Bringing Back Human Connection To The Spotlight With Ben Baker

Everybody in the world today is busy building their wealth, pursuing a lucrative career, or maintaining a successful business. With so many people becoming too self-centered and isolated, human connection seems like a dying concept. But for Ben Baker, the true meaning of everyday life is found in taking care of each other. In this episode, he joins Tony Martignetti to look back on his journey from high-tech sales to the direct mail business. Ben shares how prioritizing the human element can elevate a brand, empower a team, and communicate value. He also explains why technology will never matter regardless of how advanced it can be without genuine and impactful human touch.

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Bringing Back Human Connection To The Spotlight With Ben Baker

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest for this episode, Ben Baker. He has been helping organizations understand, codify and tell their stories in compelling ways inside and outside their organizations for many years. He is a two-time author, a podcaster, and a golf enthusiast. I am so thrilled and honored to welcome you to the show, Ben.

The fire looks great. You got the logs up there. We got a 6-foot flame going. I got the s'mores ready to go. Tony, thanks for having me on the show.

It's going to be fantastic. As a fellow storyteller, I'm looking forward to knowing the stories that make you up and have been able to show how you get to where you are. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Your readers can't see but right over the top of my head, I've got the banner, “What's your story?” I've been a storyteller as long as I've been breathing. My mother and father told me I told tall tales and lots of great stories as a kid. It's come from there. We'll have some great times talking about that.

What I'm going to do on the show is take you on a journey of sharing your tales through what we call flashpoints. These are the points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. Along the way, we’ll pause and see what shows up. You can start with wherever you'd like and share what you're called to share. In a moment, I'll turn it over to you, Ben. You can take it from there and take us on a journey through what has brought you to this place where you're making such a big impact in the world.

The place that I would start is around the time I'm 11, 12, 13 years old, or somewhere like that. I first got involved in professional theater. Oliver was my first production. I was one of those waves that sat there and said, “Lisa, can I have some more?” We went from there. I fell in love with being on stage, the lights, the attention, and the drama that came with it.

I spent as much time behind the scenes building sets, developing lights, and developing the sound behind them. It's probably my earliest memories of deciding that storytelling, being in front of an audience, and bringing people along on the journey was something that I was meant to do. That's probably the best place to start.

I love when people start early in their childhood because I feel like there are so many nuggets of who we end up becoming in those early stages of our lives. We have to listen to it and allow it to blossom. Sometimes we don't let that happen. I’m willing to bet that there are some points along your journey that you didn't quite listen to those moments early on. Tell me what happens next.

High school was high school. It is either you're one of the popular kids or you're one of those kids that are trying to get out. I was one of the kids that was trying to get out. I lived in the theater, the metal shop, and the wood shop. I was a fairly good student but I certainly wasn't applied. I was one of those kids that was a B+ student. I didn't do a lot of work for it. I sat there in the Applied Mathematics class and played chess in the back of the class. The professor would say, “What's the answer to that?” I'd look up and go, “Squareroot of 32,” and then go back to my chess game. I’m frustrated with the heck out of people.

High school is either a time when you are one of the popular kids or those students who are only trying to get out.

It was one of those things that didn't hit my stride within the school system. It was the outside theater was a world for me. Racing bicycles, playing volleyball, and refereeing volleyball were passions of mine. I did enough academics because I was told, “You're going to university,” and that's it. “You are going to get a university degree. We don't care what your degree is in but you are going to have a university degree.” I wasn't given a choice.

I ended up taking the Math, Science courses, and all the things that you needed to do, the French that I barely passed to get into university. It wasn't until I got into the university that I truly hit my stride in terms of realizing who I was as a person, the people that I wanted to be around, and the things that I truly wanted to do.

There’s something about what you shared that I haven't quite put the pieces together. We spend so much time in high school trying to fit in. We get to college and realize that we don't have to fit in. We have to figure out where we want to belong.

Who's our tribe?

We find our tribe but we stop trying to fit in. We tried to move out into the places where we most want to belong. That's a very different move than trying to fit in.

High school is as horrible now as it was back then. Social media is probably worse with the number of cliques that are available, the pressure, status, and all the things that go along with it, the haves and the have-nots. I went to school with kids that got BMWs for their sixteenth birthdays. I certainly wasn't getting a BMW. I was lucky if I got a pair of Chuck Taylor All-Star shoes. That was an extravagant purchase from my father to gift to me.

When you're trying to compete with kids that are from the right side of the tracks that their parents are the movers and shakers within society and have the money to do it, you can't compete at that level. Therefore, it's difficult to even try. When you get to university, all of a sudden, hopefully, you gain the maturity to say, “None of that is important. Let's find people that are like us, people that find what we think is important, and people whose priorities are the same as ours.” When you're in a class of 50,000, even if it's in fourth-year universities, it's a lot easier to find those 5, 6, or 10 kids than it is in a class of 300 where everything is under a microscope.

I'd love to know what happens as you've left university. First of all, where did you grow up? Did you grow up in Canada?

I was born in Minneapolis but I lived in Vancouver most of my life. We moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1974. My mom's sister's husband sold his company to Arthur Andersen. They moved out to the West Coast. They were at living in Winnipeg. My mom wanted to be near his sister. At the time, my dad was able to get a job in Vancouver. The entire family moved up to Vancouver. I grew up in Vancouver but I went to school at the University of Victoria. I spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

What prompted that?

It was one of those opportunities. Somebody came to the school and were promoting it. I'm sitting there going, “One year abroad doesn't sound terrible. This sounds interesting.” My Hebrew at the time was passable. It certainly wasn't fluent. It was something that was different. I was very interested at the time. My degree is in Middle Eastern Politics and I’m also dealing with international terrorism. There weren't the professors at UVic that were able to support it. Being able to spend one year learning from the top experts in the field was an opportunity that I couldn't give up. Thankfully, my parents helped me float this and we were able to make it work.

It was one of those junior year abroad-type situations where I spent a lot of time throwing darts at the bar listening to Queen and a whole bunch of different types of music, having a phenomenal time, and touring the country. I saw the country from top to bottom. We went to Egypt for three weeks. We did an incredible amount of traveling. This was in 1989 and 1990 when the wall fell in Germany. I was there when that whole thing was going on.

This is the best education you could get. You're immersed in a period of history but also when you're traveling, it's a whole different story. You get to feel the sense of, “How do other people live? What is the culture here? How do I adapt and learn?” I use that word intentionally adapt because you have to adapt to different situations, especially when your family's not there to call back on them and say, “What do I do here? How do I navigate this situation?”

That's the one thing. I've had the gift of travel most of my life, either through business or whatever. It enabled me to realize that just because I've learned how to do something one way doesn't mean it's the only way of doing it. One of the greatest skills I learned growing up is that there are no absolutes. There are 50 shades of gray between black and white. Just because you see something one way doesn't mean that's exactly what it is.

There are no absolutes in life. Just because you see something one way doesn’t mean that is exactly what it is.

Even thinking about what you studied, this is an area where it becomes important to know that there is no black and white. It's 50 shades of gray. There's a middle ground between all these conflicts that you're facing. You have to be able to be the person who can say, “How can I understand people's point of view? How can I maybe bridge the gap between the different challenges people are facing?” I want to know more about what happens next. You've come to this place where you're in university. What did you do as soon as you exited University? Panic?

Not at all. When I graduated from university, I ended up taking an extra year to finish university. I decided at that time, I was moving back to Israel. I spent the next two years, from ‘93 to ’95, living in Israel. I was working in a computer company, moving everybody from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. The Novell guys came behind me two days later and set up the Novell network. I was working with government ministries all over Israel. I was given a truck with a bunch of computers in the day and told to go switch out computers. That was my job. I did that for about two years. It was an incredible job. I had a wonderful time.

At the end of two years, my girlfriend and I broke up. One of my roommates got married. The other roommate decided to move back to England and my job ended. I got a phone call out of the blue from a company that I knew of in Canada saying, “What are you doing?” I said, “As a matter of fact, nothing.” They said, “How quickly can you be back in North America?” I said, “Why?” He says, “We need you to take over this account. We're sitting here.” I had a reputation at the time in the computer industry. They said, “We have an account and we need your level of expertise.”

It was about a $100 million account. It turns out the owners of the company were Iranian and very Middle Eastern. They needed somebody that understood the Middle Eastern culture to help run the account. I moved back to North America. At that time, I met my wife and got married. I flew 200 days a year dealing with this client. It was a wonderful experience until it wasn't. After two years, I got burned out. We're sitting here in 1998 or 1999. It’s time for a move again.

When you think about the journey you were on, there are a lot of things you're accumulating along the way but there are all connection points.

A lot of it had to do with conflict resolution, communication, and innovation. These are all things that came to congruence later on in my life.

The point I was trying to make is the sense of how all these different pieces start to fit together and make a whole. Maybe at the time you don't know it but it's like, “I'll follow this thread and see how that follows through.” You follow this thread and see how that follows through. All of it starts to piece together into a puzzle that is meaningful in the end.

I made a mistake. It was ‘97 because I started with them in ‘95. I left in ‘97 after two years. At the end of ‘97, I said, “I'm tired of being up in the air and being in high-tech sales because it's constantly changing.” Every fifteen minutes, you're dealing with something new and different. It was fun for a while and then it became overwhelming. I was lucky enough to be bought out and for them to do the What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up Training.

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up Training said, “Ben, you're good at branding, marketing, and communication. You're great at customer relationships. You're good at building long-term relationships built on trust, problem-solving, and enabling clients to be able to reach their goals.” That's what I'm good at. Somehow or other, I ended up playing golf because I got a whole bunch of money when I left these guys.

I went and played golf for six months. I met a guy in the direct mail business and he said, “We need people that can deal with major accounts and that are fairly technical because it was all becoming variable in the direct mail campaigns and all database-driven, computer-based printing.” I went, “I can do all that.” I got into the direct mail business and realized it's about needs, assessment, goals, brand communication, and communicating value, purpose, and mission. That's where the next step was.

When you think about it, that's something that was big at the time. It was the starting point of what digital marketing was all about.

I didn't kill trees. I killed forests. We were running $250,000, $500,000, and $1 million piece direct mail campaigns. These were enormous direct mail campaigns on web presses where it would take a week to print 60,000 sheets an hour. 60,000 impressions an hour would take us a week sometimes to produce these things.

I can hear the trees crying as we speak.

It's taken a long time but the trees have forgiven me.

That's why you're living in Vancouver with the nice forest.

Green peace and I have come to a happy medium. We're okay.

What happened as you moved into this industry? You found your calling in this space of branding, communication, and customer relationship building. That's the core of all of this. Tell me how did this evolve into what you're doing?

Direct mail lasted for many years. Post 9/11 when digital first started coming out and the World Wide Web started in 1995, ten years later, we have Facebook. When we're dealing with the advent of social media, email marketing, and all those types of things, the world changed again. The customers that I was looking for and the relationships that I built were looking for ways to be able to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in postage stamps.

The variable direct mail email marketing wasn't something that I wanted to do. To me, it was a different animal. Conceptually, it's the same thing. However, what you're dealing with is instead of getting 3%, 4%, or 5% response rates and being able to test it in such a way, you're dealing with 25% response rates. It felt more like a spam type of situation and clogging up of emails. I hated it. I realize why anybody else would either. I ended up getting more involved on the branding side and strategy side.

That stuff sits there and says, “Who are you as an organization? Let's help you communicate on a more holistic basis.” Email marketing and social media marketing are going to be part of this but I'm going to hire somebody who's good at this stuff and let them do it. Let them be the tacticians. At this stage in my life, I realized I am a far better strategy guy and a big-picture person who understands, “What is a company trying to do holistically?” I developed an overall communication plan that enables them not only to communicate externally but internally as well.

One of the things that I'm realizing is part of your evolution is to start to strip away the things that you're doing that are not necessarily the core of who you are. When you start to get to the core of who you are and do that in its essence, you become the person whom everyone wants to come to and say, “We need you to do that and not the other stuff that is extraneous to what were you were doing before.” You have to be on the journey to do it. These things weren't always clear. You have to do other things first and then figure out, “This is part of me discovering who I truly am at the core.”

I'm about problem-solving and creativity. I'm about needs analysis, understanding mission, vision, values, and brand. “Who is a company today? Who do they want to be? How do we get them there?” Communication is a large part of the puzzle that most companies miss. They go straight for the tactics or they're looking straight for, “How do we make the operational changes?” They forget the X factor, which is humans. If we're not communicating to humans, not once but over time, and if we're not communicating in ways that are as effective to them, where they're going to understand it, internalize it, be able to recall it and retell it, they're not going to be partners in the voyage forward.

This is exactly where I was heading next. We're at this place where this is the work you're doing. What is most important about this work? It sounds like it's telling the story in the most human way but also in a way that can be recalled and reinforced.

Realize that people resonate with stories in different ways. People create their images based on their sets of knowledge and experience. There's a lesson that I do when I'm in front of a live audience, with a group of executives, or I’m teaching and consulting with teams where we take an AI program that creates visuals. Adobe Firefly is the one we're using but we're testing other ones. We put images on the board. We sit there and say, “Describe this image in Adobe Firefly and have it create an image.” What you're going to do is get 30 people in the room and you’ll get 30 different images.

People are going to miss details. They're going to see things differently, highlight certain things, and not going to highlight other things. They're going to focus on things and believe that there are things there that aren't there based on their interpretation of that image. How does that image make them feel? Where do they see this image being able to portray?

We all portray images and therefore voice commands and stories differently. As leaders, CEOs, and executives within an organization, we have to realize that when we are trying to build mission, vision, purpose, and goals, we need to put it not only in our voice and the way that we think it is but in the way, the people that we're trying to bring on board see it and respond to it.

When trying to build a team’s mission, vision, purpose, and goals, CEOs and business executives must put their voices in them and shape them in a way people would easily respond to.

It's not just about responding to it but it has to move them emotionally. It can't just be like, “That was nice.” It has to be able to be something that will get them to move into action and feel something that motivates them into this place of saying, “I want to be part of this story and move this forward. I can see myself inside of that story.”

It's what's in it for them and being able to alleviate the fears that they have that says, “We're bringing AI into the thing. What is that going to do for my job? What is that going to do for the way I do my job? What is that going to do for the 12 people that I've been sitting next to for the last 5 or 7 years? All of a sudden, am I going to be alone and I'm not going to have a team around me anymore because I'm going to have to do everything through AI? How is this going to affect me advancing the company?” Everybody has got those fears in their world because everybody is sitting there going, “How does this threaten my existence?” We all have that thought that goes in the back of our minds. If we didn't, we'd all be dead.

When we are able to sit there and say, “This is what we're doing. We're using this AI to enhance what you're already doing, enable you to do the things you want to do, and allow the AI to do the stuff that you have to do. It's going to make you better at your job, enable you to be more effective at your job, and do the things that are interesting for you,” all of a sudden you've got people that are bought in. If you're saying, “We're bringing AI into the system,” all of a sudden, you're going to have people walking out the door because they're terrified. They're looking for somewhere else because they think their job's on the line to begin with. It may not be.

What you shared is such a brilliant thing because we fear things we don't understand. Our first instinct is to run as fast as we can away from this because this is going to attack us and make us irrelevant. If we stop, look back, and say, “This is not going to make us irrelevant. If we embrace it, we can create together with this. We’ll find a way to use it to our advantage not to run away from it in fear.” I'm glad that you went here because this was the thing that I wanted to ask you about. How do you see these technologies affecting how people tell stories and how brands develop? You've captured it well but if there's anything else you want to share about this, please do.

Think of the essence of what the writer strike is down in Hollywood. The essence of the writer strike is not only the fact that they deserve to be paid a residual, and they do. If a film does well, the writers should get a residual of the film. It's ridiculous that they don't. They're the creative minds that created the dialogue that allowed the actors to be able to be brilliant on stage. It's their creative genius that has allowed the actors to have the creative genius but they're also worried about the fact that, “Is AI going to overtake their jobs?” Are people going to sit there and say, “We don't need writers anymore. We're going to use ChatGPT to create a script?”

Anybody who has spent any time whatsoever in ChatGPT or any of these other technologies realizes it's not there yet. Maybe it will be in 40 or 50 years but in the short-term, it's an aggregate of information that already exists. That's what ChatGPT is. We've taken millions and billions of pieces of data, shoved them into a box, and allowed ChatGPT to take that information that already exists and amalgamate it. It's not creating original thoughts or anything that's unique or different. The truth of the matter is if you take the time and read the writing of it, it is extremely banal.

I use ChatGPT all the time for idea generation. I sit there and say, “Write me the first 500 words on this.” I'll take that 500 words and augment it. I'll sit there and say, “How do we make this better?” It's the creative mind of the individual that makes it better. There has always been a time and a place for technology or we'd still be dealing with a world of square wheels but we need to realize that technology serves human beings, not the other way around. It's not a way to get rid of jobs or replace people but the thing is, people are doing that. They're looking short-term. They're not looking long-term. They don't realize the ill effects being a slave to technology is doing to their brand.

That's why when I think about where you came from and where you continue to come from is this sense of, “We need to be communicative and be in connection to people by speaking in a human tone or a human way to other people.” You can augment it with technology but you can't do it without the human. We need to make sure that communication, building bridges, and creating an understanding between two humans or multiple humans is where this all starts, understanding what we want to communicate to the other person.

You can always create a news release. ChatGPT can create a news release, “Such and such happened on this date. This person died.” If all we want is factual information, ChatGPT will be able to give it to us a lot faster than we can ourselves. However, there is no nuance or why behind it. There's not to say, “The ramifications of this happening are. This is what the long-term impact is going to be. This is how this has affected individual human beings.” ChatGPT doesn't cognitively think.

It does sit there and say, “What about Johnny? What about Johnny's mother? What about the dog? What about the different fire people that had to sit there and get Johnny out of the well?” It doesn't tell those nuanced stories that first of all, make it interesting and second of all, make it something that people want to keep pulling from. If all you need are facts and data, those are ones and zeros. Computers do them extremely well but if you ever need to get into nuance and be able to have that information resonate in a way that makes people engage, act, and react, technology is not there.

Technology has not yet reached the point when it can gather information in a way that engages people to act or react.

We need humans and that emotion.

We need human beings and the X factor.

This was an interesting conversation because I enjoyed it. This is present for so many people so this was great to get into. I want to shift gears slightly and ask a question about you specifically. You shared a lot about your journey to getting here but I want to know what are some things that are top of mind for you beyond technology that you want to share. Maybe some lessons that you've learned or things that are important in your field that you think people need to know.

The most important lesson that I talk about, and I talk about this more often than not, is the fact that we need to go back to the point where we care about things, people, and ideas. We've moved away from that. You can see that in the dichotomy of politics, religion, and office interactions. We've stopped caring about the customer.

We've set up positions where we allow technology to be the chatbot. We allow people to send an email and we may or may not respond to it. The phone number on our website is hidden or is no longer there. If it does, it rings and goes to voicemail. We are not listening to people. We are not sitting there going, “How are people engaging with what we do? How is this changing their lives and the lives of the people that they're engaging with?”

Whether it's at a personal, community, business, or political level, it doesn't matter. It's a matter of sitting there and being in a situation where we're going, “What are the ramifications of our actions?” I sit there on LinkedIn and hammer out an answer. I send out a tweet or post something on Instagram. I can say whatever I want. It's proven to me that people do it.

It astounds me on a daily basis what people say on social media because they know there are no ramifications. We sit there. We talk about people, innuendo or conjecture, whatever is put out there to elevate our brands and self-importance without understanding the ramifications of how this affects the other people involved. The number one thing that I rail about is being able to elevate discourse, enable people to be more human, and care more about each other.

It's beautiful because it has me thinking about not just the scorekeeping but how can I be sure that I'm putting things out and also taking things in. I'm doing it in a way that's almost like a kindness bank where I'm ensuring that the flow is authentically real between two people or multiple people. Not just because it makes me look good. It feels good to be good to people.

Kindness doesn't have immediate dividends in most situations. It usually has a long tail because it's not about just being kind once. It's about opening the door for people on a continual basis or letting somebody else in front of you in a line. It's somebody's short $0.20 at the cash register. Instead of making them go back and be embarrassed that they have to go put something back, throwing $0.25 and saying, “Don't worry about it.”

It's the little things that we do for each other humanity that enables us to float all boats. That is where we need to teach the next generation. We've raised a generation of kids where they’re like, “It's not my fault. Everybody gets a blue ribbon. You could always pass the buck to somebody else.” There isn't that same sense of responsibility that says, “Yes, this was my fault. Let's fix this together.” We need to get back to that world.

I want to live there. We need to create that world together one person at a time and start to say, “How can we get that message out there?” That should be part of the work, the call to people who are reading to start to say, “What can we do to make that world happen?”

You don't need to be the Beast, Obama, or whatever to be able to make that happen. What we do is influence the people around us and let those people influence the people around them. It gets built slowly but surely time after time. It's not immediate. It takes time and consistent effort. We're going to fail and have steps backward and forward but we need to realize it's about the end goal and the end game and not about short-term gratification.

Something that comes to mind is people often talk about microaggressions in the workplace or the world but maybe we need to use micro kindness, those little things that we're doing that we can put out in the world that create the move in the right direction without any need for it to be something that comes back to us.

There are organizations out there that have points-based reward systems. There're little attaboys and attagirls where you catch somebody in kindness. You catch somebody in the moment doing some act. Immediately, it's a digital app. I wish I knew the name of it and who produced it. It’s one of those things that all of a sudden, you can transfer 25, 50, or 100 points directly to them. Every manager and team has a budget. Therefore, you and I are team members. We can support each other. As a leader, you could support leaders of other divisions.

When we can catch people doing kind things and things that are good, all of a sudden, they see a small reward, which can turn into cups of Starbucks coffee or barbecues. Who knows what they turn into? You can either use your points on a regular basis or save them up towards whatever. It enables people to sit there and get that Pavlovian response where all of a sudden, it’s like, “I did something good. People are seeing and recognizing. I'm getting rewarded for it.”

It's brilliant because it starts there, ripples outside of work, and then becomes something that's a habit that's been formed that we start doing all the time.

As long as it's authentic. You can't just say thank you to somebody and get 25 points. There have to be some parameters around this. It comes down to expectations and accountability.

I could talk about this stuff all day. We've traveled quite a path but I have one last question for you. This is the big whammy. What are 1 or 2 books that had an impact on you and why?

There are two books. One is Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends & Influence People. God Knows, it might even be hundreds of years old. It's well worth reading and rereading a few times over dog-earing highlighting the pages. There are so many truths that were true when Dale Carnegie wrote these things. It creates an amazing impact. The second book is a book you've never heard of. You may never see it in print but it's a book called Buy It By The Acre, Sell It By The Foot. It was written by one of my good friends. He was an uncle of mine. He was one of my father's best friends, Sam Allman.

He is one of the biggest tin men you've ever seen in your life. He was the guy that came into town and got you to buy the seminars or DVD sets. I learned how to move a room of 5,000 people at Sam's feet. He was the guy that got you to buy the $10,000 seminar. He was going into a business where he was going into real estate things. He needed some legitimacy behind it. He wrote Buy It By The Acre, Sell It By The Foot in two days. I have no idea if anybody's read what's in there. I don't think it matters if everybody's read it. It was the title alone.

We're talking 1982 or 1983. He had a book that automatically propelled him and gave him legitimacy in the industry where he had none. It enabled him to be able to say, “Here's my calling card.” His calling card was 165 pages. People said, “You must know what you're talking about because you've written this book.” Not to say that we write books to blow smoke but what it realize is people sit there and say, “Why are you writing your book in the first place?” I've written two books. I did not write my books to get rich.

I've broken even on both of my books. I made a little bit of money on both of my books. My books have some credibility to this other thing. They get me keynote addresses on stage. They introduced me to people and I do consulting work for them. They elevate my brand so when I'm discussing things with people, they say, “You've written two books.”

Whether those people ever read my books or not is irrelevant. What's important is that people sit there and say, “He's taken the time and the energy to not only start to write a book but finish writing a book, had it produced, published, and it has physical copies that he's putting in my hand, opening up the front page, writing, ‘To So-And-So. From Ben. Wishing you the best,’ and handing it back.” It's that relationship that gets formed through that process. That's important.

There are so many things I can say at this point but it’s brilliant. I'm going to go try and track down Sam's book because that's what I do. One of the things that I noticed when I think about how to win friends is the more things change, the more they stay the same at the core. There's a sense of, “Human connection has always been the same. It looks different but we still have to get to the core of what it is that we do.”

“We have to understand each other and make sure we spend time paying attention to what people care about. When we do, then we get further into the relationship.” Those are the things that are at the core of all this, which is to say, “Don't disregard those early books because there are a lot of wins that continue to show up over and over again.”

We all have hopes, wants, fears, needs, and desires. We have things that we're excited about and scared about. The trick is to find out what other people care about and communicate with them at their level. When you can communicate with them at their level, bringing their aspirations and their goals to the front of mind, all of a sudden you build allegiances and alignment. If it's all about me, my needs, everything I do, how wonderful I am, nobody cares. It's like, “Ben was on another podcast,” nobody cares. I've done over 1,000 podcast interviews. For 10 years, I have done 500 or 700 podcast interviews myself. The truth of the matter is people care about what's being said on the podcast, not the fact that you've been on the podcast itself.

We're running short on time but I want to stop by and say thank you so much. This was enjoyable. As always, Ben is so insightful and full of great stories. I want to thank you but also make sure that I give you some space to share where people can find out more about you.

There's one repository for everything. It's YourBrandMarketing.com. There are free eBooks and chapters to both my books there. There are all the articles that I've written and links to my podcasts. Everything is sitting right there. All our consulting information and different programs are sitting at YourBrandMarketing.com. You can even book a 30-minute free consultation to talk about what are your challenges. What are the things that you're challenged with? Let's see if we can work together to help you fix it.

Thank you so much. Thanks to readers for coming on the journey with us. I know you're leaving feeling so inspired. Go reach out to Ben. You will not be let down. He's full of many great insights. That's a wrap.

Thanks for having me, Tony.

Important Links

• Ben Baker
• How To Win Friends & Influence People
• Buy It By The Acre, Sell It By The Foot

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