rights, translations, and so on. I spent the next three years really just picking the brain of anyone who would talk to me about publishing and sometimes hiring them and paying them for their time to educate me on everything about publishing, and that was kind of the start of the journey.

And I did my first book in 2015 through that model. It hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, because at that point I knew what I was doing. And then I had friends of mine, people in my network, who also wanted to write books, who also were frustrated with publishers who said that I seemed to have figured this out. Why not do our book too? Like, can you just do us a favor? So I just did them a favor, basically, and that turned into Ideapress.

Bob: So you didn’t start Ideapress thinking it would be a stable of authors?

Rohit: It was pretty much, I need my own vehicle to publish my own books. That was it. I made the branding mistake of having a logo that we didn’t actually even own. It was just like a stock image of a dragon. I realized that if I’m going to do this as a business, I need a branded, ownable logo. So we actually found a different dragon which faces the other direction that we could purchase, so that we would own it. The first Ideapress books, have a different logo with the different dragon, and then we kind of got smart and did it properly..

Don’t Think Like a ‘Prebutter’

Bob: Your upcoming book, Non-Obvious Thinking, is rich with insights for thought leaders, for people in thought leadership research, for editors and publishers who work with experts to try to raise their ideas, to improve their ideas and bring them to market. There are number of things I saw that intrigue me, such as concepts of the need to avoid people that you refer to as “prebutters,” who are different than people who like to offer rebuttals. Tell us more about that and why people who hope to publish big ideas should avoid those types.

Rohit:  It feels like a word I made up, but it’s actually a word that was already out there. So, a “prebuttal,” if you think in terms of politics, is when someone gets interviewed by the media before the politician gives the speech and talks about all the things the politician was wrong about before they’ve actually given the speech. They’re assuming they already know what this person’s going to say. I already know what they’re going to think, and here are all the reasons they’re wrong. The first time I saw that and even heard about this, I thought it was the most idiotic way to approach life ever, because you just make assumptions. You don’t actually listen to anyone. You make up your mind ahead of time, and you close your perspective to any chance of evolution, and that is not the way that smart people live their lives. That’s not the way that non-obvious thinkers should live their lives. And certainly, if you’re going to produce thought leadership, it’s not the way you should look at the world. And so I put together this chapter to advocate against that type of thinking.

A Non-Obvious Approach to Insights

Bob: You also write about how to uncover insights. Tell us more about that.

Rohit: Insights are interesting, because working in the world of advertising, you hear about insights all the time. And one of the most educational moments for me, working at Ogilvy and working with some real consumer experts, was when I was doing a deep dive into a particular industry, and I was learning all sorts of things about behavior.  One of the things that I learned — and this was specifically about consumer buying behavior with furniture — is that no one really feels comfortable buying furniture on their own. They kind of need someone else to look at it, or sit on it, or just give them a reassurance, right? There’s certain things that people just don’t have a lot of buying confidence to just go off and buy it on their own. Eyeglasses are the same thing. Like, when you go and buy a pair of eyeglasses or sunglasses, you want someone else to tell you if they look good on your face. Even if you have your selfie camera and you could literally look at yourself, you still kind of want someone else to give you reassurance. It’s just a element of buying behavior.

I was really excited to discover this, when I shared it with Ogilvy’s consumer experts the response was, “That’s new to you, but everyone in the furniture industry already knows that, so it’s not an insight for them; it’s an insight for you…We can’t take that to a client, who will say, ‘We’ve known that for 20 years, man.’”

And it really educated me that a real insight is not something you just discovered, but everybody else already knows. A real insight is something that is new — an extrapolation of the things that you’ve seen to point to a behavior or a trend, or some element of something that is actually new and original. And I think that was a big moment for me, because it really reminded me that I have to challenge myself to go beyond just learning something new myself. That’s the first step. Second step is to now bring something that is actually insightful to a client who’s paying you to do that

Bob: And so what are the keys to doing that — telling the client something they don’t know, or telling a book, book buyer something they don’t know? How do you search for the insights, the things that they don’t know?

Rohit: Well, the first is to look at what an intersection might be between something that’s happening in one industry and something that’s happening in another. A lot of times, an insight can come from looking at the direction of what’s happening in one space but not another, and saying, Well, why isn’t this happening? Like, what if it did? Sometimes, an insight can come from looking at what people are worried about and what potentially might happen next, what would evolve there, what a solution might be.

Insights can come from a lot of places. I mean, one of the things that Ben [duPont] and I wrote about in “Non Obvious Thinking” was that there are habits and techniques that you can use to open yourself so that when that insight is there, you will see it. Because every situation is different. I can’t tell you what every insight is going to be, but I can help you train yourself with the right sort of habits, so that when that insight is there, you don’t walk right by it. You actually notice it. You could expose two people to the same experience, and one might see the insight and the other might not.

For example, there were millions of people in the 60s and 70s who walked down the streets of Milan, saw cafes on the street side and people enjoying themselves, and thought it looked nice and went and had a coffee. But there was guy who was in Milan for a coffee conference and thought to himself, why don’t we have this in America? He came back, bought the Starbucks brand, and launched Starbucks, which wasn’t home or work but a third place where people could hang out that wasn’t a bar or restaurant, which was what their marketing initially said.

And now imagine Howard Schultz today, walking down the street in Milan, sending a text message, instead of looking at these cafes and thinking to himself, “hey, there’s an insight here.”

That’s where we are, right? It’s not that he had a PhD in noticing stuff, but noticing insights through in-person observation, that kind of research, can be more effective than doing surveys or the other market research that companies do, trying to look for insights.

A Non-Obvious Approach to Research

Bob: Do you have any thoughts on the kind of the research technique that would more likely lead to big insights?

Rohit: I don’t think it’s either/or, and we are often tempted to think that the real insight comes from in-person, ethnographic research, or from data through an actual survey. In real life. I think that a lot of times putting those two together is where the best ideas come from. And as thought leadership professionals, I think that one of the challenges is to resist the temptation to say, well, it’s not authoritative if it didn’t have this right, or it didn’t have that meaning.”

I’ve written about trends for the last 10 years. I’ve never commissioned my own original research in terms of like a big survey research firm the way that some other people might now. You could look at that and say, well, nothing that I’ve ever written is authoritative because I don’t have any original research or data behind it. Or you could look at it and say, well, you’re taking all the research that exists and you’re finding the connections between it, and then you’re combining that with real conversations and your own interviews and research to come up with a conclusion. And that’s valid. Now, people might see it one or the other way, right? But I think that our challenge is not to be so judgmental about where an insight comes from.

Bob: I agree. Many years ago Michael Hammer, the father of the big management concept of the 90s, business reengineering, said he did not believe in quantitative surveys. I once asked him, “Michael, why don’t you believe in surveys? Why do you believe in interviewing a number of people in a company and multiple companies to understand how the best practice companies, the ones who are solving the problem best, differ from the worst practice companies?” And he said, “I don’t care what executives think. I want to know what their companies are doing.”

And that’s why he had his team of researchers talking to multiple people and dozens of companies on any research topic that they were working on at the time. He wanted to know what their companies were doing, and he did not think that could really be sufficiently gleaned from a 20, 50, or even 100-question survey questionnaire, which most executives would probably not answer anyway.

Rohit: I mean, I think that’s a great example of how we bring our own perspectives to the insights or the thought leadership that we produce. Everyone has a version of that, where they think that getting an insight in one way or from one source or from one method is more authoritative than another way. We can’t really change how we think about it, but I would advocate that we appreciate the other way of getting insights a little more. Because more and more and more insights can be gotten just by observing things online, right?

Bob: I mean, more and more companies are telling you how they do things online, through LinkedIn and with archived speeches they’ve given at a certain industry conference — versus 30 years ago, when I first got into the thought leadership profession, you had to go to go to the company library to get newspaper articles and books. There was a lot of microfiche over the years. The technology didn’t exist for companies to spill their guts online. There was no online.

Today, you’re not going out to companies and saying, “Well, how did you do this?” You’re reading what others are saying and reading things online, and there’s a ton more information. And I’m telling you something you already know: A lot more information can be gleaned online than there was even 10 years ago, much less when the web started.

Rohit: That’s true, and this is where the framing of our brand – non-obvious — actually helps. And so if you apply that to insights or thought leadership, it’s sort of a laying down the gauntlet challenge, because now anything that I write, I have to put it through this lens of, is this actually non-obvious? Am I pushing this far enough? Am I telling people stuff they already know, which would be obvious, or am I pushing it to a realm of things that maybe they haven’t heard before? Am I being original?

For me, that challenge that is baked into the brand name has been really beneficial, because it has forced me to kill things that I might have otherwise written because they weren’t non-obvious enough.

Bob: So it goes back to the old Monty Python line from the 1960s, I’m showing my age here: “Now for something completely different.” You’re saying that the world needs non-obvious thinking. If it’s 5% different than what five other org people have said, or five other companies, people will tune out.

The Ascendancy of Hybrid Publishing

Bob: Now let’s turn to the world of publishing thought leaders, which has changed so much over the past few years, since COVID began in March of 2020. I remember it vividly. We had to fly back from Spain. We were visiting our youngest son, who was spending a term in college in Spain, on March 13, when every US citizen abroad was told to fly back. I imagine book publishing has changed a lot, even in just these four years. Would that be true, and if so, how?

Rohit: Yeah, it has changed a lot. First of all, the credibility of independent publishing and hybrid publishing has gone up at the same time. I think that there’s been some pretty high-profile flame-out failures in hybrid publishing. In particular, it’s been the companies that scaled too fast and took on everything and tried to be what I would call a book factory, that have generally failed and scaled back. I think that there’s been some consolidation. There’s been groups even in traditional publishing that have moved away from our category of business books, maybe because they saw more opportunity in, you know, teen fiction or some other category of book. I mean, we specialize in business books and nonfiction, so we’re very specific in terms of what we do.

I think that there’s also been sort of a building of reputation. That only happens over time. If you’re in a marketplace where everybody’s a couple years old, it’s hard to know who’s really authoritative and who’s doing good work over the long term, whose authors don’t hate them. You and I are still talking to each other, right? That may not be the case for some publishers and authors, but I think that for us, at least, like we’ve survived through all of that because we’ve been really responsible and intentional about how we’ve grown. We still take on very few books; we probably reject with kindness about 90% of the things that come to us.

Still, we’re not assholes, but we intentionally don’t publish everything. We’ve grown our team to be twice as big as it was when we worked with you; we’ve added some amazing talent to our team; and I think those are all elements of responsible growth.

Bob: What do you think are the most important things for continued success? For Ideapress, what are the three most important things to continue at this growth trajectory? I’m hearing that you are about quality books, not just taking any manuscript because you can make money from it.

Rohit: We could probably double our revenue if we did that, but it would not lead us to long-term success. So, for example, we have almost no employee turnover; once people start working with us, they love our team and they stay with us. I don’t know how many publishers could say that authors come back to them for their second book because they had a great experience the first time. That’s  uncommon in publishing. I think the hallmark of success is doing interesting books with people who have great ideas that need to be heard.

We continue to take on projects that we are really strongly believe in. I mean, I’m the one who is going to sales meetings twice a year, pitching our entire catalog to the sales team at our distributor, and it’s hard to pitch something you’re not passionate about and so every book we take on like, I really passionate about it. So when I’m there pitching, I mean, a, I’m passionate about it, so I believe in it, and I speak about it very strongly. B, I’m a professional speaker, you know. So you put those two things together, you know, those pitches are pretty good, and that’s what helps these books get out there in the world, to get distribution. And so I want to continue taking books that I can be passionate about.

What Comes Next

Bob: So, what’s next after book publishing? People ask me, Bob, you’re 69 Have you thought about retiring? And the answer is no, and they’ll say, Well, why not? Because I’ll be bored. So is Ideapress the last career step for you? Or do you think there, there might be something else after Ideapress?

Rohit: Oh, there’s definitely something else. I don’t know what it is yet. I think being an ambassador to a country would be cool. I think that being on a board of a company that I actually believe in, like a large company, would be interesting.

I don’t think I’d ever be able to go back to being employed by someone. I’m unemployable at this point as an entrepreneur, but I do think that I’m constantly shifting too. My 10th business book is coming out, and my next book will not be a business book, so that already is different. It’s going to be a teen-oriented book, for middle school age, and it will be fiction, not nonfiction. So that already is going to be a great creative challenge, and I’m looking forward to that.

I know you’ll appreciate this: I love podcasting. I was doing a video show for a while, and we just recently remastered all of those as audio episodes. And then we’re going to be launching what we’re calling season five of the podcast. That’s really exciting, because I get a lot of enjoyment out of having conversations like this. So yeah, there’s a lot of potential things that we could do, but I don’t think that Ideapress will be going anywhere. I’m not planning to shut it down or sell it. I’ve had inquiries about that, and it doesn’t fit our model.

Our biggest thing, apart from quality, is that we are author-centric. So everything we do is something that I think would benefit our authors. Some publishers in the business put their logo on the cover of an author’s book, and that’s a symbolic manifestation of how they treat the relationship — It’s them first and the author second. We’re exactly the opposite. So I think that that mentality means that we will make certain choices. Keeping Ideapress independent, proudly independent, and being able to do all of these things fits our model of putting the authors first. Like, I don’t know any author who is saying, you know, we want you to get, you know, sell it, and, you know, be under the under the umbrella of something else, and have all these new constraints and stuff. Nobody wants that. So for now, I’m going to do what I’ve promised to authors. I’m going to stick to what, you know, keeping my promises.

Advice for New Thought Leadership Professionals

Bob: So last question is this, what is your advice to young people? I mean people in their 20s, maybe still in college or just after they graduated, and they look at people like us and say, I want to work for a company that’s doing thought leadership well and knows how to market their thought leaders, and that includes putting books in the marketing mix, etc. Maybe your kids want to do what you do. What would be your biggest pieces of advice for having a satisfying and successful career?

Rohit: I would say the first thing I would do is find an outlet for your voice and your perspective. Maybe it’s writing, maybe it’s video, maybe it’s audio, maybe it’s art in some way, but find an outlet for that and don’t overly stress about monetizing that outlet. I wrote my blog for free, never charged. I never had a subscription model. I still don’t have a subscription model even for my newsletter, which is huge now for me and has a lot of people reading it. And I never monetized it, because I know that it drives all of my other goals. It builds visibility for me. It adds value out in the world. It makes me indispensable. It helps people listen to me. So create something like that and put it out in the world to create your reputation. That’s the biggest challenge, I think, for somebody who’s young: building some sort of a reputation so that you’re known for something.

And obviously figuring out what you want to be known for, right? I mean, that’s not easy either, but at the end of the day, when I started my blog, it was called the influential marketing blog, and my first blog post was all about the user interface design of screen sizes. That’s not my expertise. That’s not what I write about, but that was where I started. So put something out in the world. That’s one piece of advice I would give.

The Art of the Job Search

Rohit: Another piece of advice is to be unafraid to reach out to the people that you admire. Most people who are later on in their career like us could name on one hand the number of people in their 20s who have directly reached out to us saying, “Hey, I love your stuff. I read this, I read that, I would love to learn from you. Can I pick your brain? Do you have a project that maybe I could work on? I don’t care about getting paid?” Probably you or I would pay them if they were really smart. So it’s not about the money.

But people don’t proactively go off and do that. What we do is look for a job opening, a person who said they need help. Let me wait for the door to be opened, and then I’ll try and squeeze myself through it, along with 1000 other people, and what’s the thinking of the young person? Like, there’s no way they’re going to talk to me. Why would I even approach them? I don’t know how to get in touch with them, and they wouldn’t respond anyway. Nobody wants somebody who’s pushy, who randomly emails them. Cold emails don’t get responded to. We can make a long list of why someone wouldn’t do this, and so people don’t.

So how would you ask the big question: Do you have any work?

Well, you would do two things. You could talk about all the things you worked on, and mention that you saw something [pertaining to them or their company] and have an idea for how it could be better or what you may be able to do for them on that specific thing. The other way, if you don’t have something so specific, is to lead with your skills and go to someone and say, “Hi, I’ve seen your stuff out there; I am capable and really good at x, y, z…Is that something that maybe I could help your team with? And now you’re leading with whatever skills you have, right?

In either case, you have to have that young person has to have studied the person’s work pretty, pretty closely, right? Not just one article that you thought was interesting. I’m not telling somebody to go and read all of my10 books before reaching out like, but in about a half hour you could look at all of my social feeds, look at all the content that I personally have put out there, and kind of get a sense of the things that I’m doing right now. So it’s not a huge time investment. The problem is that we’re told that if you do that for each opportunity, and multiply it by the 800 jobs you want to apply to, you never have enough time. But you don’t do that for 800 but just your top three or five, you could probably spare three hours, right? If you’re looking for a job, or you’re looking for a new opportunity, or you’re looking for an internship, and can’t allocate three hours and have a custom outreach to them, you’re probably not working hard enough.

Have an Online Calling Card

Rohit: Write about things you’re interested in. That doesn’t mean you have to keep writing about those things for 30 years. You will eventually find what floats your boat, or what you’re passionate about, right? If you’re not a writer, then don’t write. I mean, record video or do something else. But the beautiful thing about content and the noisy world that we live in is that the cost of putting stuff out there that no one will read is insignificant. You will rarely put something out there where you get hate back or even criticism — what you will get is crickets. This could feel like a waste of time and demoralizing, but it’s not risky. The only risk is you waste your time, and the younger you are and the more time you have to not waste, the more time you have to dedicate to this. And you can’t be afraid of that, even if you’re getting crickets.

That’s because when you have articles or videos or whatever it is you want to do posted online, you can point to your work when a job offer or job prospect comes in. People can see your work, whereas if you have posted nothing, people can’t see your work. And for people in creative professions, the employers will say, “Show me what you’ve done, show me your portfolio, show me your articles, show me your videos.” That’s it.

When I first moved to Australia and I didn’t have any connections at all, my first job was not marketing. Somebody called me in because they had an HTML programming job to code the front end of a user interface. And they brought me in because they saw my personal website that I built for myself. And the interview was, did you design and build this website yourself. And I did, and I said yes. And they said, Okay, you’re hired. That was all. They had a three-week gig that eventually turned into a full time job.

Bob: I love it. Any other keys to success for kids who may want to go into your profession, or my profession?

Rohit: Actually, my oldest sort of does. He’s studying marketing right now at GW, and he seems to like it. He got an internship at a PR firm over the summer. I tell him that being at industry events is a great way to build your network. And in fact, he had some beautiful moments at a couple of local industry marketing events, where he came back and told me he was the only student there. And he’s a kid who happens to be a sophomore, not even a graduating senior. That’s different from showing up at a job fair, where everybody’s a student and you’re struggling to stand out. And now you’re meeting people, by the way, who are more senior than the people who typically get sent to a job fair. You’re connecting with them directly, and you’re the only student there. I mean, why wouldn’t you do that? Showing up sends a signal. And I don’t think you should underestimate that if you’re a young person trying to break into something, just show up in the right places.

Bob: Well, Rohit, this has been a great, great interview, and there is a lot to learn from your path for our audience, and I wish you continued success in what you do.  I will be interested to see your fiction book when that hits the marketplace.

Rohit: I’ll put you on the early reader list, and we’ll get it to you. Thanks so much.