Prologue

Welcome to The Rankings Podcast where we feature top founders, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.

Chris Dreyer

Chris Dreyer here, CEO and Founder of Rankings.io, where we help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings. You’re listening to The Rankings Podcast where I feature top business owners, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys. I’m excited to welcome Emmy Award Winner Chris Do to the show today. Chris is the director CEO and Chief Strategist at Blind a brand strategy and design consultancy firm. He is also the founder of the Futur and online education platform that aims to help a billion people earn a living doing what they love. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Do

Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I mean, I’m super excited to have you on the show. I’ve been following you on Instagram. That’s where I really caught a lot of your work. And I just thought, Man, I have to have you on the show to talk about kind of what you’re doing.

Chris Do

Okay, how can I help?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. So, for those of you who don’t know who you are, what is The Futur? And who do you help?

Chris Do

Alright, great question. So I help mostly creative people make a living doing what they love. And the mission is set at a billion because I think a million’s a good goal. But we’ve already hit that I believe. And so now we’re setting our sights on a one in every eight people on planet Earth. And I define creative as a little bit different than how normal people think. Most people think creative as somebody who makes art or is good at drawing and things like that. But I think people who are creative design innovative solutions to existing wicked problems.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, that that’s incredible. And I forgot to applaud you for the big goal of, of 1 billion I think Grant Cardone the 10 x style. It’s definitely an amazing goal. And you know, even if you missed, which I add your trajectory. That’s, that’s not going to happen. But even if missed, I think it would just be a truly phenomenal impact you have on on everyone.

Chris Do

It’s important, it’s important for me to have really big goals because it forces you to look through a different lens. So if you set your goals as being small, you think small, you come up with small solutions. So every time I’m pushing my team, like how do we do this at scale? That’s a really good solution, but it only serves 100 people. So that’s not obviously going to work for the long term mission. It might help us in the short term, but we have to think long term.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I love that. And I think that that kind of plays into brand and just the whole identity and everything maybe taking saying no to some things that could generate revenue, thinking about the long game. You know, I wanted to ask you, what was the moment because you had a very successful design agency, you had it your your service based agency Blind, has, you want to talk about logos, some of the biggest logos you’ve worked with, I mean, you were With the biggest companies in the world, what was that moment that you decided, Hey, I’m gonna switch over to more of a content an educator as opposed to a service based company.

Chris Do

Yeah. So I started my company Blind in 1995. And we worked with some of the biggest bands and brands in the world, everybody from Sony, Playstation to Xbox, Car commercials and cat food and everything in between, pizza companies. And we made videos and music videos from commercials and music videos. And somewhere along the way, I also started teaching and teaching gave me a lot in terms of my creative soul, but he didn’t do a lot for my pocket book. We know historically speaking, at least in America, teachers are not valued in terms of monetary terms as what they contribute to the world. And that was a problem for me. So I was teaching for 15 years and it was through a confluence a couple different things happening. One was my wife challenging me to do more with my time, and she had asked me after one of our classes together, she would sit in a company putting me on my trips, she would say, do you want to teach more than eight people at a time? And are you tired of repeating yourself over and over again. And those are things that I had been thinking about, I didn’t have the solution. It’s also at the exact same time, I think within a matter of months that my friend Jose, interest in my life again, it says, Hey, man, we were students at Art Center, but I know you have a passion for teaching. I’m in the education business. Why don’t we do something together. And this is really the beginning the kernel or the seed, if you will, as to what ultimately became the future. And I started that in 2014. In the beginning, like all things, it’s a hobby, it could be called the distraction because it was pulling me away from doing very high paying client work. And to put that in scope and scale for some people are listening. The average size commercial job that we would do ranges anywhere between 200 to $400,000, give or take, some are much more than that. Some are a little bit less than that. And so I’m walking away from high, high revenue, high profile work, to go and explore and dabble in something else making me pennies, relative Speaking, but it ignited something in me thinking that at that time, I’m 40 something. And I was thinking YouTube and content creation is for young people, what do I, what am I doing on YouTube, there’s full of young kids. But what I found was an audience who showed up for the work and the ideas that we were sharing. And it really, it gave me a path to creating what I would consider my form of art. And I put that in air quotes, my form of art and being able to express what I want, and I get to help people and make a little bit of money. Long story short, a couple years later, we’re over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, over 400,000 followers on Instagram. And now it’s become like this little, this little movement, and it’s, it’s growing.

Chris Dreyer

So, there’s so many takeaways right there. And one of the things I was thinking about is, you know, when you move upstream and you take on one project because of the margins and, and all those opportunities, it’s it’s one project and you you can get a review from that logo and obviously that carries a lot of weight as opposed to in acting. It’s a whole different model. Well, now now, you’re you’re selling a ton of products. And and it’s a lot different. You kind of led me to the the audience question. I had those exact numbers wrote down, you know, at 880,000 on YouTube 411,000 on Instagram 240,000 on LinkedIn. Mm hmm. So let’s talk about this. If you had to pinpoint a few components of your success on those platforms, what would they be? And let’s start with YouTube.

Chris Do

Okay, I love the way you structured this question. I might try to deliver as much value as I can, of course, hold my feet to the fire if I don’t give you what you want. Just push back and I’d be boring. I’m not trying to evade anything. I just want to be clear. Okay. So first YouTube. The big breakthrough for YouTube was when we decided to sit down and plan, prepare, make slides and have an organized show structure. And I would highly recommend anybody who’s trying to do this. A lot of us think that we’re really natural teachers and great speakers and we have this audience Chemistry and charisma. It’s not true. The first few videos that we produce Jose and I put together a loose outline, we leaned into our knowledge and our experience and our experiences, teachers, but the content wasn’t that watchable, like my wife even said, You know, I love you, honey, but I can’t watch your content. And that was really a wake up call for me. So I spent, I don’t know a good portion of a day sitting down writing, preparing a piece of content, and that piece of content didn’t go viral. But it grew. And it grew in ways that the other videos that we produced did not. So that was like the number one lesson which was plan, prepare and put in the work. If you’re expecting somebody to give you their time and attention, you have to make it worth their while. Rule number two, or tip number two on this is do not try to sell people can smell it a mile away. A lot of the other content we’re creating was there like infomercials, we’re going to teach you one skill and then we’re going to pitch hard at the end for you to buy the rest of the product. And I felt disingenuous when I was doing that and it did not communicate and I didn’t Come through the way I wanted, because I didn’t feel great about doing that. So if you give generously, and you show up consistently and you put in the time and energy necessary, I think eventually if you stick it stick it out long enough you find your groove and you find your audience. So that’s the YouTube story.

Chris Dreyer

I think that’s a great takeaway I think you know, what you said is you’re concentrating on providing value you realize that it wasn’t maybe the best quality and even though you had all this extensive knowledge and and you structured it so I love that let’s let’s kind of jump over to Instagram and and I kind of want to start with the carousels so you You are the carousel King You are the slideshow King on Instagram. Let’s just put it out there. Okay, what why why carousels? What is it the algorithm that they treat them a little bit differently? Is it a better way to educate your consumers? Take Take me there you

Chris Do

have the carousel is a accidental discovery for me. I like many people tried many different things. I I want to tell people this because I haven’t told this part of the story before, is that social media for a long time confounded me, like I’m a late person to adopt any social technology, right. And initially, I wanted to get awareness around our design service company blind. And I hired a person who was a social media expert by her description, and she would do things for us. And then it didn’t really feel authentic to our brand because somebody else outside of our company external to us, was coming in writing and producing content, wrong, typeface, wrong colors, weird messaging, and we wound up doing a lot of the work ourselves. That didn’t work. So I threw in the towel, I’m like, this is not gonna work for me. Well, the second time we went at it, I hired a firm. Now, this was a group of people and I was thinking, these people must know what they’re doing. And it turns out, they didn’t either. And I was paying them a monthly retainer and what was happening there was, they were telling us to do things that I knew weren’t right for us, but seemed like really lazy ways to grow an audience. So like we have to spend money to promote things and we have to boost And do competitions and giveaways like how’s that creating value for our people except for the show free stuff. So we tried that for a while and that didn’t work. And it took a break. And then I tried to do it myself and I was doing it and i was growing a little bit, but where I got the kind of rocket boost the the hockey stick kind of graph when it goes up like that was when I was interviewing Michael Janda for one of our shows, and I was doing show prep, I go and look at his Instagram account. And I noticed that he was doing content like everybody else, just like me. And then he started doing these carousels. And I saw the growth that he had, and he was going from like 5000 followers to 30,000 followers within a matter of a few months. So I was talking to him, I said, Hey, Mike, I’m really kind of impressed by this. And because it’s a great way to do it, you should do it. And this is happening on the shows if anybody wants to look it up, this is happening live on air, I said, I’m gonna do this, Michael, because you just showed me that I could teach using Instagram. And I’m gonna say this just for the record. Okay, just so that I’m historically going to put this down there. I believe that Instagram is one of the largest untapped ways and platforms of teaching. because it forces you to distill a bite sized lesson into 10 slides and give it to somebody so they can have a quick win. We know that students don’t have the time and attention span, to sit through an hour and a half lecture from somebody. So if you were able to design your lecture, take the hour and a half and cut it down to 15 micro lessons and put it out there, you are potentially going to have greater impact on the lives of the people that you want to reach. Now, here’s the deal. I’ve done probably at this point, hundreds, literally hundreds of keynote presentations before, and some of the keynote presentations have hundreds of pages. So initially, when I was jumping, I was like, I have content for years I could do this forever. And I realized one of the challenges which is translating a talking living presentation demo, and slides to just a read only visual medium was actually very difficult. You had to learn to write differently. You had to learn to pay Slides differently. But once I got over the initial learning curve, which was a couple of carousels in, I was able to grab an audience and they were using this feature. And this is a feature that Instagram heavily promotes. And like all new features, tomorrow, they’re gonna come out with a new feature, if you use it, they’re going to want to promote and push that to get adoption. And this is a really critical part. And I’ve just personally fallen in love with teaching via 10 slides.

Chris Dreyer

So there’s, there’s so much there, and I’m trying to think about where where I want to ask next. Okay, he distilling the information to 10 slides. First of all, that that’s an immense challenge, because on its own, just the creative component, putting too many words on the slide, are there some general recommendations and trying to condense that information into something that’s usable? Or is it a case by case basis? And, you know, how do you distill that much information?

Chris Do

Yeah, I’m gonna borrow a metaphor here from a famous copwriting a writer. And he he describes writing copy like this slippery slide that you want to get on. It wants to be effortless, and you want to go from the top, right on through the bottom. And so this is the problem that a lot of people have because I see these carousels and asked me for advice. But the biggest problem is, first of all, they’re not drawing me in. If you look at your first slide is the beginning of your story. If I’m not interested in beginning your story, there’s no way I’m going to get to the end. So it’s really important to have a really strong hook. And a hook is probably a combination of a few words and an image that’s very thought provoking a puzzle question and invitation to draw the audience in. And then you got to get them through the slide. A lot of people front load all the information which is something that I used to do, I would put too much information and then they would either a get everything they wanted or it was just too much work. I felt like work so they’re not going to read anymore. So the engagement I had at the beginning wasn’t very good. I learned that less is more and that you need to reduce. Here’s your carousel down to one simple lesson, think about the one key takeaway and deliver on that. So the general phrase I like to use is I want to have a light, but satisfying meal, I got to get through slides one through nine or eight before you drop the heavy hook. So at the end, if you haven’t delivered value yet, you’re in deep trouble because now people are not going to be happy with you. So if you promise an answer, give them something that they would pay money to learn, and, or B that they would gladly share with the friend. Jimmy, you need to read this. Mary, this is excellent. I think we talked about this the other day. So if you can live with that kind of value, then I think you’re onto something. Now, I do want to caution everybody about this one thing because it’s made famous by author Austin Kleon his book Steal Like An Artist, and people have misinterpreted what that means by the author’s own words. And through the examples that we’re seeing is that a lot of people see the carousels like everybody’s doing it. I want to get in, so they wind up copying the form. Without understanding the structure and the structure is more important for you to understand. The other thing that they do is they tend to regurgitate content, design it, remove the credit away from whoever originally wrote it or shared that concept. And then they try to claim that this is theirs. Now, this is very disingenuous way to work and live. And I think this goes against the principles of sharing generously.

Chris Dreyer

That the integrity, the journey, no fluff. I like all that. And so let’s kind of transition over to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has slide decks I, you know, you’re up to 240,000 followers, but the audience is different. The channel is different. But having said that, a lot of the content you produce is very educational. How is LinkedIn different than say Instagram?

Chris Do

Yeah, so LinkedIn for a long time has been a puzzle for me because as many people describe it, it’s like an online resume site. And people were trying to figure out how to use it well, and a couple people cracked it but a little while ago, LinkedIn also opened up feature. And they’re don’t they’re not referred to as carousels. But you can upload a PDF, you can upload a PDF, which is essentially if you if you work in carousels, it’s exactly the same, just a different file format. And what I do is, I will post content on Instagram, and I’ll see which content performs well, I’ll see which ones are more relevant for business minded audience, and then adapt that sometimes change it, make it longer, make it shorter, change language a little bit, and then export a PDF, upload it to LinkedIn. And there’s a special button, it’s kind of hidden, and it’s not obvious where you click on it. And if you share that, then it functions in exactly the same way as Instagram where you’re able to swipe through them. And I think there’s something very pleasurable and addictive to simply swiping it’s it’s just a gratifying gesture, especially if you learn to tell stories one frame at a time. And by doing that, in combination with a couple hashtags, and writing more appropriate descriptions, I think you’re going to be able to hook into an LinkedIn audience and these posts also get viewed a lot because the platforms promote the new features.

Chris Dreyer

It’s interesting that you said that about it being gratifying with the swipe because that’s that’s really true. I was thinking one of the reasons when we switched from Basecamp 3 over to Trello. And we wanted that simplified konban Canavan setup, but I liked the the feeling of moving a car to completion was more gratifying than checking off something off the list. And I think that the slide decks have that. And I, I think, now that you’ve mentioned that, I think that’s one of the reason why I kind of resonate to your Instagram, The Futur account, because I can go in there, I can consume some really high value information very quickly. And I can move on to the next topic that I’m interested in, as opposed to trying to really find the value, which may take a lot more time. So I’ve got a follow up question to that. So actually, before my follow up, let’s let’s talk about the podcast. I listened to your interview with Jordan Harbinger. Yeah, today. Great, great interview. Great discussion. So what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned running your podcast?

Chris Do

Okay, the podcast is holding on to animal, you’re getting some really good questions here. So you’ll notice that when I’m talking about these things on each platform, we have to do something a little bit different. I know you want to do a shotgun approach was just take one piece of content and just shoot it out everywhere and hope something sticks. I don’t believe in that as much as I can. I try to post things too, so that it’s tailor made for the audience because I want to give them a reason to follow me in different places. This is why it make a lot of times you’ll see people who have a strong YouTube following have a horrible Twitter following and vice versa. It just doesn’t translate because they’re not learning to adapt to the medium. It’s kind of like in the early days of radio when they made the jump from radio to television. The camera was static and people would just read things to camera. It wasn’t very interesting until they learned how to create for television. Then it became its own media medium. Now, when it came to podcasts, we started the podcast because people are trying to consume our content. On the go, we have an international audience. And we didn’t realize that everybody has fast broadband that’s relatively affordable. So they would download content. And then they would listen to it on the go asked us to make podcasts. So in the early days, we took the audio track from our YouTube episodes, and we dropped it to the podcast. But what we realize quickly is that it’s a very intimate relationship that you’re having on a podcast. It’s like you’re in somebody’s head and ear hole. Generally speaking, that’s all they’re hearing, right? So they’ve isolated everything else out. And they’re either working, jogging, cooking or doing something, but they’re listening to you. And in you need to speak to them. It has to be a conversation with them, even though they can’t talk back to you. So that’s when I had to learn how to adopt a different style. And what’s what’s been interesting is if you only focus on the audio part, the conversation changes. It’s very different than just converting a YouTube episode because I have to describe things that I’m trying to do a little bit of theater of the mind. I get to have more intimate and deeper conversations without the worry of production. A team is a lighting, right? How’s my makeup, if you will, whatever it is, I could just have a conversation with people.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I found it. It’s it’s, it is more intimate. You can ask the questions. You know, there’s there’s this back and forth dialogue. And I think the preparation I really underestimated from starting our show the amount of preparation it takes to have a good conversation, because you see these superstars and what they’re doing and it’s like, wait, I need to drill down and provide value to my audience. What things should I be asking? And you know, so one of the things I want to ask you that that doesn’t get talked about a lot. And you see other individuals like Gary Vee, he’s cranking out a ton of content. He’s got that article 64 pieces in a day or something but and people talk about delegate and delegate, or elevate. Is it is it a situation where you have a team composition That’s really helping with this or is it that Chris Do is an artists and you’re just crushing it creating this high quality content? What’s kind of the team composition look like to have this much success on these platforms?

Chris Do

Very good question again. First, I want to say that everything I’m saying can be applied to you, whoever’s listening to this, that’s a one person thing. And if this is something that you want to take to the next level, you’re going to need some help, especially if your backgrounds not in design or writing, obviously, then you’re going to need some help. We definitely rely on a team and there’s there’s a lot of people I’m not nearly as big as what Gary Vaynerchuk has, I think he has told people dedicated just to his social medias, and our whole company’s like 14 people. So there’s a there’s a difference in scale there. So here’s how it breaks down. Here’s the nitty and the gritty part of it. My Instagram carousels I write I design I produce all by my lonesome. The Futur Instagram account is created by Elle not created but run by Elle and she essentially scrapes the content that we produce like videos, articles, tweets, and she does her own take on it. And she’s very good at presenting information adding to it, but it feels consistent with the style and the messaging of what it is that we’re doing so we’re getting double the impact so people were confusing like one person writing for the other. Elle basically produces for the for the futures Instagram company account and I produce on my personal account. When it comes to the video, there’s a whole video production team, they generate ideas me we write, they direct me even though I’m the boss, I say I’m gonna read these things to you. And if it doesn’t sound right, I want you to listen for our audience, not for yourself. So if I say something that’s not clear, just say, hey, that’s not clear or I’m feeling you’re coming in a little aggressive here or you’re, you’re too soft spoken, I need you to amp up the energy so they’re directing me to deliver what it is that I need to for camera. And so there’s a whole team for cut downs definitely because I don’t do any of the editing myself. I do have my own home studio setup just like you and I send me the files when They get the files, they figure out what to do with it. They’ll write little scripts or intros for me after they’ve cut it so that we know this is going to work.

Chris Dreyer

Well, thank you for that really detailed question. It’s always interesting to look kind of behind the curtain, like, how is this being created? Like there’s a lot of moving components here. And the production quality is extremely high. And I was just kind of curious there. And you did you did kind of wrap answered. Another question I had as a follow up was personal brand versus business brand and how you separate the two. And so so I appreciate that. So you do yours, you’re representing Chris Do, and then you have The Futur with someone that represents that account. So I love that. And so, so let’s kind of shift over to personal development, or are there any business books that you recommend?

Chris Do

Yeah, for sure. So what topic do you want? Yeah,

Chris Dreyer

so let’s go let’s go with let’s go with project management. That’s kind of scaling up. Who knows?

Chris Do

Dude, I don’t know. I should have asked you guys, you know? Yeah, I don’t know what to do with

Chris Dreyer

what what are a couple? What are a couple books that come to mind? I know you mentioned Steal Like an Artist.

Chris Do

Yeah, so let’s talk about marketing. I don’t think there’s a better writer in terms of marketing than Seth Godin. So the two books I’m gonna recommend is This is Marketing, which is his latest book, and, and a classic one, which is All Marketers Are Liars. I think at this point, I’ve read four or five Seth Godin books, and they’re all very good. So All Marketers Are Liars. And This is Marketing from Seth Godin. And also from Allen Dib, The One Page Marketing Plan is also very good. So that’s on the marketing side. On the sales side, I recommend Socratic Selling. I think it’s Kevin Daley, who wrote that book. And I also recommend The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier, who we had on as a guest and it’s excellent for, for lots of different things. It’s called The Coaching Habit. wasn’t like a, like a sizzling title like a must read for me. But what’s inside is incredible. It’s really teaching you about how to ask questions and why the importance of questions will elevate your relationships. Whether you’re a manager, coach, a friend or a teacher, broad application love that book. For the godfather of business books, I think you are going to need to read Jim Rohn Seven Strategies for Wealth and Happiness. For company culture. I’m going to recommend Delivering Happiness by Tony Shea. And I also enjoyed another book from Seth Godin Permission Marketing. And if you want to learn how to run a 21st century company, I would read most of the books by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, I believe they wrote the book rework and remote. They wrote the manifesto for work from home in 2013. It’s quite an interesting read to now look at that in 2020, the middle of the pandemic.

Chris Dreyer

So I should have structured my question better at the beginning and you nailed it because those many those books are phenomenal. Read. I’ve read many of those. I had Seth Godin on the show a couple weeks ago. Just awesome, awesome human being the, This Is Marketing. I’m a huge Jim Rohn fan, the 12 Pillars of Success, just incredible audio book that you can crank through in a day. And I’ll link up all those books. Those are phenomenal recommendations. And so let’s let’s go to one final question here. Is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven’t discussed?

Chris Do

I don’t think so. I think you’ve done a really good job asking us questions. Who is your main, like, legal people are listening to it. Yeah. So

Chris Dreyer

mostly personal injury attorneys. And I know many of them are trying to break in the social media space. So I thought, hey, let’s have someone that’s that’s really doing an excellent job and and that’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to have you on the show.

Chris Do

Okay, then I know what my final message is going to be. I think most people think of social media as an extension of advertising and I think it couldn’t be anything further than advertising and advertising. The way it’s classically defined and understood, is a company, a brand has the message and they send it out and they blast it. They broadcast it to a broad audience. And they hope something sticks. I think the internet is the first modern communication tool that wasn’t invented for advertising. And Seth Godin said, This is not my idea. And that you can have a real conversation with people. So if you approach building an audience as an act of generosity, one where you have zero expectations, and you give incredible amounts of value, you’re going to get people who are going to raise their hand and asked to become a part of your your marketing. It’s really weird. They opt in instead of opting out. They say yes, you have my permission to continue to market to me. So the critical part here is not to abuse that relationship, not to spam them with a lot of junk and pitching them stuff. You need to constantly deliver value, and you need to move them up the permission ladder, and Seth describes in his book Permission Marketing. the very highest level of permission marketing is when needed. client or customer gives you permission to spend their money in their best interest. And there’s a bunch of examples of that, like when you belong to certain clubs, they say, we’re going to send you a box of stuff like the subscription boxes, right? They’re saying, like, based on your preferences, and what we know and learn about you, we’re going to send you something that we think you’re going to find delightful. And if you don’t, we’ll keep working on it till we do. So that’s the highest level. And that’s, that’s really a wonderful way of having a relationship with a client. So even though you’re in the legal space, which you could say, maybe everybody’s figured out everything you could do in the legal space, but I’m not so sure. Think about how you can improve and and make the lives of the of your customers better. And you’re going to build an audience and a customer for life.

Chris Dreyer

I love that incredible piece of advice. And I think that if the attorney said that and they’re going to provide that follow or create that following.

Chris Do

I hope so.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, absolutely. And guys, we’ve been talking to Chris Do, Founder of The Futur Chris, where can people go to learn more?

Chris Do

They can find out pretty much everywhere on every social channel and The Futur is that it’s spelt without an E, it’s Futur. The way we remind people is if you drop the E, the ego, that you can spell the future. So thefutur.com and everywhere on social is @thefuturishere and I’m @theChrisDo and Do is spelt Do.

Chris Dreyer

Thanks, Chris.

Conclusion

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