Speak Like a CEO With These 7 Simple Rules - Ep. #319

Chris Koerner (0:00)

It was 15 years ago, almost to the day, April 27th, 2011 I had just opened my very first real business. It was an iPhone repair store in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was right next to a subway. It smelled like fresh bread all day long, and I loved it. But after a few weeks, nobody was coming in the store. The haters were right. I was going to fail.

I had signed a personal guarantee on this five year lease and a newborn son at home who is now almost 16

And yes, you may have heard the story before, but stick with me for one minute because this is a brand new fresh episode. And then I was lying in bed on a Sunday night staring at the ceiling and I had a stupid idea. Now keep in mind, I don't drink.

I'd never been to a bar in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in my life. That's where I was living. But I thought, hey, college students go to bars, they get wristbands. What if I put my ad for my iPhone repair store on a wristband? So I pulled out my clunky Dell laptop, I Googled custom wristbands. There were two cents each. I ordered a few boxes and I started distributing them to bars around campus. What would happen? Well, college students would go out, get drunk, break their iPhone, wake up the next morning, hung over with a wristband on the wrist that said phone restore, and then they would walk into my shop holding a broken phone and a ratty, smelly wristband. It changed everything. My store survived. We opened three more stores and eventually we sold the business for about a million bucks. And here's the thing that nobody tells you about running a business.

On the surface, the wristband was like a marketing gimmick, but that's not what it was. It was communication. The kid was going to break his phone either way. The question was whether my message was the one that his brain would grab when he woke up the next morning. That is communication. That's the game here. Remember, I've started about 80 businesses in the last 17, 18 years, and I've recorded almost 300 episodes of this podcast. I've watched founders close deals worth tens of millions on this exact microphone. I've watched other business owners fumble in real time. So I want to talk about seven different communication tactics that the best of the best do that everyone else misses out on. These are backed by real research and they're backed by my own stories of when they worked for me. And also a couple stories of when I bombed because I didn't implement these tactics. So if you're a founder, a salesperson, a wannabe founder, an entrepreneur, operator, an employee asking for a raise, anything, this episode is for you because the money is found in improving your communication skills. And these principles apply no matter who or what you are. So I'm going to end this with a wild story, but I want to start by going through these seven tactics. Number one, the hook, the first sentence. That's everything. The first sentence is worth more than everything after it combined. Open your inbox right now and look at all of the cold pitches you get and delete in three seconds. Hi, my name is I'm reaching out because we'd love to hop on a quick call. No, stop. You're just going to delete those. Everyone deletes those, yet you're also sending those. Around that same time as my wristband story, I learned the hard way that the CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy deletes those as well. These people have heard that line 10,000 times and they're going to tune you out before sentence two. You're sounding like a car alarm in a parking lot. It gets shut out after a while. Now, the cold pitches that I hear or read that stand out, they hit me with something specific to me, not AI-generated specific. Hey Chris, I see you went to the University of Alabama and that you currently run it. No, not specific like that. Specific to a tweet that I posted yesterday or an episode that I aired just last week. Honestly, if it's AI-generated, it doesn't even matter because it's still relevant to me. This is something that proves the person actually paid attention. A few months ago, I got a cold email that started with this one sentence. Hey, you said on a recent episode that your favorite type of business is one a high schooler could run. Well, I built one. Here's what it looks like. I read that entire email and I responded within 30 minutes. He's coming on the show. Now, many, many moons ago, I cold called the Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy to get my iPhone repair company into their stores. I thought, hey, they have Geek Squad, they're fixing computers. They need to fix phones too. This is a no-brainer offer. And I also did reverse engineering research, aka Googling and learned that Geek Squad was a very small business at the time they were purchased. They bought a system and a process. And really that's all I had at the time. So I thought, OK, I don't need to be huge for them to buy me. But before I made this call, I met with maybe the only mentor I've ever had in my life. His name's John Nolan. Love the guy. And he asked me about this woman, the CMO at the time. We pulled up her LinkedIn and he told me a fact about her. He scrolled way down to the bottom of the LinkedIn. That's where the magic is. He saw that she had played women's basketball at Gonzaga. And he said, Chris, that one fact tells you everything you need to know about her personality type. It also tells you how to open the conversation. So that's what I did when I called her. I led with a Gonzaga thing. Before I got to me and my pitch, I led with her because what do people care about themselves? That first sentence is gonna do 80% of the legwork. Everything after the first sentence is just confirming what the first sentence already promised. So if the opener is generic, they're gonna assume that everything else is generic and they won't even read it. So tactic number two, admit a flaw fast. I know this one's gonna feel wrong instinctually to you. Trust me, there's a thing in social psychology called the Pratt fall effect. And that's when you admit a flaw or a weakness and then people somehow, for some reason, trust you more. That polish and sheen that you're always trying to convey to others, you think it makes you look more credible when actually it's having the opposite effect. So here's an example from my own life. When I first opened my first iPhone repair store, I had never fixed an iPhone in my life. People would walk in with a broken iPhone and I would say, okay, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, okay, uh-huh. Oh, okay, yeah, give us a few hours, we'll figure it out. Then I would go in the back, pull up YouTube and learn how to fix their iPhone with their phone in my hand in real time. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. Now, maybe I should have been faking confidence that I didn't actually have, but instead I started practicing what happened when I told customers the truth. Yeah, I can figure out how to fix this. It disarmed them and any concern that they might have had about my credibility or lack thereof was offset by the frankness of it all. They'd laugh, they'd come back, they'd tell their friends, and they became regulars. Believe it or not, there are more regulars in the iPhone repair business than you'd ever believe. But remember, if I would have been polished, I probably would have lost those customers, but the honest version got them. And I see this on my show every week. I don't know if you heard this episode from about a month ago. Mike Yoder had that drone deer recovery business turned drone agricultural business. He made 50 grand in his first 10 weeks doing agricultural spring. But after we stopped recording, he just mentioned offhand that he grew up Amish. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's the story. Can we turn the camera back on? He said yes.