How to use Innovative Marketing To Increase Revenue with Charlie Webb

Entrepreneur, technologist, author, filmmaker… – Charlie Webb

Charlie has a great business that many would consider to be boring. Medical Packaging. Yet he makes it extremely interesting and profitable with innovative marketing techniques. Learn what he does to minimize risk and create campaigns that make him top in his market. Plus we discuss the passion-myth – do you need to be passionate about your product or service?

Check out Van der Stahl Scientific, Inc. for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Today on the showI have Charlie Webb of Van der Stahl Scientific, a "boring" industry in medical packaging but he's got some amazing innovations, especially in marketing, that you wouldn't expect. We talk not only about that but what the future is going to look like and how we can jump ahead of trends if they're good ones and find out whether or not they're bad trends. He gives tons of advice for someone who's brand new, just starting, but also for established businesses and what they can do for innovation. Enjoy.

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show we have Charlie Webb. For 20 years he has owned a really cool company called Van der Stahl Scientific, Inc. They deal with packaging medicaldevices. It doesn't sound that sexy but if you go to their website it actually looks quite sexy. So I'm really excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, Charlie.

Charlie: Thanks for having me.

Jaime: Explain to me a little bit, because most people will think "Whoo! Medical packaging sounds really fun?" How did you get into something like this and do you think it's super cool or do you think it's kind of boring?

Charlie: I love it. I'm kind of a science guy so I love anything to do with technology. Our family had a micro-surgical knife company and we split off - I have an identical twin brother who, interestingly enough, has a patent on one of the smallest human implants, a thing called the punctal plug so we're innovators in medicine and I moved into the packaging side after having a consulting business. Although it doesn't sound very exciting, melting bags together to contain a medical device,there are actually a lot of challenges and it's an interesting business. My education background is in business so any vehicle to work in business is terrific for me and I love the fact that it's in technology.

Jaime: That's really interesting because a lot of people say to me that they want to find their passion, especially if they're in a day job right now. They have tons of skills and all of that fun stuff but they're looking for this thing that makes them excited every second. For you, it's really interesting, because you wouldn't think of medical packaging as being interesting but it's not the melting of plastic that excites you, it's all the other stuff that goes with it. So tell me about that.

Charlie: I think the mistake that a lot of people make when they're starting a new enterprise is that, for example, they open up a bakery, which is good, but you might want to go a few tiers up or down and understand how you can make that passion a business. I can tell you, from all the people I've spoken to over the years who have had failed businesses, that one of the principle salient takeaways that I've always got from these discussions is that they only focused on the passion and they never looked at the business. There's an old case study where they talk about how the kids go to grandma's house and everyone's sitting around the Thanksgiving table saying "Grandma, you've got to market your pies, they're delicious," and the kids put up a little bit of seed money and the next thing you know, grandma's got a factory, she's making pies but five months later it's out of business. The epilogue and the moral of the story is that it would have been better if grandma was an MBA, rather than a good pie maker. So I think you've got to remember that, whatever your passion is, passion is great but if it's not centered around some kind of cogent business model you're probably not going to succeed and, ultimately, the terrible footnote is that you're probably going to end up hating that passion because it's the thing that got you kicked out of your apartment.

Jaime: Exactly, it's the downfall instead of this amazing thing.

Charlie: You don't want to do that to your passion.

Jaime: I think that's reallyinteresting for anybody to know - even if you love it, after doing it for a year, hardcore, for other people, it's not as though it's still as fun as it was before. Doing it for yourself and doing it for other people - way different. Grammy probably gets sick of making pies after her thousandth pie.

Charlie: It's true. If you watch Kitchen Nightmares or any of those shows you can just see the diminution of passion over the life of that enterprise and the reason for that is that they never really think about the seven days a weekend the grind. That is one of the things that you really have to understand to take it to the next level. Doctor Maltz talked about the theatre of our mind and how we have this great projector inside and we use our imagination for the good but imagination works both sides. Use your imagination to understand and really future what it's going to feel like ten years from now, flippinghash browns in your kitchen, or the girl that quit, or the waiter couldn't come to work at 10 o'clock. Understand what those limitations are because that's going to keep you a lot happier when those realities hit and it will make you hate business. So many people get pushed away from business and I can't tell you how many people go through the cycle of working for a company, get the passion to start something on their own, they went out on their own and they landed right back where they started in that cubicle and there are so many ways to thwart that if you can visualize what it's really going to be like when you get there.

Jaime: Let's talk more about that, especially for people who are new. Because we also have people, and we'll talk about this, who have already got their business going, but for people who need that inspiration, what do youthink they should do? They're in their cubicle and they're dreaming about this amazing thing, what sort of reality check do they need to do before they jump in to make it better?

Charlie: Well the first bit of recommendation I would give anybody going into an enterprise is to read or listen to anything from Seth Godin. I'm a big Seth Godin devotee. He's an amazing futurist. You've had him on your show before; I'm a big fan. He really synthesizes what our market looks like now. I'm 55 years old and what my market looked like in the '70s, '80s and '90s is very different, although I keep a close hand on it. a couple of things to remember is that, when we're going into something new, at one point there's innovation,  whether that innovation is personal development to prepare yourself to be a consultant, whatever that may be, you've got to realize that you will be innovating. Another important thing to remember, and I think this trips up a lot of people, is that they say 90% of patents never make any money and 1% never have any true wealth generated. Inmy life I've made millions of dollars and I've done itthrough not being so product focused but more holistically focused on what the enterprise is all about, howtheir distribution is going to work, etc. I can picture acompany in my head when I'm developing everything from the logo, how I'm going to market it, how the product is going to feel, and having a much broader, global look at what you're going to do. I think the biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make is that they're only looking at a slice of what they want to do, "I want to be a consultant" or "I want to make cupcakes". Let's take a look at the cupcake revolution - over the last few years, in any town in America, in any mall, is a closed cupcake store because they watched the food network, they said "Gosh, everybody's going to cupcakes, now it's time to role in." As any business person will tell you - usually, by the time you see the trend, it's too late. Other people got to market quicker and you don't want to move towards these trends or these fads. Right now, in California, and it's happening across the country, I'm sure, you're part of the country as well, is the food truck craze.

Jaime: Oh yeah.

Charlie: Which is great. One of the beauties of this craze is that I wrote a book about five years about trying to get distribution and I made the mistake of sending, and Seth Godin, again, would say it's asking permission to be able to get my book to market. So you have all of these layers of people trying to stop you from getting your idea into the hands of people who need it. Now we're into this "farm to fork" movement and this truck movement. Now, a chef out of culinary school or someone with a great idea, a great recipe, can, for some amazingly low investment, be in the restaurant business. That is the good news. I've got to tell you, anybody who is in their 30s and 40s, you live in an amazing time because you're in a position now where you can take your idea and get it to your customer so easily compared to the way that we had to do it. Again, it's what Seth Godin called the industrial complex, where we had to buy television ads, newspaper ads and radio ads and then we were in competition with the big people and really the little guy or girl never had the chance to get into that market. Now, it's a new deal. If you have agood idea and you understand the mechanics of business, which is something that you are going to have to learn at one point - there are still mechanical aspects of business that apply - but you've never been in a position where you've been able to take your idea and get it to your customers this easily. The farm to table, the restaurant movement, and finally the farm to fork, which is the product to the customer. We've moved three tiers of distribution away which is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs; you're in a terrific position right now to be able to exploit this new market.

Jaime: Because we can go directly to the people that we need. I can't even think about the way it was before. I love the way you talk about our future. We were just talking about our kids, we have sons the same age, and I keep imagining what it's going to be like for them in 20-30 years and, while I can't predict the future, I'd love to be able to, then I could be a millionaire in a second, thinking about the future and what that looks like, because our innovation seems to be moving faster and faster, especiallywith the amount of information that we have, what do you see coming up in the future?

Charlie: Most trends have sort of a bowtie graph. For instance, in the '90s, if you had a book, you would do desktop publishing and that was a paradigm in publishing because now, if you were a collector of Wedgwood pottery, you could create the book through your own photography and literally create the entire thing through your desktop and you're a publisher. That was amazing to me in the '90s and to move to where we are now where we don't use the paper anymore, we go directly to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and we're able to take our manuscripts and convert them into reading formats for tablets and electronic books and now we've even eliminated the paper. It's the same issue that we're having in technology with memory - there are certain physical limitations to where, at one point, I'm talking to you right now on my brand new Retina that has a terabyte on a solid state hard drive. A year ago, a solid state terabyte was just fantastic. So obviously we're going to get to a point where we reach a limit where the physical properties of the world, or in the case of marketing, the properties of the market, will no longer allow me. Where do we go? Well, we go directly to our customer. I think we're now going to see the market expand back a little bit towards the way it used to be. Distribution may come back into the fold again because we're at the point of saturation, in my opinion. There's not really anywhere left for us to go. If we're able to sell our produce directly to the customer, what's next? Theycome to our house to pick it up? At some point we reach a limit. But innovation is going to continue and just like when we reach difficult limits like this, we tend to spread out in a new direction. I think that's what's going to happen. I've been researching and writing a book called "No Food or Drinks" and it's a customer service book about the retelling policies of companies, which is so foreign to me. The reason I've been so successful and have a thriving company that grows every year is because I have a very great relationship with my customers and the new trend that I'm seeing is the expansion of those relationships. I think distribution is where we're hitting a wall. We can get our trucks to the downtown area to sell our burrito idea that we have, but where do we go from there? Do we go to their home next? Maybe that's the next level but, again, we're working on a distribution future model. I think if you want to grow your company now, it's new ways to wow your customer. As you know, our company, Van der Stahl Scientific, we just got a beautiful $300,000 motorhome office and we're doing what I used to do natively in the '80s, which is knocking on doors, doing sales calls. I come from a time where that was normal. Maybe some, and I don't want to sound derogatory here, but Generation X and Generation Y have a more difficult time with an outreach program.

Jaime: Yes.

Charlie: It's a little foreign to them.

Jaime: You're like "I can sit behind a computer. I don't have to go and talk to people. What?"

Charlie: We don't want to do that, but at one point, if you want to be exceptional and extraordinary, that's the new movement in business development, is how to be extraordinary. In the '80s, I'm dating myself here, but Zig Ziglar, Tom Peters and Lane Dwyer, all of those gurus of the '80s, we would talk about the cast study of a little gas station that was fighting the big mega gas station across the street and his response was to put people in mid-century gas station garb, a little white thing with a bowtie, and to wash their windows, and pretty soon he started pulling over the customers from across the street and that was a customer-centered response to a price-centered industry. I don't chase after products; I really have never used that model. I really don't think any of us want to go there, but in your industry, for your product, it maydictate that you have to be a low price leader. I hope not because it'sjust a really boring place to be. All you are is a person with an erase on your pencil and you're looking at ways to make less money. I don't give my products away but I produce absolute concierge level of service. One of the things that I do and continue to do, and this is something about innovation - remember, when you think about innovation, think about yourself as where innovation needs to happen. This year I became a Six Sigma black belt so I'm a lean manufacturing specialist because I sell to engineers that have to be compliant to the FDA's requirement - I'm a certified packaging engineer, I'm a certified management consultant. I'm constantly adding these, not just to have the qualifications at the end of my name, but rather I'm adding value and capability to me because I provide those my services that I know and my research to my customer at no charge and that's the way you win. I hate to use a dating model here but this is something we can all easily get our heads around - if you're dating someone and they're attractive and you can sort of see the future in them but they're a jerk then maybe they're not quite there - and the problem with most companies is that they're not quite there. But the term "triple threat", which you almost never hear anymore, but triple threat is what it's all about and triple threat, of course, in acting, is the ability to act, sing and dance. In business you've got to be a triple threat - you have to have a great product you believe in. our product is absolutely the magnum opus of technology where we developjust absolutely great technology. That's expected. Most people havea great product with this new manufacturing paradigm. In the '70s, I keep telling you my '70s stories but they're important, it used to be that getting 10,000 miles off of a car was unheard of. You could buy the cheapest car in the market - if it doesn't get a quarter of a million miles you had a limit. So we all expect that the technology that we're buying is going to be good so the question is always "What else?" You want to know what else you can get. And that's the same thing we look for in dating, right? You're a great guy, you're absent of ugliness, you've got a job, and what else? Are you principled? What's your character like? That's what is going to happen as we hit the wall of distribution - we're going to go back to an '80s, '90s model. I said it first here! We're going to be looking at quality companies and customer-focused companies. It almost sounds generic but I believe in this so much because I've seen it. We probably have about twelve competitors and, although I don't have an official breakdown of where we stand, we probably own more than a third of the market and I wouldn't be surprised if we have half of the market. We have a policy where we answer the phone at our company - you'renot allowed to not return a phone call. Everybody is solution-oriented; everybody is empowered to make a customer happy. We typically get machines that come in and rather than using balance sheets to decide whether or not we're going to cover them under warranty when they're slightly out, it's a no-brainer - they're getting coveredunder warranty. So just common courtesy - following through, answering phones - that is going to be the new baseline and it's just amazing to me. I don't know if it's a global issue right now and this is the reason I'm writing the book, the customer service book "No Food or Drink", but in my book I chronicle tons and tons - I mean just look at Yell. We are dissatisfied with the service we are getting, we start a company and we start dispensing more dissatisfaction. It doesn't make sense.

Jaime: I love that. But tell us, especially for somebody who has got their small business for maybe 3-5 years. You've been doing this for 20 years so you've had time to hone and pay attention to that. For someone whose business is maybe 3-5 years old, how do we evaluate how we can become a triple threat, especially with limited time, resources and all that other fun stuff?

Charlie: It's probably the Six Sigma black belt in me, but with medical devices you've got to remember - if we make a mistake in sterility, and one of my patents is a system is a forced policy compliant system that doesn't allow people to not follow the policy of the company, so it won't allow that person the latitude to be able to seal or patch and get into the sterile field. Now, remember, they're saying something like 60,000 people ayear die from hospital and surgery site infections. Obviously we're really invested; we really understand what the Six Sigma group or quality group call "root cause". Root cause analysis is a system where you go upstream of a problem and analyze from where it flows. In the context of an entrepreneur, if you're not recording, then how can you possibly gather data where it's going to make a difference? I think the problem with a lot of entrepreneurs is that shooting from the hip is what we all do. We do it our way, we're mavericks, loose cannons, all those sort of things, but at some point we need to reel it all in. it's like the old saying, if one person calls you a jerk, you can forget about it; if ten people call you a jerk, maybe it's time to reflect. So if your company is constantly getting complaints on delivery times, for instance, then clearly you need to do a root causeanalysis, go upstream of that and find the cause - why are you having this problem with delivery? You can't ignore the feedback and you have to have some method. Even if you're a cupcake shop, and I hope you're not, you need to understand why cupcake sales drops - call me and I'll tell you - or you can just look in your own area and see a waning fad. But in the day to day nuts and bolts you need to do some things. I encourage everybody, I'm not a big proponent of Six Sigma, but any sort of quality system - watch a TED Talk or just watch a 10 minute YouTube video on quality systems like Six Sigma and just learn how big companies track their mistakes and how you understand where the root cause is. A lot of the times when I look at companies their problems are so obvious to me but, as you know, when you're in the middle of it, it's very difficult to understand. It's the same with personal relationships. How many people say "How can you date him, he's terrible?" and people in the relationship just don't see it. That's the sort of thing that you see in business - we're not using any sort of metric to be able to score our company and we're not getting any sort of feedback to be able to see how we're doing. You should always be doing a performance study, even of your own personal development. I suffered with a weight problem constantly. Every morning, what do I do? I get on a scale. It's a metric that gives me the feedback, telling me whether I'm on track or not. If I avoid the scale I'm avoiding the data and avoidance of data begets trouble. We all know that.

Jaime: Tell me a little bit more about your tracking and what you guys have done and found. Being a small business owner, a lot of people are shooting from the hip, and I totally get that in the first couple of years because you don't know if it's going to work and you don't have a lot of time, you're trying to do everything yourself, but as soon as you start building it a little bit you have to start tracking things, which is uncomfortable for some people. Not a lot of people like data, as I've found, which is funny.

Charlie: For sure.

Jaime: So how do we get somebody who hasn't really started with this yet to get their feet wet? Because I know there are some consultants that come in and measure everything and I think that's a little bit overkill. So where do you think someone should start?

Charlie: That's a good point. You've got to make sure you're asking the right questions. In fact, if you look at the annals of great literature, really what the takeaway is on self-development is that you find out that people are asking the wrong questions. If we're in business it's a little bit easier - the question is are we making enough money for the enterprise to continue? That's obviously the principle question you've got to be asking yourself. I think one of the problems that I see with most companies - when I go to a restaurant or I go to a store and there's a gaping failure - is that the owner principle is nowhere in sight. Don't create layers between yourself and your user or your consumer. Once you start doing that, you have, as the author of Generation X jokingly called "McJobbers", you have the entry level people who are your ambassadors. When I was a consultant I did a little bit of physician practice management and as a consultant the first thing Iwould say is don't have your lowest level employee the first contact of your company. The reason this was so much better up until the '70s is because the wife would be at the front of the house, greeting people as they came in, and the husband was in the back making the food, or vice versa, and so you had vested people involved in the company. So if you want to get good data and you want to get it quickly and you want to stay on top of it, don't add layers of humanoids between you and your all-important customer. That's the first thing I would take away from that.

Jaime: I really, really appreciate that. But how do we mitigate that with how busy we are? Because you have a company of how many?

Charlie: It's a small company, there are less than 10, but I am an efficiency expert - we should have five times that.

Jaime: Really? That's another topic. We should talk about that later, too.

Charlie: It's a small company. If you were to take my spreadsheet against my competitors as far as personal income and quality of life sort of thing, I don't work as hard and I make a very good living because I've learned how to structure a company that works for me. When I was a young man in college in northern California I had areallyimportant event happen to me that was interesting and really got me on this track. I'll tell you alittle bit about the efficiency - at this time in the '80s we had vending machines moving from bottles to cans and I had theopportunity to buy a few bottle machines for a few hundred dollars each. I was in business and I placed them up and down the central coast and while everyone else was working at the McDonald's and all of these terrible minimum wage jobs I had passive income and passive income became very intriguing to me. When you develop your company with a model that's like the vending machine sort of mindset you look at it in terms of machinery - how can I use the least amount of moving parts? The ultimate moving part is employees. Reduce the amount of employees, cross-train and set up with fewer employees. The end result is more money for the owners. So I developed a company that I made sure was small enough that I'm in it and I can see when there's trouble and also I'm not burning all of profit at the end of the year through payroll. One of the biggest mistakes I think new entrepreneurs make is that they want to look like a business. They think that there is a business god and that if they have a nice desk and the right computer system and they dress the right way, the business gods are going to look down and say "This person really deserves success." Business is a cold, blind enterprise. If you want a business to work, you're looking at efficiency. Forget about how you look to everybody else and in our Facebook mentality - I'm guilty of this, I have a six year old - all we're concerned about is how we look to everybody else. We're obsessed with whether we look good. Let me get the right selfie, let me put a filter on it and edit it a little bit. We're so concerned about how our company looks to everybody and we think that we may not be taken seriously. On my website, even though we're small in terms of the number of people we have, our company is the main provider of medical device packaging machines in North America. We do an amazing amount - in this country, every hour millions of sterile pouches are closed up using our equipment, that go into surgical theatre safely so that people can get out of surgery.

Jaime: And thank you, because I just had surgery! So I appreciate you doing what you do.

Charlie: We've both just been through that, right? It's an important thing that we do, but you've got to remember that efficiency is really what rewards you in business. You're not rewarded for looking a certain way. I put pictures of myself hiking on my website. Why? Because I want to. I've been criticized - "Nobody wants to hear your personal story." I want to do things my way. Obviously I don't want to upset customers and things like that but the reason I think my story is kind of interesting is that I'm in an industry with engineers - these are the most anally retentive people you'll ever meet, it's a hard group to sell to and they're very traditional and very much the A student types so it's hard to be plastic when you're dealing with that group. You do have to watch it, depending on your industry. You don't want to be a sideshow, you don't want to completely disregard it, but I dare companies to be much bolder. There's a great saying and I use this all the time when I'm about to make a bad decision on expensive toys, but it's "When you're faced with two choices, always take the bold choice," and I'd say that's probably true for business because most people are so conservative, they take this evanescent, weak, careful approach to their enterprise, and then they're surprised when it fails. How about being bold? When your mum and dad are on the phone saying "I don't even know who you are anymore, this is crazy! Where do you come up with this stuff?" That's the language of progress. When you hear that sort of stuff, good things are about to happen.

Jaime: I love that! Normally that is not the case. We were talking about the kids and the world that they're growing up in, having to deal with the commoners and really being able to push yourself in innovation not only for your company but for yourself and the decisions you make is really, really impressive. It's hard because what we've been told is that this is the thing, this is the way you do business, not to go insane, crazy, on the other side of things, but you're saying push the envelope and you'll never know where you end up.

Charlie: I said before the interview that we are in the era of the C student. Which is great, because that's me! I got through college, I maybe did a little bit better than a C, but the interesting thing that I've found out through medicine, I have a lot of friends who are physicians and nothing against my doctor buddies, but you've got to remember that if you have an A student mentality.

Jaime: I was an A student, what are you saying?

Charlie: I maybe mean that in sort of the Steve Jobs drop out of Reed College sort of thing. Most of the things that are happening right now are not from compliance experts. A students and physicians are compliance experts - if you do well in high school, you get into a good school for pre-med. If you do well in your undergraduate, you get accepted to UCLA or Harvard or your choice of medical school. You're taught to be a compliance expert and that's how you get into med school and that's how you get a great engineering job, you're on this board and volunteered here and you have all of these great things that you've accomplished but really, at the end of the day, those things don't help you as an entrepreneur because your customers will never know or they don't really care that you got great grades in school. Creative thinking, going outside the box, I hate to use that term but to go outside of the mainstream. I went to the university of Redlands and I remember, out of all of the group that I graduated with knowing so little about the curriculum that we studied but I was working at the time as I was finishing school and so I was digging everywhere for information, reading books, but because they went through this curriculum and they were trying to go to a better grad school or they wanted to get hired on at a school that brings in A students, which we never do, we go outside of someone's expertise because you find that those are the people who do better. I don't know if you remember a book from the '80s called "Growing Your Business" by Paul Hawken of Smith and Hawken yard tool fame. I think this is a great story - he hired a pianist to come in as his IT manager, which was a new job at the time, because he felt that if anybody was so good at understanding music and the complexities of what is effectively a differentlanguage, that would probably translate well as an information technologist at his company. The guy turned out to be one of the most amazing IT guys in the country and that's really what we find. Regardless of what you think your core expertise is, you may be surprised that it translates somewhere else. That's really what we're faced with right now. We're no longer trying to follow the bouncing ball or, as my brothercalls it, following the loser, by doing what the competition does. I rarelylook at what our competitors are doing because all it does is cloud your innovation and I would recommend that you blaze your own path for sure.

Jaime: So it's just like following the trend and following the ball. We don't want to be followers; we want to be leaders, and in order to be leaders we have to take those bold moves that we need. That's really, really interesting. You've recommend a whole bunch of really cool books and I haven't really asked this question but since I know you read so much, do you have any other recommendations of some really cool books that someone might be able to listen to? Listen to! I use audio books, so listen to.

Charlie: I can't say enough about Seth Godin. If you're coming into the market, and I've been so consumed with Seth Godin over the past year just because he has such a crisp insight into this new market.

Jaime: What book would you recommend from Seth? Because he has a lot of books.

Charlie: I think "The Dip" is a good, short read and it gives you a bit of an understanding of, when things are going down, what it means and whether it's long term. One of my frustrations with "The Dip" is that it doesn't? come out with a crisp solution about how you identifywhether you're in a dip or you have an enterprise that's failing but I think, again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier, it asks an important question - when your company starts to wane, is it waning because it's a failed enterprise or is it just a metric to let you know that you need to work on a certain area? So certainly "The Dip". I think "Poke the Box" is a great book. If you're a new entrepreneur I absolutely recommend "Poke the Box" because it is basically about how to start thinking in terms of a new enterprise or a new idea. So anything Seth Godin, for sure, and, as I say, a lot of the things that I've read in the past are a little pass? now. There are so many things that I read in the '80s that are out of print now. I'm so consumedwith TED Talks right now that I don't read as much. I think I mentioned before that I'm a hiker so I am all about audio books right now and I get through so many of those things. As an efficiency guy I can't tell you about how great Audible.com and iTunes are for audio books. It's where it's at; it's a great idea for us entrepreneur multi-taskers to get up to speed. One thing that I do as an entrepreneur and a business owner is that I have my bookmarks and every morning I watch an hour of my specific TED Talks, I research my industry and then I research business as a whole. The people that become irrelevant are the ones who become so industry-specific that they don't understand the global action of what's happening in an industry.

Jaime: I think one of the things that's really difficult, when you are the A student or when you're following the ball, is that you lose that perspective. That's sort of what you're saying - when you're going into this you need the perspective on everything else. But that's also very intangible. It's not as though you can measure how wide that is or how innovative. Innovation is something that's really hard to measure. So I love that your specific way of watching TED Talks and reading, it doesn't come up with anything measurable at the end, that's what happens, that's where the innovation and everything comes from, even though it's so intangible it definitely helps in the long run.

Charlie: Your mind is a funny thing. There's an interesting fact - we say that 80% of the patents of important technologies over the last five years came from people who were inventing outside of their core expertise. I like to consider myself a polymath. I'm a drummer, I'm now a filmmaker, all of these things and you never know what's going to fold in from your other interests. The filmmaking is just a vocational hobby but I enjoy it. I can look at a lot of analogs that are coming in from all of myother interests. The more rounded that you are and the more that you know about a lot of different things, it's amazing how much that helps you in that one core area. This is not a time to be a specialist. No one is a specialist anymore - we can't be because, particularly as an entrepeneur, you know that you'd better understand marketing. This week I know so much more about video search engine optimization that I could probably write a reasonably cogent white paper on it because I have to know it because someone is selling it to me and I have to know what I'm buying. So this is the time to know as much as you can about many different areas. On a personal development note, I would encourage anybody to come into an area that they know nothing about, something that they may not even be that crazy about, and do it and see how it may change your perspective because a new perspective is how new ideas are born.

Jaime: That's awesome. I didn't prep you for this but I ask the same last question of everyone. Normally I would tell you ahead of time but we ended up chatting for way to long so you're not prepped for this but the last question I always as is - what is one action listeners can take this week to help move them towards their goal of $1 million?

Charlie: Action itself is the answer. Most people are theoretical about what they're going to do - they talk about it, they research it - and you get to this point of saturation. At one point you have to act and most people just have that fear of action, of actually doing it. Even if it's not a very cooked-up idea, you're far better to move forward with a marginally cooked-up idea than you are to just continue to research because it becomes this always-interloping problem. The more data you get, a lot of the time it becomes what they call the law of economic convergence, where the more you try to get close, the farther away you get because you brought in too much data. I don't want to say ignorance is bliss but at one point you just have to move forward and go for it. Obviously, if you're look at this, you already have something in your mind, so just remember to not get focused on just the product, you have to look at the business model holistically, you have to understand a lot of things. Don't go in blindly thinking that, because you have a patent or an idea, this is all you need - it's far more than that but, again, action is where it's at.

Jaime: You learn as you go. I think that's huge. I get a lot of e-mails from listeners and I can tell the difference between the people who are like "I have this idea and my plan is this month I'm going to do this much" and there are so many numbers and I'm like "You haven't even started yet so you don't know if this is agood idea!"

Charlie: They say that delay is the ultimate form of fear. We used to have this salesman that would call us all the time and he was never getting anything done. He would always say the same thing - "Well, I've got a lot of things moving forward." That is delay. It's a lack of action. If you're saying that you have to hit all of these landmarks, usually you have to be hard on yourself, ask yourself the hard question - "Am I really just afraid to jump?" My son and I went to one of these rope courses the other day and I had to jump off a platform. I was having a conversation with everyone on the ground because I didn't want to jump but that was just delay and fear talk so what you really need to do is jump, go, quit looking for all the reasons you can't move forward.

Jaime: Put up or shut up, right?

Charlie: That's right.

Jaime: A little crude, but still! I really, really appreciate this, Charlie. Thank you so much, I'm sure we could chat for way longer but thank you so much for coming on. Where can we find out more from you? I know most of the people aren't going to be buying medical stuff, but you never know! So tell us more about you.

Charlie: The page for me is just charliewebb.com or you're welcome to go to my company, vanderstahl.com and poke around and see the things that we do. Feel free to drop me a line [ there's my e-mail and contact information there, I'd love to hear from anybody.

Jaime: Everyone should check out your site. We'll definitely link to both of your sites, but check out Van der Stahl because it was different to what I expected. Especiallylooking at the pictures of you hiking and all of that other stuff, I think someone can definitely see your personality from that, even though it's medical devices and packaging. I really appreciate your perspective - thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Charlie: It was absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jaime: Thanks for listening to the interview. I hope you enjoyed it. I have a question for you - so if you're on the blog right now, I want you to comment, but also if you're on YouTube I want you to comment. If you'rerunning and listening to this on your headphones or in the car, you can't do very much right now, but make a point to go and leave a comment. I want to know what you can do in your business that's really innovative and different. If we don't actually ask ourselves these questions, nothing will everchange. So try to think about it right now - try to think of one thing that you could add that would be really, really innovative for your specific business, no matter how boring the business is, no matter how normal or maybe no matter how cutting edge. What could you be doing to be really innovative in your business? Go ahead and write it down - I want to hear what it is and so does everyone else. So go to eventualmillonaire.com/blog, comment on this episode with Charlie Webb, otherwise check out youtube.com/eventualmillionaire and leave a comment there. I will always respond. Take care.

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Tags: campaign marketing, Charlie Webb, Failure, Fear, increase revenue, innovative marketing, millionaire interview, product, service

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Fear, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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