Chapter 04
It was the summer of 2012. Shane Sams was at home in Kentucky, in his front yard, mowing his lawn on his riding lawn mower. He usually listened to music to pass the time, but that day he wanted something a little different. Scrolling through Apple Podcasts, he stumbled across my podcast and hit play.
Shane was mowing along, listening to the show, when something he heard piqued his interest. He leapt off the lawn mower and ran toward the house. As he burst into the kitchen, his wife, Jocelyn, was there with their kids, Isaac and Anna.
“Jocelyn, you’ve got to listen to this! This is our destiny! We’re going to change our lives!” Shane was fired up and breathless. “This guy Pat Flynn is talking about making money online and passive income. I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds great! Let’s do it!”
“What?” came Jocelyn’s reply. “How are you going to do that? The people who do that are not normal people. They’re probably just lucky or something.” Inspired but deflated, Shane headed back outside to finish cutting the grass.
But that wasn’t the end of Shane and Jocelyn’s story. In fact, it was just the beginning.
Time machines haven’t been invented (yet), but it’s super fun to imagine if they had been. That’s why I’m a superfan of the movie Back to the Future. Sure, the story is great and the characters are fun, but it’s the idea of traveling through time that fascinates me the most. Bonus points for the DeLorean, of course.
You can also use time travel to take people from casual to active on the Pyramid of Fandom. Wondering how things are going to turn out in the future is something that’s on every person’s mind, and the more you can paint a picture of what a person’s life could be like if they take action with you, the more likely they are to do that and become a fan.
There are two aspects to this strategy: painting a picture of the future of what life will be like if they DO take action with you, and what life will be like if they DON’T. You’re going to help your audience “time travel” to two potential futures by telling a story of what life could be like if they don’t make a change, then on the flipside, showing what’s possible by sharing stories of people who were in their exact position not too long ago and turned things around with your help.
Let’s start with the DON’T part of the strategy—painting a picture of life without your help. To craft that not-so-rosy picture, the very first thing you have to do is identify the problem you are solving for that person. You’re not judging, but identifying their experience as it currently is and helping that person become even more aware of it.
And to do that effectively, you have to amplify the problem. Amplification is essentially making it very clear to someone what will happen if they don’t take action. This might be describing what someone could negatively experience if they don’t launch their podcast—all the lost potential they’ll be giving up and the regret they’ll feel about not following through on their vision. Or if you’re helping people with weight loss, this could involve painting a picture of a heavy person’s future, such as not being able to keep up with the kids, diabetes, heart issues, money spent on health bills, etc. The key is to provide lots of detail—again, you’re painting a picture, not just drawing a sketch.
Focusing on a potentially negative future picture will capture the attention of a percentage of people in your audience and motivate them to take action. The key is to be sure you know exactly what your audience is afraid of, what keeps them up at night. This is where “learning the right lyrics” and understanding your audience’s problems and desires, in their language, is crucial. But there’s something really important to keep in mind here. When you give people a potential image of their future without your help, you have to be careful to not prey on their fears. There’s a fine line between amplifying a problem and using fear and shame to bring someone around to your side. Use your power wisely and compassionately.
So we’ve addressed the DON’T side—what a target audience member’s future might look like without your help. And while this will motivate some people to take action, you’re going to be even more successful when you provide a counterpoint to that gloomy picture—which brings us to the DO side.
Once you’ve made the problem super clear, and showed someone their possible future if they don’t deal with that issue, you need to tell them a story of what their problem looks like once it’s been solved. It could be the story of how you solved it for yourself, or it could be the story of how you helped a client or customer find the solution on their own.
You see, your audience won’t be buying your product or service—they’ll be buying the change that product or service offers them. They’ll be buying the way it will help them transform their lives. They’ll be buying the solution, and you need to tell them a compelling story about how that solution works.
How do you do that? You need to show them examples of transformation—your solution in action. You need to give people a chance to see the change as it happens, in the lives of actual people. You need to paint a picture of how your solution can create direct positive change for someone.
Here is where your past experience with your audience—your clients or customers—will come in very handy. One of the best ways to paint that picture of transformation is by using testimonials. It’s one thing to tell people what will happen if they follow you or use your product, but it’s another to prove that your stuff works by showing people who were just like them not too long ago and how well they are doing now. Testimonials are incredibly powerful—and often a lot less work than trying to tell the transformation story yourself!
Which brings me back to Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
Shane kept listening to the SPI Podcast that day on the lawn mower in 2012—and for many days after, eventually getting through every episode in the archive. Over the course of the following two years, he and Jocelyn used what they’d learned from SPI to turn themselves into two of the “lucky” people. They each started out teaching what they know online: Shane taught football coaches new plays, and Jocelyn was helping librarians. In the years since that first fateful mower ride, they’ve started their own podcast and built an incredible online business called Flipped Lifestyle that has allowed them to quit their jobs and helps thousands of others build businesses of their own.
So what does this all have to do with time travel, DeLoreans, and DOs and DON’Ts? Well, Shane and Jocelyn were the featured guests on SPI Podcast episode 122 back in 2014. In that episode, they told the story of their online business-building journey, starting with that day in the backyard in Kentucky. Their success has been so massive that I even had them back a few years later, on SPI Podcast episode 265.
But that first episode is a special one because it’s a phenomenal example of two people who followed someone’s advice—who chose the path of DO—and made it work for them in a big way. In fact, it’s become one of the most shared episodes of my podcast—even more than episodes featuring famous people like Tim Ferriss and Gary Vaynerchuk, who have shared plenty of amazing, inspiring stories of their own. Why? Because Shane and Jocelyn, a football coach and a librarian respectively, two “regular” folks from Kentucky, are probably a little more relatable to most people in my audience than icons like Tim or Gary (as awesome as they are). And so their testimony carries a little more weight. When people hear the Sams’ story, they can hear themselves saying the same things. They feel like they know Shane and Jocelyn, because Shane and Jocelyn were just like them, not very long ago.
Whether it’s in a DeLorean or on a riding mower, if you want to activate your casual audience, you need to take them on a preview journey of their possible futures—both with your help and without it. In the next and final strategy of part 1, I’ll tell you why the simple act of shaking someone’s hand can flip the switch for someone who’s on the fence about your brand.