In this eye-opening episode, Ryan Chute joins Pualena to explore what it really takes to stand out in today’s crowded business landscape. From infamous to influential, Ryan shares his journey from a transactional sales mindset to leading a nine-figure branding agency. He emphasizes the power of clarity in communication, encouraging businesses to boldly stand for their values and choose who to lose in order to attract their ideal customers. With sharp wit and real-world examples, Ryan breaks down how aligning your messaging with your values and customers’ identities is the secret to long-term success.
Throughout the conversation, Ryan unpacks the vital shift from hard sales to persuasive storytelling, urging businesses to focus on creating value, trust, and identity-driven loyalty. Learn how to make a lasting impression on customers by delivering experiences that engage oxytocin responses over dopamine hits and how to foster relationships that last far beyond the first sale. If you’re ready to ditch transactional tactics and start communicating with intention, this episode is your blueprint to get started.
About Ryan Chute
Ryan Chute is the leader of an 8-figure creative consulting agency within the Wizard of Ads® group, where he helps ambitious Residential Home Service Contractors and Professional Service Companies scale their revenue by 4 to 10 times through brand-forward sales and marketing strategies. His expertise lies in eliminating friction and aligning story, experience, and culture to accelerate profitable growth.
Ryan’s journey to leadership wasn’t linear. He began his career in the high-pressure, transactional world of retail and automotive—environments rife with questionable practices, toxic leadership, and fear-based management. Like many, he mirrored what he saw, becoming a capable manager but, by his own account, a poor leader. A pivotal moment came when he was fired for toxic behavior. That experience led to an awakening and a fundamental shift in how he viewed leadership, accountability, and growth.
In November 2015, at the age of 40, Ryan was introduced to a transformative concept by his Wizard Partner, Ray Seggern: the power of Story, Experience, and Culture. It clicked. He realized that a company’s brand is an expression of its internal culture—and when that culture is thriving, it naturally extends into an exceptional buying experience.
Today, Ryan helps business owners create legendary brands by removing hidden sources of friction in their businesses, enabling teams to sell more easily and buyers to purchase with confidence. His work is built on the belief that when companies protect and nurture a happy, healthy, and wealthy culture, everything else follows—including lasting growth and meaningful impact.
Resources discussed in this episode:
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Contact Pua Pakele | RBL Media:
Contact Ryan Chute | Wizard of Ads:
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Transcript
Ryan 00:00
That is also the reality of branding, because you have to choose who to lose. The price of clarity is the potential of offending someone, and there's always somebody that's going to be offended when you connect with the people that you're trying to connect with. You don't need to target people in a lot of your marketing channels. You just need to say the things that would resonate with the people you want.
Pualena 00:25
Infamous countdown to the infamous Ryan Chute. Welcome to the podcast.
Ryan 00:32
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. I love being infamous. Infamous is still famous. I'm just saying.
Pualena 00:38
It is. What's the difference?
Ryan 00:41
Well one's like, like the villain and one's the hero,
Pualena 00:45
Really?
Ryan 00:46
Yeah.
Pualena 00:47
You're kidding. Have I been using it wrong all my life?
Ryan 00:49
Well, it really depends on how you see me. By the end of this, I might, in fact, be the most infamous.
Pualena 00:57
Well, now I'm excited. Let's just, let's just dig in so I can decide which one you are.
Ryan 1:03
That's it. You never know.
Pualena 1:05
Incredible. Well. You do have an air of mystery and magic with your brand and the results that you get for your clients. So I would love to hear. Who are you? What do you do? What is your business? How did you get here? All of the things?
Ryan 01:20
Well, you know, you got to be a special kind of weirdo to call yourself a wizard in the first place. Let's, let's start with that. And it really, it really just goes downhill from there. Believing in better communication is often the reality of most people. But it wasn't until 2015 that I really realized that I was so transactional in the way that I was thinking. I was so survival mode thinking and so fixed. You know, I wanted so much I want. I'm ambitious and smart and and all the things that you need to be to kind of get the job done. But I was getting in my own damn way. And when I realized what was causing that it was a real, you know, game changer. It was a real changing point and a transformational moment where I said leaning into the bigger picture and how we connect with people on a more relational way and in a more abundant way, a more thriving way, opens up opportunity that you don't think you can open up. I had made a lot of money. I was really, really successful in sales. I was transactional seller and and doing transactional marketing, lots of offers, discounts, and all of those things grew up in retail, so it was pretty rough and tumble, lots of friction, lots of toxicity, all the kind of normal stuff that you that you kind of experience in high pressure, high performance sales environments, and that's what you know. And you act the way you know, and you think you're doing the best that you can and doing what's right. And then you get fired, like I did, and you're like, I'm crushing it here, and you're firing me. I don't understand, like, what's going on. So that was a big game changer for me. Today. I'm blessed. I run a nine figure agency, and we chase down all kinds of huge opportunities for clients to go from name recognize good brands, good operators, and turn them into brand names, into household names. And it makes a huge difference. And the biggest difference is in the operations that are already doing great. It's in the messaging that we wrap around it and to stop thinking of it so transactionally,
Pualena 03:40
That is so needed. And it's interesting because we think about sales, and we're like, I want to, it like it is a such a transactional mindset, of like, how do you get A into the hands of Person B, and then they give you their money, and that is just sale. And I think a lot of people think about like, I don't want to be salesy, and therefore I shall not sell my products or services, right, period. What can you share with us about shifting that mindset from feeling salesy or that being like a necessary evil in our business to being something that is enjoyable and worthwhile and also crucial to building an actual business that's profitable.
Ryan 04:29
Well, let's, let's, let's remove the word sale and all of the negativity that comes with the word sale, and replace it with the word persuasive and and everyone wants to be persuasive, right? Whether they're trying to convince that pretty girl to go on a date with them, or they're trying to convince their kid to do that thing, or they're trying to convince a class of students to buy into this math equation, or this, you know, this notion of God, or any other situation, we're always selling people something, but we don't have to call it sales. We just have to talk about creating an environment of value. And the real question ends up being, what do I actually bring to the table that is valuable? And this is a huge gap. This is a monstrous gap in this universe. People think that I bring value when I do the stuff that everyone does right? And that's a baseline of value that no one values, because everyone can do that. What people truly value are the things that come with sacrifice, with consequence, with self imposed consequence, when you don't do what's promised, that comes with suffering to some extent, right? Think about it this way. My favorite analogy around this is justice and mercy. We agree that both of these are equally true, right? They're valid, they're relevant, they're important. But it really depends on which side of the table you're sitting on, right? If you're sitting on the side of the table of the accused murderer, you want mercy. And, of course, if you're the victim's family, you want justice. But what happens when the victim's family murders the murderer? Tables are turned, right?
Pualena 06:10
You are a wizard, go on.
Ryan 06:12
And, and this is the fundamental definition between the two, the people that we are so taken aback by are the people who are the victims family that want mercy, right, and the and the accused murderer who wants to justice. Those are like, wow, that that's the hard thing to do. Well, what if we transferred that into our businesses, right? When the customer feels a certain way about a certain thing. Most of the time, a manager is going to make the decision of what's going to not hurt the business the most, which means you don't really stand for anything. These are like the stars in the sky and all the constellations they move around. The alternative to that is that they've already chosen. That thing was chosen before the situation happened, and I'm going to stick to my North Star. The North Star is the only star in the sky that doesn't move. Well, here's the thing about a North Star. If you're navigating the ocean of life, the North Star is the only thing that's telling you where to go. And if you have only one thing that tells you where to go, then you can go somewhere, and that makes you a leader, because followers don't follow people who aren't going somewhere. You want more followers? Pick your North Star.
Pualena 07:32
So what's an example of this in in your business?
Ryan 07:36
Well, you know, you look at Amazon, their North Star was, we'll return it, we'll refund you. And that changed the retail landscape forever. Broke a lot of retailers, yeah, right, that's a North Star. That's hard, especially since they were an online business. Today, it's infinitely easier than it was. You can go down to Whole Foods and drop off your thing that needs to be returned, right? Five years ago, 10 years ago, you couldn't, but they still did the hard thing, right? The expensive thing, the unnecessary thing, they lost money for 20 years, right? So we look at it and we go, what are the hard things in your business that you can do? What are the things that you stand for? What are the things you stand against? Do you know who else that appeals to besides customers?
Pualena 08:22
Your team, yeah.
Ryan 08:24
Right, your employees. They want to be a part of that. They want to be known for being the on the side of virtue, right? That's attractive. And that's branding in a nutshell, right there.
Pualena 08:40
Wow, I've never thought about it this way. It makes a lot of sense. We talked a little bit earlier. We're like, people are either gonna love me or hate me. I'm like, that's perfect. We want that.
Ryan 08:54
right? That is also the reality of branding, because you have to choose who to lose. The price of clarity is the potential of offending someone. And there's always somebody that's going to be offended when you connect with the people that you're trying to connect with. You don't need to target people in a lot of your marketing channels. You just need to say the things that would resonate with the people you want.
Pualena 09:15
Yeah, wow. Say that again for the people in the back, that is exactly yeah, and I think people are afraid to be in that position, because we don't want to disappoint people.
Ryan 09:28
Well, this is it. We want to be all things to all people. So we're trying to speak to everyone, and in turn, we're speaking to no one, right? Because that message doesn't belong to me. You're not talking to me anymore. You're talking to this ethereal group of people that don't exist in my world, right? And a lot of that world lives in survival mode, right? Pain happens in survival mode. People are trying to hang on to their thriving, you know, entity that you know, their their business, their marriage, their whatever, their job. And it's like, now I can't risk it. I want all of them. Okay, if you want all of them you already lost. You can have most of them. You can have some of them. You can turn a whole bunch of the people that want what you want to choose you, and you can have your disproportionate, unfair share of the pie that is appealed to what you sell, but you're not going to have everyone you're not going to get the whole pie. Stop trying to get get the whole pie. Just start trying to get a bigger piece of somebody else's pie.
Pualena 10:33
Yea, would you consider that niching?
Ryan 10:37
Well, I would. I mean, no no, because it's really define niche. I mean, niche can come in so many different ways, segmenting, niching, personas, archetypes. There's so many different kind of words that are floated out there that are fundamentally nonsense, and that's why people sometimes hate me. It's because they've been preaching this forever, and it really isn't that right? What it is is being better at communicating. It's being better at standing for something. You're not going to be better communicator until you choose what to stand for. That's, that's just kind of the basics, right? Like it's, it's if, until you have chosen who to lose, until you've chosen what you stand for in whatever it is that you're doing, you're never going to communicate better, because you're just saying what everyone's saying. And if you could just replace ABC with 123, company, then you're nothing. You're nothing to anyone. Will you get business? Yes, just enough to convince you to keep going. You want disproportionate success, you have to do something disproportionate.
Pualena 11:47
Tell us more about that communication style or system. Like, what? What would you tell someone who's like, Okay, I've been trying to please everybody because I'm living in this, this space where I'm just holding on to anybody that will listen to me. How might they begin and sort of navigate that shift?
Ryan 12:08
Yeah, they begin exactly where we started the conversation. They begin with, what do I stand for? What do I stand against? How does that fit into how the customer wants to buy I was just I spent a day with an HR company, and they service the trades. They're fantastic at what they do. And three of their packages, they have three main packages were perfectly aligned to how they run their business, completely unaligned with how people want to buy their stuff, and they absolutely capture who they deserve to capture, and they don't capture a whole bunch of people they deserve to capture. And by simply shifting how we package it, how we improve the packaging of what they sell, right not the wrapper around a plastic bottle, but basically that, right? How do we make it so astoundingly easy for the customer to go? Yeah, I want that one. That's how you shift from getting some people to a lot of people, and then you have to kind of consider who you have as a market, right? Some people aren't going to come to you until something external happens. Something has to break first before they can they can act upon it. These are things like hot water tanks and insurance and stuff, external stuff. And then there's stuff that has to happen on some products that are sold internally. Something internally has to break right, figuratively speaking, of course, but sometimes not, like mental…that doesn't have to be severe. But it's like, you know what? I want my ass to look fabulous. I'm going to go buy Lululemon pants, right? And that's the thing that broke, right? What is the thing that's that's tying this all together identity, right? I'm a person who, when they have no hot water, has hot water and goes and solves that problem. I'm a good consumer. I'm a good provider for my family and myself, and I'm going to get the thing done that needs to be done that needs to be done to fix that problem internally. I want my ass to look fabulous in Lululemon pants identity. I equally want something to be fixed that I can elevate my status within myself, within my internal self, within the individuals that I care about most, my in my nearest proximity, my wife, my kids, my co workers, my boss, whatever, or the tribes that I associate with, the community, the church, the business that I'm in. All of this orients to identity. And when we start to realize that all motivations. Internal or external, positive or negative are driven by identity. We can start baking a different cake that's going to be more persuasive, delicious to solving that problem. And the better my cakes, the better my identity within myself, my individuals that I love and and my my greater tribes that I care about.
Pualena 15:22
Hmm, this is fascinating.
Ryan 15:24
Isn’t it?
Pualena 15:25
We are…. it is!
Ryan 15:27
It is I love this stuff. It's so neat.
Pualena 15:29
It's so it's so juicy, and it's such a interesting puzzle to solve, because once this reframe right, it's like, I selling a service that is connected to someone's identity.
Ryan 15:45
Yep.
Pualena 15:46
Then we get to think about, how do we communicate, what we do to drive persuasion, not sales, based on the transformed identity that somebody wants.
Ryan 15:58
Right. And where does that start? It starts within yourself.
Pualena 16:05
Tell me more about that.
Ryan 16:06
Well, how do you identify, right? Like, what do you see yourself as? What do you see yourself providing this universe, even if it's one soul at a time, don't worry about trying to solve everyone's problem. Worry about one human being that you could make a difference in their lives. And just realize that there's more of those people that feel the same way. It's amazing when I sit in a room with somebody like Lisa Nichols, who has 200 people in a room, and she says, Does anyone else feel like Sally feels right now? And like 78 people raise their hand, and you're like, Oh, dang, I'm not alone here. That is your customers. You're solving all of their problems by solving Sally's problem, and you did that by identifying what you care about most. What did you intend when you built this business, when you solved this problem, when you spent time with this beyond what anyone else has spent time with it on right? That's where your true genius lies. That's what Albert Einstein says, who was a true genius. He says, It's not that I'm smarter than other people, he was, but he was humble, and at the end of the day, it's that I spent more time with it than other people, and that's why he was successful in that. And there's so many people in this planet, people that are listening to this podcast that are feeling the exact same way that I have something to contribute. How do I do it in a way that people actually receive what I'm trying to build? Well, start with what you intended, and then tell the world about that in a way that stands for something and sacrifices for others for their benefit. That's where true value lies. What's valuable is what you value, and your value is what you give up for the benefit of others, and they're willing to pay you their money, which is worth more than the thing that you have to give up, right when it's worth less than the thing that you have to give up, they're giving you the money because they're getting something more valuable. It's all about value, but you have to do something valuable first.
Pualena 18:07
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, because we often are in a space where we have solved a problem and we've gotten so good at solving that problem that we can then provide it as a service to others. And we're here because it was us. We were the ones. I mean, right? You were in sales positions. You had to figure this out. And so when we allow ourselves to connect back with that version of ourselves, essentially talking to ourselves.
Ryan 18:38
Right, right.
Pualena 18:39
Genius.
Ryan 18:40
We’ve often heard people say, be the you know, be the solution that you were looking for, be the leader that you wanted when or needed when you were when you were younger. This is the essence of everything that we're doing already. Just once you become aware of the ingredients you can make a better cake.
Pualena 18:56
Brilliant. So what are those ingredients that you guide people to start to collect and bake into this delicious cake.
Ryan 19:06
You know, I, I'm in the midst of writing that exact book. It's called Frictionless, yeah, this, this is, this is a book about a business owner who really just kind of struggled with getting in his own way. And he got in his own way, being a normal person, doing normal person stuff, his whole life, learning from the people that were around him who taught him those things, and those, those visceral feelings that he had about his previous experiences, is in his genetics and and ultimately, it boils down to a handful of things. There's, there's a dozen things that really do kind of get in your way when you're in business. A few of those things are what we talked about earlier, the motivations, I've monikered it “Harold the Motivation Penguin” for many obvious reasons we I inverted to Yin-Yang symbols and then overlap the positives to really highlight identity being kind of the linchpin to all these things, the internal problems, the external problems. And in every internal problem, there's positive and negative, and any external motivation, there's positive and negative, and all of those things influence us. And what we're really trying to do is just get that barometer right. We're trying to trying to get from negative feelings, right, the cortisol that we feel those bad feelings that pit of our stomachs up to a baseline of happy and then find happiness right when we're meeting and exceeding the KPI of happy, right? And then we can look at things like KPIs and how much, those are nonsense, and how we're chasing all these red herrings that make us feel like we're measuring stuff that matters when most of the time we're interpreting completely the wrong thing. And what we really need to pay more attention to are the actions and behaviors that achieve a KPI. And when we get KPIs right and measure the things that matter, well, then we don't have to be burdened by all the things that make us feel depressed because we didn't get, you know, enough likes off of our you know, YouTube video and whatever the case may be, then we look at, how do we compensate people? Well, do we compensate people in a way that that keeps the demons away and has them operating in the forefront of their prefrontal cortex, where they make the best decisions and have the fullest range of complex thinking, or do we have them always twisting about in survival mode where they make bad decisions and do deceptive and devious things to meet quota based on bad leads that we never took responsibility as leaders for to motivate our staff to do the thing that needs to be done, we just hold them to shitty statistics, right and bad data, right, with insufficient sample sizes and low quality customer base. Because we never actually said the thing that attracted the good customers. We just said transactional nonsense that brought in a warm body that's willing to take something for free if you gave it to them. So when we start to pull apart all of these things, all of these things are the things getting in way of my advertising being successful, right? Because I get paid money to write ads and to build strategies and grow companies, and I only get paid when the company grows. I don't get paid more when they stay stagnant, I get paid less when they go backwards. We bake that right into our business model, because we're not here to not succeed. But the reality is, is that marketing is far too important to be left up to the marketing department. If we don't have sales people who are bought into the vision. If we don't have customers who are willing to buy what the salespeople are selling, then we really don't have anything. We just have shiny words on a pretty font and a nice colored truck wrap or some other silly thing that get us a whole bunch of people to disappoint. And then eventually, it's not the people who don't know you that's a problem. It's the people who do that are choosing not to shop from you.
Pualena 23:02
Wow, that's a powerful statement.
Ryan 23:06
A sad reality of a lot of businesses. You know, there's choice out there.
Pualena 23:12
A lot of times it's not like, I think people will be listening to this and they're like, Oh my God, that's me. And we are well intended. We're just doing what we think we need to do.
Ryan 23:24
We are absolutely and I live that life of good intentions fully and all the way to the gates of hell, right? Because the road is paved with good intentions to the road to hell, right? And it's not because we're bad people, it's because we're not saying it right. We're not doing the things right. It doesn't matter what your intentions are, if, if they're misplaced, you're going to go in the wrong direction, right? And it was a huge moment for me in 2015 and that was just the first moment it took me two years to break through that, figure it out, and then start building a plan to help point others in the in the right direction, to help them get out of their own way, to reach beyond the length of their shadow, so that they could be tall enough to ride the next ride. And that's how you level up.
Pualena 24:14
So 2015 was that a business of yours that you were trying to grow? What was that?
Ryan 24:20
No, I was working for a company, and they had just asked me to take over the Australasia market. We did. We blew that thing up. It was a monster, hugely successful. Visas run out. I'm sitting there going, what am I going to do? How am I going to do this? And they, they, I'm basically back to zero. It's felt like I'd take 10 steps forward and 20 steps backwards, and I was just depressed. I just it was awful, and it just became a culmination of miserable life and realizing that I hadn't lived my fullest potential and was frustrated. Not, they, they're not bad people that I worked for. They they were good folks and and they just ended up creating an environment that was overdone and overplayed and and transactional, and it just didn't fit with me anymore. I had started learning about it, and by 2017 it was like time to do a thing. And and I did.
Pualena 25:19
And how did you decide that this was your path forward?
Ryan 25:23
I was invited by Roy H Williams to become a partner. I didn't even know really what partners were, but I had said, Hey, can we talk literally, three sentence email to him. I'd found his email, and he'd been teaching these classes that I going to for two years now, and he'd gotten to know me, and I'm like, man, I love what you're doing. I just see that there's like, this gap. There's this missing piece here. And the missing piece is that if you don't have a great employee experience, and you don't have it's you're not going to have a good buying experience. And if you don't have a good employee and buying experience, you're going to go flat. You're just like, your branding and marketing is only going to work so far before you before you hit a wall. And he's like, yeah, we see that all the time. Absolute, huge problem. And I thought I was going to do sales training, and then I spent time with some some real mentors of mine, real good sales trainers. Been in the business a long time. They said, Ryan, this is the wall that we continue to hit over and over and over again. And it's that you train these sales guys up to a point where they're completely competent, only to have the manager walk in behind you and disassemble it almost instantly, because they're not the ones following it. They haven't bought into the system of success. So I said, Well, I can't do that. Then I like, it's like that's just going to make me mad, and people don't like me when I'm….including myself. I'm a horrible person. So I said the people that we need to fix here are the people at the top, and those people have to be the champions of the people in the middle who are going to lead, the people in the at the front lines who are going to get the job done. And you start thinking about it the way modern military people think about it, with commander's intent and rules of engagement and flexibility over autocracy. You have to create this ability for people to be successful. We can't box them too far into a corner, because, like Mike Tyson says, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth, and that's exactly what's happening in sales the moment you step over a threshold, or a customer comes into your shop, or you get a phone call in or an email, you're dealing with the scenario at hand, and that's never going to go as scripted.
Pualena 27:36
I'm just thinking too like, what? What's the plan? When that happens? When it hits the fan, when you're kind of rocked, and you're like, these are all of the things that I thought that this company was built on, and somebody just came in and said that that's not working.
Ryan 27:52
Well. I mean, that's exciting in my world, because, because it's, it's not, a it's not a problem, it's an opportunity, right? It's a it's an opportunity to be better, to stand taller, to stand out, to be 600 feet above the competition. Because, let's face it, the majority of your competitors, probably all of them, haven't thought about that either, right? So good news, you stand for something, they don't. You stand out, you matter, you win, right? Does it happen overnight? No. Trust takes time. Brand is an element of trust, right? No different than me. You're you're going to trust me. The more you spend time with me and understand me, you're going to trust your spouse, your kids, your boss, your teachers, as you start to experience and align or disalign from them and choose whether or not they are your people or not, including yourself. Do you trust yourself, right? How kind are you? Are you treating yourself? All of these things matter, and when we just start to shine a light on it and go, you tell me you know what's going to happen? You start working on your traumas. That's what you're going to start doing. You're going to start figuring out the things that made you the person you are, and come into terms with that stuff. Because we're all living a life of where we came from and how we were built, both externally and biologically, and we lean into that and become better people. It's not going to make us weaker. It's not going to take that, that energy that got us to where we are today gone. It's going to improve things. And we just have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We have to have that courage. You can't have vulnerability without courage. Can't have courage without vulnerability,
Pualena 29:40
And it does not, entrepreneurship is not a space for somebody who does not have courage, right?
Ryan 29:48
And frankly, an ambition to win, and a kind of a directional mindset of trying to go somewhere. And the very first thing in the path to going somewhere is. Finding your North Star, right?
Pualena 30:04
This sounds like a win, win, win, win, win, win, and you just have to be willing to do the work and go on the journey. It sounds like a personal transformation, a transformation for your business, your profitability, the joy in which you serve your customers, because you then have people in your space that you actually like and have been looking for all this time.
Ryan 30:31
You do attract those birds of a feather. You do? You know the words you use are, what attract, what you get. If you're just transactional as heck, you're gonna get a whole bunch of transactional people. They're looking for magic bullets and snake oil and all the silly stuff that we deal with. You're starting to see course creators suffer significantly from that fatigue that that companies are putting out there and and course oriented companies like Masterclass and Coursa and whatnot eating their breakfast because they're hitting this this volume play on small, little costs. If we're going to do something of value, understand that the quicker it works, the quicker it's going to stop working right. Those are transactional things. Those are tactical things that satisfy the dopamine of your customer. You absolutely have to get them in, but if you want durability in a customer, you have to switch from dopamine to oxytocin. You have to do things that have them love you, bond with you, get loyal with you. You have to deliver beyond what they expected for them to continue to buy in for the second, third, fourth, fifth purchase, to keep leaning in and buying more. That's where the real money is. Everything that you do up front, if you're trying to build your business off of the one thing that you sell that's the loss leader, effectively, quick, short term, tactical thing that gets them in the door. You've already lost. You're just going to spin your wheels doing a whole bunch of really small stuff your whole life. You have to lean in and create relational stuff that's going to take you to the next level.
Pualena 32:20
Wow. This is huge. So question for you, is there ever an appropriate time to like when you're when you're talking to a cold audience and you're looking for that hook? You know, once they get into your ecosystem, you've got that, you've got everything that they're looking for, they can learn to trust you, but upon entry, do you do you play on one or two hits of dopamine until you can get them in? What does that look like?
Ryan 32:53
There’s no measurable amount of dopamine. People are addicted to dopamine. Do you know that every addiction on the planet is not the addiction itself, but dopamine, right? So everything from adrenaline junkies, which is dopamine, to drugs and everything else in between, is dopamine. So the addiction is dopamine. It's not anything else, and it's not to diminish the vehicle or mechanism that gets it in that has to be addressed, but it is the dopamine, the actual chemical that we're having to deal with. So yes, is dopamine important? Yes, it's the thing that gets people going and gets them in once they're in, the way to get oxytocin into their bloodstream is to do something that you didn't promise. So a lot of people will completely give away everything that they're going to do just to get the person to step into the space.
Pualena 33:48
Oh, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Go on.
Ryan 33:52
Forgetting, forgetting that operationally, you need to deliver 20, 25% of things that they didn't anticipate that they get for free and more of your time, your money, your effort, something of value, monetarily or or through transformation. And when you do that, you are playing chess, not checkers. And the oxytocin is what leads them to product B, C, D, E.
Pualena 34:23
Wow. This reminds me of a story I heard about a trust bank where, like, if you are able to deliver on things, as you said, unpromised in the beginning, and continue to build that trust through consistency and delivery of quality and just being a good person and helping them to achieve the goals that they're looking to achieve and more that trust bank gets more and more full, and they're more and more likely to stay, to come back, to refer their friends.
Ryan 34:56
So what we're talking about is loyalty. I like to call it the “Loyalty Bank.” It's based off of Jim Camp's work. Jim Camp is a master negotiator, and really orients his strategy around getting people oriented to the no, not the yes, because a yes is a trap and a no is a is a safe place, which Chris Voss has popularized in more recent times with Never Split the Difference. So what we're talking about here is, how do I get people to feel loyal? That's getting oxytocin. If I'm going to get them to feel loyal, then one of the things that we do with one of our companies is they pay $120 to become a member, right? We then give them a $120 loyalty credit towards a big purchase, right? And that adds every year, they get another $120 so every time they give us $120 they get $120 in their bank. And this is what I like to call the Loyalty Bank, because after three years, if we can hold that customer, which is the average attrition time for the memberships in that space, they've got $360 they're walking away from. And $360 is hard to walk away from. And we also reward them more stuff if we can have them refer to us. We don't have a public referral program in that company. We're not going to tell them that they're going to get $200 for every customer they refer like you hear an awful lot in the car business or whatever. Instead, what we're going to do is what Daniel Pink calls “Now That Rewards.” So if you look at Daniel Pink's book, it's called Drive. He's a brilliant researcher and author. He talks about if, if we create an if-then reward, if you buy this, then you get that, then what you're going to get is actually mediocre productivity result. This is what we talk around, spiffing, getting, getting. Basically, you do this thing, I'll give you 25 bucks. If it's anything more than the most rudimentary basic thing in the whole wide world. You're not going to actually improve productivity. You're typically going to reduce it with anything that requires any level of complexity or complex thought. Instead, if I said the same person nothing, and they did the thing and then I gave them $100 or I sent a gift basket out just thanking them. Instead of giving them dopamine, I have given them oxytocin. If I want loyal people to refer me, ask for the referrals at the peak of their emotion, at the peak of their oxytocin, at the peak of them loving you for what you're doing for them, ask for the referral in that moment, and if you even get one referral that turns over, and you can pay on that referral, pay them with a surprise. The surprise is going to activate oxytocin, which is going to deepen loyalty. Again.
Pualena 37:55
I love this. Do you have any thoughts around and this is getting like real in the weeds, and it might not matter, what’s a cool gift?
Ryan 38:04
That’s where I live, right in the weeds.
Pualena 38:07
I love gift giving, gift receiving. It's totally my love language. And we're always talking about, you know, what could we gift to our clients? What could we gift to the people that refer us? What are your thoughts on just, you know, pay paling somebody a couple 100 bucks versus sending a physical gift that is probably actually worth less, but received in a different way?
Ryan 38:33
Yeah, so PayPal creates a disassociation. But when you're across the world, that's probably the most practical thing. PayPaling somebody, or Venmo, or whatever. Doing it unexpectedly is the key. The surprise is, is the is the chemical activator. So doing it without expectation, without promise, without offer, that's where you have the real win, the chemical win, the biological win here, of loyalty. The other thing that we do with a company, they install air conditioners, and when they install an air conditioner, it's like a $15,000 purchase. It's a lot of money, right? If that goes really, really well and there's not these outrages over expenditures, then the company will then take a check for some vaguely random amount, $163.18 handwritten by the guy who did the quality control or the sale, and they bring that, that retro check to the customer and just say, Hey, listen, we didn't, we didn't spend all the money that we need to spend just in contingencies and stuff like that. And we're just going to give you this check for $163.18 because we didn't spend all the money. This is yours and oxytocin, right? When you're looking for ways, and that's real hard for a company to do. There's like. You want me to give money that I just fully earned? And it is like in my bank account back to what? Yes, yes, I do, because we're building friends for life here.
Pualena 40:09
Yeah, does that? Does that feel a little out of integrity, though, like if it's not actually money that you save, then it's just this random check?
Ryan 40:18
By all happenstance, it actually is money that they saved. It is, it was baked into the operational equation, and not everyone gets it. It is, it is as random as the situation at hand, because sometimes you crack open a wall and all of a sudden you're spending an extra $3,000 fixing a problem that's not yours to solve, but you have to solve it, and you eat that, and that's just part of business. But in those instances where they can give back, they absolutely do give back.
Pualena 40:48
Oh, I see interesting. I like that.
Ryan 40:51
Yeah, so and every company who's doing good work is doing that right there, there's always a contingency there. That's just like the what if contingency, well, what if we just gave that back? If there was no contingency right?
Pualena 41:05
You’re getting your security deposit returned.
Ryan 41:09
Right, and because they were never promised that it just feels good, right? And that's really the question of sales and persuasion. The only difference between manipulation and persuasion is the is the negativity and positivity that people have assigned to those words. Manipulation by rights is no more evil than persuasion. It's just how people perceive it. But when you look at the intention of those words, my definition to speak into what people already believe to be true is that manipulation is for your benefit as the business owner or the individual, and persuasion is for the benefit of others. So if you're giving them $163.18 back, are you manipulating them, or are you just being more persuasive to make a friend for the long run, because they just got $163.18 back for no reason.
Pualena 42:00
Right? Right? Yeah, I really, really like this reframe. We're persuaded all day long.
Ryan 42:10
All day, every day, a billion times a day, totally, sometimes well and sometimes not so much, right?
Pualena 42:17
You know the grocery store and you're picking between two jars of pasta sauce, whoever has the marketing that and here, I think this kind of, like, brings it all home. It doesn't matter whose is prettier. It matters who's resonates with you as a person, if you if you prefer organic food, and you know, whole ingredients and no preservatives, and this person prefers something that can stay in their pantry for three years. You're two different consumers who are going to make two different decisions, and if you are, pasta sauce number three, that's trying to please both consumers, neither one will buy you.
Ryan 42:58
Right, right.
Pualena 42:59
So, it's not really about sales at all. It's about connecting with the value of your consumer. Wow.
Ryan 43:09
Understanding that the communication channel in the passive sauce equation, I would say it's the exact same as the wine industry. You're making a decision off of the color of the bottle, the shape of the bottle, the weight of the bottle, the label that was put on it, and whether or not you have previous experience with it? Well, if you think of your business or the product you sell as the bottle of wine, do you want to be the $14.99 wine that a million people will buy nobody will buy, or the $80 bottle of wine that people love to buy? Right? And and it's a choice you have to make. And all of those are fine, but you can, you can have a cheap bottle of wine that no one buys because it's gross, right? You can have a $14.99 bottle of wine that everyone loves for whatever reason they love it, right? It's jammy and, and then you can be the $80. But no one friggin knows what's in the $80 bottle of wine unless they've had it before. They're buying it because of identity, I'm an $80 bottle of wine buying guy, or I'm the practical $14.99 This is perfectly good table wine, and it's going to do the job I needed to do, which is to make the back parts of my eyes feel a little number for a moment right after about three glasses. So I'm gonna get two of these, because the numbness comes on faster when you can put, you know, it in a big gulp cup.
Pualena 44:35
Right? Awesome. This has been so eye opening, incredibly informative. I think people are gonna love this. And to your point, if you were wondering if they were gonna love you or hate you, I'm pretty sure they're going to feel a little bit more oxytocin after this episode.
Ryan 44:54
Maybe, let's look for the complaints. Let's maybe we get a Reddit started about how much of an adorable person I am.
Pualena 45:02
It will have crickets, I'm sure. Yeah, share with us a little bit about your services, your business, and how people can learn more about you and connect with you.
Ryan 45:12
I’m really blessed to be surrounded by 83 partners now at the Wizard of Ads, we also have a not for profit school in Austin, Texas called Wizard Academy, and I match make clients in with the right teams. Sometimes I'm on those teams. Sometimes I'm not, depending on the situation and what I can actually bring for value to the teams. A lot of the time, I'm a mentor in those environments for both the client and the and the partners who are on the on the on the on the case, as it were, and we do three big things. We figure out what the strategy is, business strategy, and how that ties into how we're going to market it, what we have for unleveraged and leveraged assets, and how we can put those to use, what your values are, and how we can highlight those. And if you don't have values, to start doing what I've done today, which is start having you being encouraged to start looking back at your original commander's intent and and how that and how that has translated into where you are in your business today, be it a new business or something that's established. And those are the consulting side of the fence, really. This is the advisory, it's the counseling in a lot of cases, and then we're tying that into how we're going to write that creatively, because the words we use we agonize over, and we have very, very specific strategy on how we do that, so that your ads don't sound like ads, because if they sound like ads, you've already lost, right? But we have to follow certain rules to make it make sense for the customer to be able to reconcile that thing so that more people aren't knocking on your door in whatever way they do. And then, and then we've, over the last 35 years, had the ability to buy just an astounding amount of mass media. So we say, instead of trying to get other people to buy your mass media for you, we're going to negotiate your mass media for you under our agency brand, which gives you national rates. So you're going to get astoundingly good deals as a local business if you end up needing mass media, or if you're using mass media currently and want a better deal. So we we more than pay for ourselves just in that but more importantly, we put the words together that are going to execute on the strategy that matters. This could then get you noticed and keep you noticed, and then help you start thinking about your business in a different way to, you know, forge forward and actually grow the business and get out of your own way and level up the way that you've been trying to whether you're a sub million dollar company, you're $100 million company, we've worked with clients to this day that exceed a billion and who are under a million.
Pualena 47:47
Incredible. And how can people find you? How can they learn more? Get in touch with you, all the things.
Ryan 47:53
Yeah, my websites, ryanchute.com, and that has the conduit to all the things that I talk about, think about and, and, and work on and my socials are @wizardryanchute, and you can find me pretty much anywhere.
Pualena 48:07
Phenomenal. You have a lot of great content out in the world right now. So I hope anybody listening that's interested go just search for Ryan, listen to some of his interviews. You were on the Lisa Nichols show, right?
Ryan 48:20
I was, yeah, Lisa Nichols and I have actually become friends. I talked to her today for an hour. Yeah.
Pualena 48:25
Amazing. She's awesome. I was super stoked to see that great interview. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for just helping people to reframe this space. It feels very uncomfortable, kind of scary.
Ryan 48:38
Sometimes. Yeah.
Pualena 28:39
Yeah. It's just a joyful, useful tool to grow your business.
Ryan 48:46
And it comes from a place of knowing. I live that way, and I'm so excited to be able to share that with people, to let them know that there is an opportunity, that universe that you wondered about. It's real, and you can have it.
Pualena 48:59
Ryan, thank you so much for being here. I look forward to staying in touch. Thank you.