Barry Cohen With AdLab Media Communications

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be an interesting one, everybody, so make sure you got paper and pencil ready to take some notes. This is going to be good stuff today on the show, we have Barry Cohen with AdLab Media Communications. Welcome, Barry.

Barry Cohen: [00:00:50] Welcome. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:51] Well, I’m excited to get updated. What’s going on at Ad Lab Media Communications?

Barry Cohen: [00:00:58] Well, we’re doing it. Ad Lab is working with coaches and consultants to help them become thought leaders perceive thought leaders in their industry. I mean, how do we do that? We do that by helping them create and promote their intellectual property.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:10] Now, a lot of coaches out there really struggle in this area. They know they know some stuff, but they have a difficult time of getting the folks that are trying to get as as clients to really appreciate how much they know. So how do you work with a coach to get kind of some of that intellectual property out of their head and in either into a book or an audio book or whatever form you help them kind of repurpose it into?

Barry Cohen: [00:01:36] Yeah, great question. And that’s exactly what we do. We get it out in as many possible ways as we can because people are consuming their content on multiple platforms. So there’s a variety of ways to do it. So one way, of course, is if you’ve got somebody that really can take it and run with it, you know, we’ll just work with them and publish their work and take it from good to great. But then, as you said, not everybody can do that. Some people struggle. So one of the ways that we can do that is, of course, ghostwriting. I call it collaborative ghostwriting. And what we’ve found to be successful is today, again, with technology, we will interview somebody like you’re doing with me right now on Zoom will record the audio right. We’ll have Zoom process and then we’ll run it through transcription software. And then we’ll take the speech to text transcript and edit that and create a book from it. We’re actually doing that right now, so that’s one way. All right. You know, other ways are, of course, you know, giving people just the, you know, guidance and the critique and the hand-holding. But here’s what people need to know. What coaches need to understand is that, first of all, there’s still a great cachet to publishing. I like to say that Publisher Parish is the new business manager. You know, in academia, that was always the mantra. If professors didn’t publish, they didn’t get retained, tenured, promoted, but it’s fast becoming the standard in business. If you think about it all the business leaders, you know, love him or hate him. Donald Trump. Jack Welch, the late CEO of GE.

Barry Cohen: [00:03:07] You know Robert Kiyosaki, the rich dad, poor dad, real estate guy, Guy Kawasaki. They’re all authors. But again, you don’t have to be famous to be an author. In fact, it works the other way around. The authorship will help you to become famous. So, yeah, again, it’s not as daunting a task as you think. I have one coach right now that is doing it where I would say the tail wagging the dog. We’re first creating the articles and the podcast, and then we’re compiling that into a book. I’ve got another one that has done a course and now is sending me the transcripts of the course. I’m turning that into a book. So, you know, think of it this way. Everybody knows somebody whose kid wants to be the next American Idol, right, so in order to do that, they need three things. They need airplay. They need a record deal and they need public performance. It’s the same thing with coaches and consultants. You need public speaking engagements. You need product, the book and the intellectual property, and you need publicity. And that’s where we come in. It’s not as daunting a task as people may think and again today getting published. The barriers to entry have come down. You know, you no longer have to have a big legacy publisher behind you. There’s a lot of great self-publishing options out there. And again, technology, for example, print on demand. You don’t have to have a garage full of 5000 books today. Every single one of our clients books is printed, bound and shipped as ordered, so they have no physical inventory to maintain.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:38] Now, you mentioned a word earlier and the word was famous, and a lot of folks think that that’s the objective is to become famous in some manner, and my counsel to people in this regard is you just want to be famous to the people who hire you like you don’t have to be famous to the world. But if you’re a coaching dentist, you just have to be famous among dentists. You know, you don’t have to have the same strategy as somebody who wants, you know, worldwide fame. You just want fame in your niche.

Barry Cohen: [00:05:11] And so true.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:13] So now how do you kind of help your client understand that? Because then when your audience is kind of has more parameters like that, then everything becomes easier, the marketing becomes easier. Everything, the writing becomes easier. You can go kind of inside baseball and talk really the minutia of what you’re doing and show depth in your knowledge, rather than kind of general generalized content that most worldwide famous, you know, people have. It’s not really specific. It’s just general kind of life advice.

Barry Cohen: [00:05:47] Yeah. Leigh, you hit the nail on the head. The key word is audience. I always tell all of my authors, all my clients, that you have to start by defining, defining and refining your audience to really understand exactly who they are. When you know who they are and you know what interests them. Then you know how to write for them. You know what the tone should be. You know the style that you should use, and you’ll also know then who to promote it to, and we will know how to help them find that audience. You know, in other words, where does that audience live? What content do they consume? You know, what publications do they read? What programs do they listen to or watch? And you know, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about shaping that. You know, I can’t help but emphasize again the importance of if you want to become the expert in your space and not just the practitioner publishing will help you get there. It will raise your profile and credibility and make you that perceived thought leader in your arena. It also will help you to attract speaking fees and higher speaking fees if you’re a published author. You know, again, I did this myself, so whatever advice I give, I’m just following the path that I took myself.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:05] Right, and that’s one of those things where when you have a speaking opportunity, you can include and everybody gets a book and, you know, if I’m going to go and do training at your at your office, everybody gets a book like you can build this into your pricing, into your offerings.

Barry Cohen: [00:07:23] Exactly. And there’s still a great cachet to being a published author. And again, the very definition of publishing has changed. So, you know, let’s clarify that for a minute. The book may become the centerpiece of what should become whole product line. You know, somebody very wise who’s done a lot more books than I did said to me early on in my publishing journey. He said. You don’t make your money on a twelve point ninety five paperback, and it’s true. Most of us that are writing are not writing in order to sell a million books. But what he emphasized to me was the importance of building out the product line, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. You take the book, and as you said before, the key word is repurposing the content, so when you have the book, the e-book, the audio book, the podcasts right, the live speaking engagements and the CDs and DVDs of the lives speaking engagements, you know, eventually you’re going to have we in a box for two hundred hours instead of twelve ninety five for one paperback. And while you sleep, you sell a couple of those and you’re certainly making your money. But again, for the most part, people are using this to attract attention to them, not necessarily to to generate income from it. It’s to, you know, to get people to notice them and to hire them. And, you know, let’s go back to what I said before about those three things. You know, the public performance, you know, the product and the publicity.

Barry Cohen: [00:08:47] Each one of these feeds into the other. So if you’ve got a book right, you get speaking engagements. And if you get speaking engagements, you get publicity around them, you get publicity and you know, because you’re getting media attention, then right away, you’re the star, you’re the expert, you’re the person up on the dais that knows what’s going on. And then people are attracted to you to do business. And we’ve proven this, you know, we’ve had clients that have become very successful and they were never published before. Some of them hadn’t even done public speaking before. We’ve got a couple of them that, you know, we’ve gotten really good media coverage because part of what we do is to shape that product so that it stands out from the rest. You know, I’m known for coming up with titles and, you know, don’t let anybody tell you you don’t judge a book by its cover because you do. You know, how many seconds are you going to spend looking at the thumbnail on Amazon before you decided you’re going to buy it? If you walk into a Barnes and Noble and you’ll look at the spine of a book, how long are you going to look at it before you decide to pull it off the shelf? So know part of that is I bring a marketing perspective as an advertising guy to publishing. I look at the book as a product. I look at the at the author as a product that has to be marketed

Lee Kantor: [00:10:02] Right and everything has to holistically work together so that you get the most bang for your buck. Because all of this, it is an investment of time and resources in order to pull this off. Now let’s take. I’d like to go down a couple of different paths. Sure, let’s go. I’m I’m maybe saying I’m an executive and I just got laid off and now I’m going to be a coach. Ok, so I’m kind of unknown. I don’t have really a body of work yet, but I believe in what you’re saying. I believe what you say is true. So I I don’t really have a pile of content other than, you know, I know a lot of stuff, but it’s still just kind of, you know, not on paper and pencil pencil yet. So how do you work with me in my path? Like what would my journey working with you look like in order to get some of the the brilliance I have out of my head and then launch me into the coaching world?

Barry Cohen: [00:10:55] Yeah, excellent question. What I usually do is I have a what I call a thought starter questionnaire, and I’ll send that to people. And if they’re serious, they’ll take that questionnaire and they’ll answer those questions and then share their answers with me. That questionnaire will become the basis for an outline, and then the outline can be fleshed out into a book. And then, as we said, the derivative works can be backed out of that. Now we’ve taken excerpts from clients books and turn them into articles, turn them into blog posts, turn them into guest columns and guest posts.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:27] So that kind of engagement where it’s kind of starting from kind of blank sheet of paper. What’s the time and like a ballpark of the cost to get me, you know, a finished product and now on my way, like some escape velocity?

Barry Cohen: [00:11:42] Ok. Yeah, good point. Provided the back and forth is is timely, right? You know, we’re each sending work back and forth to one another because I’m going to be critiquing it and shuttling it back to you and and you’re going to be then, you know, revising and sending it back to me provided that that rhythm is in place. It shouldn’t take more than, you know, in most cases, three to six months to have a finished product, depending on, you know, how much content we’re talking about the weight of it. I mean, you know, I’ve done books that are 150 pages of done books that are 450 pages, but it shouldn’t be that daunting and should really be, let’s say, you know, three to six months of the outside process, in some cases, even less. We just did one for a Stony Brook University professor recently who does process improvement, and he moved through it in record time. I believe that we probably did it in under three months. And in terms of cost, again, depending on what we working with, if we’re working with a draft that just needs to be taken from good to great. You know, it’s one cost structure.

Barry Cohen: [00:12:50] If we’re taking something from ground zero, as you described before, you know, and basically pulling it out of your head, you know, then it’s a different arrangement. So again, to not be evasive, to give you an idea, you know, let’s state it in ranges. Generally, if somebody sends me a draft, right, it just needs to be improved. You know, we’re looking at some not in the stratosphere, you know, something and maybe the two to 3000 range to complete it and have a, you know, ready to go manuscript when it comes to something that we have to do really a lot of hand-holding. And like I said, either, you know, either start from nothing. Develop the outline with them and flesh it out. Or as I said before, do the, you know, the Zoom brain dump. Then you know, we’re more likely to to want to do a monthly retainer. We don’t do our ways because it’s a blank check. I like to have a predictable. In that case, it’s probably going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred a month and usually that’s completed again within a six month time frame or less.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:56] And then at the end of the day, the person their books on Amazon, their books exist.

Barry Cohen: [00:14:02] It’s not so. So this takes you to the to the point of having a completed manuscript now to go from there. Then they have to decide we’ll give them options. They have to decide, do they want to use one of the self-publishing programs out there? Right. So the return key services that can do everything from designing the cover to, you know, setting the, you know, formatting the interior of the book to getting the ISBN barcodes and putting it up on Amazon. So those services usually if it’s a color cover black and white interior book, those services usually range around, maybe give or take several hundred dollars one time fee. And that’s done now. On the other hand, if it’s a book that we feel is really worthy of it, we now have our own publishing imprint. And if if we put it through there, then it’s not self-publishing, they’re not paying for it.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:58] And then it’s it’s more traditionally published at that point.

Barry Cohen: [00:15:01] Yes, but by a small, independent publisher, but it’s more traditionally published, correct?

Lee Kantor: [00:15:06] And so the elements that I’m hearing are the creation of the content. That’s one, you know, maybe the first phase of the launch or the rocket ship. Then you have the actual kind of distribution through an Amazon or a publishing firm of some kind. And then the third part would be the publicity and the marketing around it.

Barry Cohen: [00:15:26] Correct. Exactly. And publicity and promotion is again usually done like a standard PR firm on a retainer basis. You know, we’ll establish again a predictable, fixed, you know, retainer for a period of usually six months, and then the author can reevaluate and decide if they want to do anymore or not. And that involves doing everything from, you know, collaboratively drafting press releases to coming up with a target media list again, collaboratively to us, aggressively pitching and following up. We don’t just spam it out there and leave it until we get an answer, and it takes usually six touches before you get a yes or no from a media outlet. And they’re we’re soliciting everything from book reviews to articles to feature stories to excerpts of the book.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:18] Right. So then I mean, so the bottom line end of the day of this, it’s like golf. You know, you can spend as little or as you as much as you want on your clubs, right? So it’s the same thing here. Like if you do a lot of the work, the author does a lot of the work and does a lot of the legwork. It’s definitely in the thousands. If you want to do the whole white glove, hands off thing. You’re talking tens of thousand ten twenty thousand at the end of the day.

Barry Cohen: [00:16:44] Yeah, but probably not more than that. It’s like I said, it’s not in the stratosphere. It really isn’t

Lee Kantor: [00:16:49] Right. I mean, I think that anybody that is has a practice or is coming from corporate, that number shouldn’t scare anybody. But but it just you go ahead.

Barry Cohen: [00:17:00] It’s good that you mention that because, you know, it’s the perfect vehicle for somebody transitioning out of corporate and into consulting and coaching because so many people that are going into that space don’t have an entrepreneurial background and they’re going to need that extra rocket fuel to make themselves credible. And what they have to realize is that when you hang your shingle out, you’re starting all over again. Doesn’t matter what you did incorporate. People are still going to look at you and say, But what can you do for me now, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:30] Like when you had Deloitte at the back of your email address, you were getting people returning your call. But when it’s, you know, Bob Smith, not so much. And that’s a harsh reality for a lot of corporate people. I think they think that they still have the same cachet when they had the corporation behind them.

Barry Cohen: [00:17:47] Yes, it’s true. And you know, I just dealt with somebody recently that was in that position, and he thought that he was going to go after the same size clients that he did before. And I said, no, I said, those folks already have McKinsey or Booz Allen Hamilton, you know, on retainer. I said, You know, you’ve got to you’ve got to move down a tier, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:18:07] You’ve got to earn your way back up the ladder under your own kind of umbrella. And that’s where the book is so useful. Now we’ve been talking about people from scratch. What if? And I would imagine this is good advice for anybody that is maybe a year or two out and sees like, Oh, you know, there’s a reorg in my future and I might be laid off at any point now. It’s probably a good idea for that person to start a blog, I would imagine. So they have some content. So when they do get laid off or they retire, they already have kind of a framework or a, you know, kind of some content to pull from so they can accelerate this whole process. And so you’re not creating a book or a concept or course from scratch, you’re already kind of developing the bones of it. Do you work with folks at that stage, you know, to help them kind of plan out, like maybe to come in and say, OK, we’re not going to do much work here, just strategize and say, OK, you know what, in two years you want to retire. Why don’t we build at least the, you know, the scaffolding now and start? Get you working on some of this without my help, but I’ll just give you some guidance at the earliest stage and then you go off. Then when that time comes and then we reconnect back again and then now we’re going to ready to take this and then compile it and repurpose it.

Barry Cohen: [00:19:21] Yes, you know, the answer to that is a simple yes. You know, I have worked with people that way and we can work with people that way and we will work with people that way. And, you know, we’ll also give them some of the hacks and the shortcuts, so to speak, and and give an idea. Ok, here’s you know, here’s a podcast platform that you can start on. You can take your blog post now and turn it into a podcast. You know, we’ll give them some, you know, general direction on, you know, like how to, you know, how to position an article so that it’s going to resonate with, you know, with an editor or producer or reporter? Yeah, you know, we’ll give. And that kind of a launch pad.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:00] So now if somebody wants to learn more about your offering, get a hold of you or somebody on the team, what’s the best way to do that?

Barry Cohen: [00:20:08] Well, email is publicist seven four zero at gmail.com and they can look at the website publishing mentors, and I can give you a phone as well. All right. Daytime phone on Eastern Time is Area Code nine seven three five eight zero three five three four.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:30] Good stuff, Barry, and congratulations on all the success you’ve helped so many people, you know, take their practice to the next level.

Barry Cohen: [00:20:38] Thank you. That’s what we do.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:40] All right, this is Lee Kantor, we’ll see you next time on Coach the Coach radio.