Summary

This episode is for you if you are a start up and trying to find the best way to market your brand other than paid ads. You will learn the pros and cons of paid and organic marketing strategies when applied to your business and how it can affect your brand over the long term.  

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Inspirational Quotes

 

Full Transcript

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of The Life On Purpose with James Laughlin Show. Please note that there may be small moments where grammar goes off track - this is simply due to the fact that the LIVE episode was converted to full long-form transcript.  For weekly motivation, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Youtube.]

SPEAKERS 

Dan Norris, James Laughlin 

 

James Laughlin  00:00 

Welcome to life on purpose. My name is James Laughlin, former seven-time world champion musician and now success coach to leaders and high performers. Each week, I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you live your life on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show. 

 

Dan Norris  00:30 

Super excited to welcome in today's guest, he is none other than CEO of Black Hops Brewing. He's a serial entrepreneur, international speaker. And also, here's the most amazing part. He is a multiple times best-selling author, right? He's done so much serial entrepreneur, runs the Black Hops Brewing Company, international speaker also, he's just released his sixth book, Compound Marketing. So please welcome Dan Norris coming in from Australia. 

 

James Laughlin  01:02 

Thank you so much for joining me, mate.  

 

Dan Norris  01:04 

Thanks for having me.  

 

James Laughlin  01:05 

Absolute pleasure, man. I've heard nothing but great things I've started over the last few months. I've just seen you everywhere. I've seen what you do. Your most recent book complaint marketing was brought to me actually from my coach, who is over in Australia and she was like James, you got to check this guy, you got to check out the new book. So, I'm just delighted that we get a chance to connect with you and understand what drives you. And also learn about this new book. So, I really do appreciate you making the time.  

 

Dan Norris  01:30 

No worries, so who's your coach?  

 

James Laughlin  01:32 

Kat Abianac. 

 

Dan Norris  01:34 

Oh, yeah. Nice. Cool. She's been she's been really great.  

 

James Laughlin  01:37 

It's been amazing. She's, she's really amazing on the social media side of things, you know, so I gotta be getting coached with her on that side of things for quite a while now. So big ups to cat thanks for connecting us.  

 

Dan Norris  01:48 

Yeah, no worries.  

 

James Laughlin  01:50 

So tell me that's like, I want to talk about the book. But I want to know, what's the story? Like, where did this serial entrepreneurial mindset come from? Was there something at childhood where you're like, you just started getting into this whole aspect of creating and selling?  

 

ON HOW HE BECAME AN ENTREPRENEUR 

Dan Norris  02:03 

Yeah, I was neglected as a child. And so, I yeah, no, I actually don't know, I don't really know where it came from. I think I was just bored working in jobs. And I kind of tried, like when I only had a job for like, four years out of university. But in the jobs, I kind of just kept changing the job. And I was in an in an organisation where like, they just let me do whatever I wanted. So, I would just pretty much like they employed me in HR. And then I was like, actually, I would prefer to like, do programming. And now like, Alright, well, you can do that. And I kind of just started doing it. And then they let me do it. So, I just kept changing my job and changing it and changing it until I realised like I just actually just don't want to work for someone else. So, I started thinking about what else I could do, started reading books about starting businesses, and then just quit, I got quit, like, I got a promotion. And then we had like a Christmas party. And then I quit like a week later. I was like, 25, I think 26.  

 

James Laughlin  03:03 

That's excellent. You've always had a hunger then to drive and succeed and grow. 

 

Dan Norris  03:10 

Not always probably just probably just towards the end of university, I've kind of got my shit together. But before then it was all bad. 

 

James Laughlin  03:20 

I love it. Hey, I can I can totally relate. I can absolutely 100% relate, man. I love it. And so, you're running Black Hops Brewing doing frickin’ amazing job there. It's an amazing brand. And you're also an international speaker, and you have pumped out books. And I don't mean like just the book that a few people have bought these are best-selling books on Amazon. So, your most recent one is Compound Marketing. So please tell me a bit more about the book. 

HOW HE STARTED WRITING A BOOK 

Dan Norris  03:49 

Um, well, yeah, I've written quite a few books, I think it's these days, it's kind of more of a hobby because like black ops is turned into, like, That's like my job. Now it's pretty much all I do. But outside of that, I still kind of got this. I still think about shit and I'm like, I'm as I'll write it down. And once I write them down, I'm like, okay, I could write a blog post. But then if I've got like, 10 of them. That's like a quarter of a book. And then I'm like, well, it's quarter of book, I could probably just write a book. And just do it is like a bit of a hobby. There was a while there where I was writing them and kind of had a membership and I was kind of doing the whole online influencer thing and stuff, but I shut all that down. when Black Hops kind of took off. I didn't really enjoy it. To be honest, I don't really enjoy as a job. I like it as a hobby. The latest book is like I've written all my books are basically about online marketing, content, marketing and startups. And I kind of brought it all together with this one because I just like figured, like, early on, I kind of had this approach to marketing, which was like, create shitloads of content. And that was it. And so, I wrote books about that. And then business stuff was like create shitloads of businesses and then just fail a million times until one of them works. And so, I wrote a book about that. But I kind of feel like I'm bringing it together now with a company that, you know, it's a bigger, more sustainable, more solid business than I've ever had, I've worked in it, you know, for a few years straight, and I feel like continuing to work in it, it's not something I kind of want to get rid of, and start another one.   

 

ON HIS MARKETING APPROACH 

And the marketing stuff has all come together, because it's, it's not now it's not like about creating lots of content, it's more about really engaging with groups of people to make them care about the brand. And there is still a lot of content, because we do a lot of social media, we do blog posts, we have a podcast, we do all that stuff. But I feel like it's no longer kind of throwing shit at the wall and hoping something will stick. It's more organized, more strategic and not just content, it's also about really focusing on the brand really telling your story or like, every time you release a product, telling a story about the product. So, those kind of elements were coming together, I was kind of writing some ideas down around content, storytelling, branding, and community. And community, I mean, like your customers and community and fans as opposed to like, you know, serving the community. And they're basically the four things I spent all my time on now other than kind of stuff, but they're basically from a marketing and business point of view that things I spent all my time on. And we've been able to grow the business to way bigger than any business I've ever had. And we still don't have like really had marketing people, like we've got people that help out social media and stuff. But that kind of strategy of focusing on those things, has helped us build this company without spending any money on advertising.  

 

ON PAID ADS VS ORGANIC ADS 

James Laughlin  06:44 

Yeah, so people are watching this on replay. So, if they're running a business, whether it's a small business, maybe you know, working towards six figures, or seven, or maybe they're pushing up into going into eights. So, if marketing is chewing up a ton of their revenue, what you're saying is like, actually, there is a formula, I've got four key pillars, if you can actually invest in these four key pillars, you can see some massive growth without paying top dollars for some marketing agency.  

 

Dan Norris  07:13 

Yeah, I mean, I don't like to word formula. But I kind of feel like I'm going back to my online influencer ways by like, giving people a list of things they have to do, and then saying, if you buy my book and join my membership, and everything will be fine. And I'd like I've gone so far. The other direction from that. So yeah, I don't like the idea of formula. But I do think there's lots of different ways to market a business. And you know, I've never been good at the paid advertising stuff. I've tried over the years of being an entrepreneur, I've tried so many different options of paid traffic, paid advertising, just like billboards, paid banner ads, on websites, all that kind of stuff, I've never really understood it, I've never been good at it. And I've constantly been searching for another way to do it. And it kind of turns out that if you can get good at doing the other way, which is like a more organic kind of storytelling way, then you end up in a position where you've got a really, really strong advantage because it's not just this kind of saving money each month on marketing, it's more that you kind of build up a level of brand love that is really hard to replicate with paid advertising. Like our brand, I think is very strong. I think that's the biggest part of it, you know, like at the moment that our business is quite healthy. If we wanted to spend 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand a month on marketing, we definitely could afford to do that or more, we could spend more. But the fact that we don't have to, and the fact that we build up a level of kind of brand love that other people can't really get with paid ads, I think is a really enormous advantage.  And like the point I'm making the book is it's moving away from this kind of transactional model where you're paying for something to get an immediate return as opposed to investing in something and getting payment over the long term.  

 

ON COMPOUND MARKETING 

And that's why the word compound marketing, because I'm sort of starting to reflect on all the different things I do in a business for marketing. The whole time I've been thinking, Okay, this is a long game, like it's going to be, you know, I'm not going to write one blog post, and it's going to go viral, like I've written hundreds, probably 1000s of blog posts. And you know, you're not going to start a Facebook group and have like, immediately a 1000s of people in there, super engaged and loving it. Like that's not how it works. Like I started my first group with 10 people when I did my first book, and I built it up from there. And it took a very long time for that to happen. But eventually it ends up paying back and that kind of approach to marketing is not, like you hear people talk about that in business, the long game and everything but you don't really hear talking about as a marketing strategy and I did marketing at university and this never came up like this was not, marketing was always something that was like a transactional thing. And that's not how I've ever thought about marketing. And now I think the timing is good because I've actually got some evidence that we've got a solid business that we build. It's one of the fastest growing companies in Australia, I think we're doubling every year for five straight years. We've got like, 50 staff now it's, you know, 10 times the size of my last business. And we started that out of the garage and haven't spent money on marketing. And so there's, I've got some good kind of evidence that you know, that approach can work.  

 

James Laughlin  10:27 

That's amazing. And that goes for large corporations, as well as it's not just say, someone that starting off that you're providing evidence that, hey, if you're running a massive international business, you can actually use these strategies too. 

 

Dan Norris  10:39 

Yeah, there are some examples in the book that I talked about. There's definitely some companies that are doing as well, like big corporations. I don't know how many of them are doing well, but they're definitely like to kind of the more modern startups like you look at brands like Tesla, you know, what Elon does, the way he approaches, things. brands like Peloton, and I don't know that I haven't like sat down and done research on you know, how much these companies are spending on advertising. I'm sure someone at university can do that work. But I can see these companies like even if you just take kind of the Tesla thing. In Australia, I constantly see ads for car companies like I think car companies are basically holding up these media companies, and they're all articles and ads, every time we get a news.com is like the best car has just been launched in Australia. It's just some shitty Toyota that they're paying all this money to advertise on it like Tesla don't do any paid advertising at all. And that's the only car I want to buy, I don't want to buy any new Toyota SUV, I want to buy a Tesla because I know the brand. I think the products great, and I love the story and all of that stuff. And I've been following them for a while and I'm on board, I'm part of that kind of community of people who want to be part of it. And that's so I think it's possible at any scale. And but i don't i don't know if you know, but at least from my own personal experience, you know, I always did kind of think, okay, it's fine. And that's often the argument you get with content marketing. So, like, okay, it's fine to do, it's free, as long as the founder is doing it, and you're not paying for their time, but it's only going to get you so far. But you know, I don't really believe that anymore. And I know at least with our company, we've gotten this far without it. And I feel like that's going to keep going as long as we do a good job of engaging the community and keeping the brand strong and telling the story. And keeping up with the content and the kind of approach we take to things. And as long as that, you know, if everyone did this, it wouldn't be that interesting. And so, for us, it's kind of a good point of difference for us. But for someone else to go and shut down everything they're doing and double down on this, it's quite difficult, it takes a bit of a leap of faith. And so for that reason, it ends up being a good point of difference, it's really hard for all your competitors to kind of copy what you're doing. And even if they take a bit of inspiration from what you're doing to me, it kind of helps. And it's a really hard thing to replicate. It's hard. It's easy enough to replicate paid strategies, I think. But it's really hard to replicate, the love that people have for a brand or you know, a genuine, unique story and a group of people who are really passionate about the brand, like that kind of stuff is really hard to replicate. And I think sometimes even the paid strategies actually do more harm than good. I see, you know, our competitors doing a lot of paid traffic for things. And then you see the results come out. And we've done just as well, if not better without that. So, what are people thinking like these companies are trying to buy people's love, when there's other companies that are just having a crack being genuine. And getting that getting that love. So, I think I think some of the paid strategies can kind of work against that. 

 

James Laughlin  13:58 

100% I totally resonate with what you said about Tesla. And Apple kind of sticks out there for me a little bit as well, where, you know, they've got evangelists who love the product, because of the story that it tells and how they connect themselves with that. So, for a business small, medium, or large, the whole storytelling aspect, how should we present a story about our business or our brand so that it can connect with more people?  

 

ON IMPORTANCE OF BEING GENUINE 

Dan Norris  14:20 

Yeah, so again, like I said, before, you know, when the books I've read on storytelling, we're all sort of like, this is the structure you need to follow. And if you follow this structure, your company will have a great story. And that's, I don't subscribe to that. What I've tried to do in my book is say, these are the different types of stories that you can tell. And if there is one that is a genuine story that fits into your business, then you should be learning about this and telling it because it's going to be beneficial. But if there's not, there's not and you know, I don't think I don't think you should be making things up and there's a lot there's a lot of that in our industry where you've got, you know, products that are kind of themed after like fake explorers or convicts are some shitness. Like, this is the beer they drank. It's like, it's actually not, it's just you just doing that for marketing. It's quite obvious and kind of depressing. But so i think i think stories have to be genuine. That's what I think. And if you're like, with the companies I've started, my businesses have always had a genuine sort of founding story. And that's helped me a lot. I've used that a lot throughout my marketing and throughout my story.  

 

BLACK HOPS FOUNDING STORY AND HOW IT WORKS FOR THEIR BRAND 

Just because it's a good genuine story of, you know, like the car business, it's three mates having a crack, we started in my mom's garage, you know, and it just kind of blew up from there. And people have been following along this whole time. And that's just a good fun story, especially when it comes to beer, because it's kind of like every man's dream to like, do a home row and then build a brewery. That works for us. It's a great story. But that would like we don't stop there. So that's like typical founding story. But what we do a lot of as well as like product stories, or even customer stories. So, we've just brewed our 200th beer in and we've been, that's about five years in the making, but we've done probably 150 of them in the last two years. And so. we're constantly bringing different beers out. And in a lot of these beers come out with some kind of interesting story. Like one example I've got in the book is one of our Facebook group members suggested a beer for an event. And were like, Oh, that's a cool beer. But the event was cancelled. So. we were done, I thought that was over, they thought that was over. But instead of it being over, we brew the beer anyway, and kind of acted like the event was still going. And, you know, gave him credit, when we released the beer, surprised him by sending it to his house, did a full branding and everything for it, and did release the beer anyway, and then did a live call, and pretended we were doing like, you know, the tasting for the event. And, like, that's an example of where, like that, if we didn't choose to do that, not that we only chose that because it was a good story. But like, I'm always conscious of like, if we're going to make 200 beers, I might as well make some that have a good story behind them. And when he suggested that, it's like, if we do this, this is going to be good, fun story for him, it's going to be good, like customer success story. It'll be good for that community of ambassadors in the group on Facebook, where we've got almost 3000 people. And so for all of those reasons, it became a really good story. And we chose to kind of go down that path. One reason being, because we knew it would be a good story. And I talked about that in the book where you like, if you're an entrepreneur, you got a business, you can choose how you spend your time. And like I choose to spend zero time on paid strategies and 100% of the time on organic compounding strategies. And I choose to look for stories and what we do and, chase press opportunities and, you know, do beers that will involve our customers, engaging our audience all that stuff because I know that stuff is compounding activity. And, you know, if you're aware of it, and you kind of understand what stories can be useful, then you're more likely to kind of go down that path and chase those opportunities.  

 

18:06 

that's missing a 

 

James Laughlin  18:07 

lot. That's so And I think more companies do want to look at organic marketing, because paid ads, you know, it has its limitations, it has its costs. And I think we're going organic, there's so much more authentic on that.   

 

ON TRYING ORGANIC ADS TOO 

Dan Norris  18:20 

Like in my case, you know, I've gone all in on organic strategies and compounding strategies throughout my whole career as an entrepreneur. And it hasn't always worked like I've had a lot of bad years. But I've just continued doing it and believe it was going to work and it did work in the end. But I do like to think that that's not the only way to do it. Because not everyone wants to be that ruthless. And also, just kind of fail for that long before things work. So, it makes sense to me that if you are really good at paid ads, and it's working really well for you that you will keep doing that. But maybe you would also kind of dabble in some of this stuff, you know, set up a blog, do some content, set up a group for your community members. Really start thinking about the brand and what it means and telling stories and that kind of stuff at the same time, and then maybe doing a bit of both. And you know, who knows, maybe eventually, you don't need the paid stuff. Or maybe you come up with a really nice combination of both that works for your skills, and you get the best of both worlds.  

 

James Laughlin  19:19 

I love that. And you talked about starting it in the garage with a couple of your mates. And then now you've got a brewery. So for those people who haven't engaged with your brand yet, where's the brand that night? I started in the garbage. Where are you at night?  

 

FROM GARAGE TO BEING VOTED #1 INDEPENDENT BREWERY 

Dan Norris  19:31 

Yeah, so we've got three breweries now. So, three breweries, three tap rooms, we just bought one and turned it into Black Hops Brisbane, which is the city kind of 100 kilometers from here. We got two in our local area one up there. We're about to release a fourth tap room just for barrel aged beers. And the brand is, we just got voted the number one crop brewery in the country. Yeah, the brand is extremely strong. We're doing two to 3 million liters of beer a year, which puts us as sort of one of the bigger independent brewers. We did that, started in the garage, we've got a small brewery, we build a much, much bigger brewery. And then we just bought a third one and turned it into Brisbane. And the bigger one is just expanding and expanding, we should get tanks, we've got three lots of tanks in the last three months, we should get more today or tomorrow. And we're just feeling those immediately we're selling a lot of beer at the moment. And, and it's also, from this year, it's been a good solid, consistently profitable business. And that's, that's quite difficult for this kind of business, because it's, it's very, it's a very, very difficult business to run. Like, if you're going to run a small brew pub, you probably got to be always profitable, and it'll be fine. But you got to try and distribute a liquid product that you make around a country as big as Australia that's very difficult to do and still make money. So that's, you know, that's probably what I'm most proud of is now we've gotten through that kind of valley of death where you just have to invest in all this equipment, and you don't have the scale to actually not lose money every month. So we've gotten through that hurdle as well.  

 

James Laughlin  21:14 

That's amazing. For other people are trying to scale and do what you're doing. And they come up against hurdles they come up against the bureaucracy or pandemics, you know, what's your advice to those people who are coming up against hurdles? What have you got to do to overcome your hurdles? Have you had mentors? Have you had strategies?  

 

Dan Norris  21:32 

I wouldn't say I have mentors. I'm much more of a do-it-myself, type person. I'm not really that into coaching, mentoring stuff, for whatever reason, I don't really know why. But I do. I observed what other companies do for sure. And I have, you know, other colleagues in the industry that I kind of turn to if I need to.  

 

ON HAVING THE RIGHT TEAM AND OVERCOMING HURDLES/PANDEMICS 

But we've also built up a really good team. So, we've been very fortunate is probably the right word. With the team we've got. I delegate just about every job and I've got a lot of faith in our team. We were able to move pretty quickly with the pandemic, we were kind of worried it was going to completely squash our business. We went from I think, the week before it hit here, we run a business that sells beer to bars and restaurants and sells beer, their own bar and restaurant. And all of those were shut down with about a week notice. So, and that was about 40% of our entire business. And this is a business that's just breaking even at this point. So, it was very scary. But we were able to do a couple of things like one to shut down here only lasted four to six weeks. throughout that whole time, we're still doing takeaways. And we also had the retail trade in the bottle shops that went through the roof. So we were fine from that point of view. During that one month, we were able to execute really quickly and get a local delivery app up and running. Had a mate of mine, Jared, who's who does. It's called the app match. He did like helps entrepreneurs with apps. And he helped me build this thing. I basically build it myself with his help over the weekend of that pandemic. And then we had a live app in the App Store Two weeks later. And we had a you know, web app, you know, basically on the Monday following. And we were doing like we went from I think our previous best month of online deliveries was like 160, I think and then during that month of April, we did 1091 online sales, we literally 10x and we were doing for April, I think we did $85,000 in online sales. So, we basically, effectively built this kind of million dollar run rate online business in a week. Which got us through that kind of four to six week period of shutdowns. But ultimately, once everything went back to normal, we didn't need that month was good because we didn't kind of lose that whole chunk of the business. But once everything went back to normal, we just straight back at it and we've been selling more beer than ever. So, it's a bit different here. We were very, very lucky with the pandemic I think that the politicians here seem to get it pretty right. I think they get some pretty aggressive shutdowns before I've got out of control and got everything back slowly and at least Melbourne, it took off again and they were shut down for months and months. But where I am Queensland it kind of went back to normal and it seems normal now and we're very lucky.  

 

24:30 

On our two different I've never 

 

James Laughlin  24:33 

I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand and the same thing, our government shattered inside real fast. Really, really fortunate. I've got some clients actually in and around Brisbane, and one of them is in the medical industry. And she ended up a lot of COVID testing. During that time. She was really impressed that how few cases, were showing up, you know, across a number of months. So, your government policy, made some really great calls.  

 

Dan Norris  24:57 

Yeah, I think we're very lucky.  

 

James Laughlin  24:59 

It's good. In terms of the book race, so I want people some people can jump onto Amazon, they can grab Compound Marketing on Amazon, when it comes to launching because you're quite amazing, your track record with launching and getting success and bestseller status is phenomenal. Do you have any advice? If there's an author watching this, any advice to that author around how to get your book on the platform? Or how to position and then how to launch it?  

 

HOW TO BE A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR 

Dan Norris  25:23 

Yeah, well, to be honest, I haven't done really a proper book launch since my first one or two. Because these days, like I like even the last book I did, I didn't even do any podcasts or any marketing at all. for it, I kind of really traded it like, this is like a hobby that I'm doing for fun. This one, I have done a bunch of podcast interviews, mainly because I kind of felt like, I put a lot of work into the book and you put it out there and a few people downloaded it, it's kind of not really doing yourself much of a service if no one buys the book. But the best one, I think the first one I did was just getting a group of people behind the idea, getting a review committee together, giving them free copies of the book in advance, and then lining up a bunch of content and interviews and whatnot. Around that time. I don't know if people still do it. But at that time, I did like a free for three days thing on Amazon. And that was quite good. And then they swapped it over to paid and then it kind of stayed in that bestseller status for quite a while. But yeah, I mean, it's probably like anything I think like my personal brand was at its strongest when I was personally engaging with it with those people. So, I had a Facebook group that was really active. You know, I was speaking at events and conferences, and I was, I was selling my books themselves and signing them and sending them out and really like trying to build that community around the ideas. Like the seven-day startup, the first one, I had an online challenge. I had courses, I had a local group at a free Facebook group, I was presenting at conferences, I was doing like live calls where I'd review people's businesses and give them feedback and review their marketing, all that kind of stuff, all that free stuff just to engage people around that topic of the seven-day startup. And, and I'll be doing the same thing now if that's what I wanted to focus on for this book. But like I said, it's like now it's just Black Hops. And but Blac Hops is even got its own book that I wrote about Black Hops. So, I do focus on that one a bit more. And we do sign copies of it. And we still do talk in events and things. And, you know, just try to engage with people on the topic. And that that just kind of builds up this swell of interest. That has worked pretty well for me, the audio books have been good too. For some reason. This one is not published yet. And I've been trying to contact audible about why but the audio books have been a big plus as well. There seems to be a lot of people who like listening to audiobooks. 

 

James Laughlin  27:45 

I love it and did you record that yourself? Or do you have someone do that for you?  

 

Dan Norris  27:48 

No. I did it myself. It's super painful. I've done all of them. I've done all six of them myself. And it's not fun. It's really not fun. It's probably the least favourite thing like i like i like writing the content. I like publishing. I like the feeling of getting a copy of all that kind of stuff. But I hate recording the audio books. It's just so painful. I think if you'd like reading through your own content, I mean, I do it because I think it's better when the author reads it. But it's a painful thing to read through content you've read through so many times before. And then also, every time you make a mistake, you kind of have to clap, and then do it again. And it's quite difficult not to make mistakes when you're reading content. I think you just kind of like he never really, as an adult, you never really read out loud anymore. So, you kind of forget, it's actually not that easy. And then you want to get the words exactly the same as the book. So that whisper sync thing works. So, they can start to listen to the book and read the Kindle and it syncs up. So yeah, it's frustrating. But yes, I have done them all myself. And if I write another book, I'll do it myself, because I think it's worth it. And the audiobook sales tend to go really well too. So, it's worth from that point of view.  

 

James Laughlin  29:02 

That's brilliant. And in terms of the book itself, do you do you have a paperback or hardback and an e-book version? 

 

Dan Norris  29:11 

Yeah, so it used to be through CreateSpace I think Amazon owned them now, but yeah, if you I've got a guy that helps him with the formatting. So, he just, I do the whole book in Google Docs, I get Chris from Jet Launch, he's the guy who helps me with that he does the editing and the formatting, it doesn't cost a whole lot to be honest, it's reasonably easy. He just puts it in a format from the Google Doc into a format that works on paperback and PDF and Kindle and you just upload those files into otter Central. It's it's pretty easy to do. And it's print-on-demand so like it doesn't really cost you a cent. Like when I make a book, the only thing I really pay for is the design of the cover and the formatting of the book from Chris, but it's really not a whole lot of money, it's probably like it's under 1000 bucks in there. And yeah, and I would get that back on just audio book sales alone, like reasonably quickly. So, it's not a huge money-making thing, but it's not like I'm pouring money into it's quite an easy thing to do.  

 

James Laughlin  30:17 

That's brilliant. Well, you're making such an impact. And I think that's one of the most important things in terms of what you're doing with marketing is showing people that hey, here's how we can do it. here's here's a pathway. So other than what you're doing with your business, what else in your life? Are you juggling? Do you have a family that you're looking after as well?  

 

Dan Norris  30:34 

Yeah, I've got I've got two kids. I have some 5050. So yeah, that can that can be full on. But yeah, that seems to work pretty well. They're like 10, and 12. So they're kind of looking after themselves a little bit more now. It was a bit harder when they were younger.  I've got a boy who's four, we do 5050 as well. So, I totally understand that juggle. And so yeah, any advice for dads out there who are entrepreneurs, new dads that are busting their gut, but want to be there for the kids? Any advice just to keep moving in the right direction? 

 

31:06 

Drink more beer. 

 

James Laughlin  31:08 

Black Hops Beer, right? Love it. So good. Hey, that's all we need. That's perfect. Now I've done I want to say a massive thank you. And, you know, I think the book, compact marketing, I think it's a book that every CEO should have, every marketer should have. And you know, what you're doing is amazing work. So please keep proliferating your content, and creating the amazing work that you do.  

 

DAN NORRIS AS AN AUTHOR 

Dan Norris  31:35 

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. And yeah, if I think of like a sort of everytime I write a book, I'm like, Oh, that's the last one. I don't have any more ideas. And then I kind of have some more ideas. And then I write another one. So, if I think of more ideas, I will make another one. But I tend to write books about what I'm what I'm doing at work. So, they're not just books, written by kind of authors, you know, they're really just like capturing what I'm doing as a business owner. And to me, that's, that's kind of a little, it's a little bit unique. And it's good, because it kind of takes people inside the business when, you know, might be hard for them to do that otherwise. So, if Yeah, if I have enough interesting things to talk about, that I'm working on, I'll create another book. But if I don't, I'm not just gonna do it. For the sake of kind of having a business. By the time you have six books, you don't really need any more business card books. 

 

James Laughlin  32:27 

Totally. And hey, where can people come and connect with you and your brand? 

 

Dan Norris  32:31 

Yeah, I don't do a whole lot with my personal brand anymore. You know, I've got the books there. I'm on social media. And obviously on Instagram @thedannoris, Facebook, Twitter, I don't use Twitter a whole lot. But yeah, if you're interested in looking at blue or black ops or doing that, that's what I spend all my time on now. So have a look at Black Ops be here Have a look at how we go about our marketing and if you are anywhere in Australia, you can you can buy the beer and get behind the story and get behind a bunch of independent people kind of building an exciting business. 

 

James Laughlin  33:04 

Hey, everyone that's in Australia that's watching this please do support Black Ops brewing gold, buy their beer, enjoy it. And as Dan says, Be a part of the story. That's what it's all about. Engage and interact. Hey, thanks a million, Dan. I really really appreciate you taking the time I look forward to connect them with you once this bubble opens up between Australia and New Zealand. I'd love to come and and check out one of your top rooms.  

 

Dan Norris  33:24 

Yeah, sounds good. Well, we've done we've done a collab with Altitude in Queenstown over the COVID period, and we're keen to do a couple more over there. New Zealand's got a really good. Once that's opened up, we'll be coming over there for sure. 

 

James Laughlin  33:36 

Come and say hello please. Thank you so much for listening in today and investing in your own personal growth. Please hit that subscribe button. I would love love, love. If you'd leave me a rating and review as it really helps me to impact more people. I've got some amazing guests lined up in the coming weeks. And folks, it's that time. Get out there and live life on purpose.