Magic, Marketing, and Inside-Out Growth | Stories With Traction Podcast

In this episode of Stories With Traction, Matt Zaun sits down with marketing advisor Tim Parkin to unpack what magicians and great marketers have in common: the ability to capture attention, control focus, and follow a repeatable process to create results.

Tim shares how a childhood love of magic and an early career in software development led him to a process-driven marketing approach that most leaders never use. They dive into why so many executives cling to “safe” tactics, how AI is quietly homogenizing brands, and why the fastest growth almost always comes from the inside out rather than from chasing the next shiny tactic.

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors

 

Matt Zaun 

Tim, welcome to Stories of Traction podcast.

 

Tim Parkin

Matt, thank you so much for having me. I am super excited to dive in and explore and see where this goes.

 

Matt Zaun 

Likewise. Thanks for your time. Really appreciate it. First question I have for you is when you're at a party or a networking event and someone asks you, what do you do?

What is your response to that question?

 

Tim Parkin 

That is the best question I've ever been asked. It's a surprising answer because it has nothing to do with what I actually do.

When people ask me that, I pull out a deck of cards because when I was seven or eight years old, I was in a magic club and I always dreamed of becoming a professional magician.

And I pursued that pretty seriously. And to this day, I have friends who are... Oh, it's the best thing in the world, Matt, because as you said, one, it's so distinct, right?

It's so surprising. No one expects that. And if you say, hey, would you like to see something or would you like to see a trick?

No one's going to say no. And if they do, they're not the type of person you want to talk to anyways, let me be honest here.

And so it's so interesting for people and they lean in and they call other people over and you become this object of interest.

You become someone who people want to pay attention to. And in an attention-starved world, that's so important. And what's also so cool about this, Matt, is that I have people I've done magic for, friends who I haven't seen in 20 years.

And they'll comment on my LinkedIn, I haven't heard from them in 20 years. And they'll say, I still remember the trick you showed me.

I mean, that's the power of a story and of a memory of an experience that you give people. And it makes you memorable, makes you interesting.

And people want to be around people who are interesting. And I think everybody should learn some type of little silly trick.

If it's not a professional level card trick, you can learn some type of magic trick to entertain people.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah. Another thing that I like about that. is it's not over the top. It's not crazy. A lot of people get concerned about when they start being inauthentic or they start trying too hard.

But it seems simple but powerful. Simple but powerful. So talk to me a little bit about the magic piece.

So you said you were doing a lot of magic. What did you learn as it pertains to magic and being a magician that connects to what you do in marketing today?

 

Tim Parkin 

Yeah. Well, when I went to college, I didn't want to go to school. I dropped out of high school or graduated early rather.

And then my parents made me go to college and made me go to a second college. So I had a lot of college experience.

I didn't want to be in school. I described myself as an introverted introvert. And so I don't get energy from being around groups of people.

But college, you're just thrown into a swarm, a sea of people. And as this introverted personality, I realized magic was my saving grace.

It was my weapon of choice that I could have 50, 60 people surrounding me. Captivated, watching a magic trick, and I could put on this different persona.

I could become someone else. I was the magician, the entertainer, not, you know, Tim, the introverted person. And I think this is so important for all of us that in business and life and personal situations, professional situations, sometimes you need to put on a mask and be someone else.

Sometimes you need to have that hard conversation. And for me, magic helped me do that in a way that was safe.

But more importantly, to your point, I went from a career of trying to do magic to software development. And at 10 years old, I learned how to program.

I built websites, I built apps, I did a lot of programming. And that then eventually led me to marketing, because I would develop all these applications and software for companies, but they wouldn't have customers.

And so eventually, I'd have to find a new client, you know, and build something and they wouldn't have customers.

I said, let me solve this customer problem. Let me figure this out. And that got me into marketing. And now Matt, looking back, it's so fascinating to say, well, magic is the art of getting attention and keeping it and telling a story and getting people to pay attention to the right things and not attention to the wrong things.

And coding and software is. How does it work? And now today, marketing and technology are synonymous. You can't have marketing without technology.

And you can't have marketing without some form of magic and attention and storytelling and capturing people's interests. So magic and programming have led me to marketing, which I think really combines all my passions together and all my skill sets from the past.

And it's just such a fun thing that I get to do and teach and coach marketers today.

 

Matt Zaun 

So you mentioned something I do want to dig into a little bit. You said you, I guess, were, or maybe you still are, but an introverted introvert, which is wild that you're even on a podcast today.

Wild that you do any kind of speaking at all, just because of, you know, getting out in front of people.

And wild that you learned and adapted and kind of created this almost character, if you will, that was focused on the magic piece.

And in a lot of the sessions and a lot of my coaching that I do, I do get asked questions on how I became a speaker, right?

Because my story is I was... Horrible at communication for quite some time and then ended up getting into politics where I needed to be connecting with audiences and then transitioning into what I do today, which I'm a professional speaker.

I travel all over doing keynotes and workshops. And one of the things that I did that is not a response that people like is, but it's just true, is I gamified embarrassment.

Okay, so this is really important for me. So what I did, and I kid you not, I'm actually looking at a whiteboard right now in my office.

I whiteboarded the gamification of embarrassment where I set a goal that every single week I was going to figure out a way to embarrass myself.

And this could be – I can give you all kinds of examples on what I did to do this because the idea was why take five to seven years to be a great speaker?

That's typically how long it takes is a five to seven-year journey when I can speed this up. What if we could do this in one or two years?

So constant embarrassment and it just kind of stretched. could could this one one two Thank you. This muscle in me where I would go into environments, become incredibly embarrassed, and then the next day I was in front of business leaders or political leaders, and it was a cakewalk.

It wasn't near as embarrassing as what I went through the day before, right? So I made this goal of it.

But I like your approach on becoming a character, and there's a lot of people that do this. So for anyone listening that wants to know a little bit more about that, let's say that they've struggled themselves and being captivating or connecting to an audience, what specific advice would you give them on how they can create a character?

 

Tim Parkin 

Where do they even go? Where would they start on figuring out how to play the part, if you will?

Yeah, Matt, love this idea of becoming rejection-proof, and Jai Jang has a great TED Talk on this, and he did 100 Days of Rejection, and he wrote a book called Rejection Proof, which is definitely exactly what you described.

And I think that's a good place to start is we need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. And so I've flown a lot in my life, but I hate flying, and I hate flying because I...

have extreme anxiety about flying. I'm afraid of heights. I don't like being trapped places. And I have fears of the plane.

I don't trust planes. But I've realized after doing this enough that you have to get comfortable in the uncomfortable.

And for me, flying is very uncomfortable. But yet you have to get comfortable with it. And I see life, whether it's business or personal, as a flight.

And there's turbulence, right? We hit unexpected things and things happen. And you have to get comfortable with it. And I love what you described because I think the more we push ourselves, the easier it gets.

And my mentor used to say, I've been thrown out of worse rooms than this. And that never made sense to me until later in life when you realize, yeah, I've been embarrassed before.

I've been thrown out. I've been insulted. People said I didn't do a good job. So what? You know, you move on.

You do better. You learn from it. And I think that the sooner we can learn that, the better. The other thing I'd mention is, I believe it's Todd Herman wrote a book called The Alter Ego.

And he helped Kobe become the Black Mamba. And that was his personality on the court. And if you've ever seen Kobe Bryant on the court, he's just vicious, absolute stone cold.

And it's a And it's because he can become this alter ego. He can become this version of himself when performance is necessary.

And for me, it was more of survival. sounds like for you perhaps as well, know, that'll never happen again.

And for me, it was, well, I'm here. I got to survive somehow, you know, and you find it out of necessity, I think.

So it might look different for different people. But I think part of it also is this idea that we think that the status quo and we need to fit in.

And doing magic is an unconventional thing to do. Like people don't expect it. And I could have said to myself, don't put them, put away the cards, don't bring them.

That's a weird thing to do. People think you're a weirdo. And instead, I said, whatever, I'm going to do magic, because that's what I know.

And I think for all of us, we have to find the thing you know, find the thing that you're passionate about, that you're comfortable with, and just own it, be yourself, be authentic.

That's really what this is all about.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah. I want to speak to the comfortable with the uncomfortable, you know, simple but powerful concept for sure. And when I'm thinking of particularly C-suite executives...

Because, you know, obviously to get to that level, there were multiple events, multiple decisions that needed to be made that would put them in an uncomfortable position.

Absolutely. But then when we talk about marketing, it is interesting that a lot of leaders want to play it safe, right?

And you and I both know that when we play it safe, that's not necessarily captivating. It doesn't really break through the noise, especially in today's world of an abundance of noise, especially with AI and everything else coming out.

So what do you do from like just to advise a leader or encourage, motivate, whatever you want to say, someone that is very reserved as it pertains to marketing?

What do you do to give them permission to get uncomfortable so their brand can break through the noise with different marketing channels?

 

Tim Parkin 

Yeah, to any leader listening, I would ask this one simple question, which is, has what you've been doing... been working?

Because I can guarantee it probably hasn't. And most of us get comfortable with what we're doing. We do the same thing all the time.

You've heard the story of, you know, the woman makes the meat and she cuts off the sides of it to put it in the oven.

And they say, why do you cut off the sides? I don't know. Let me ask my mom. That's how I learned.

She says, I don't know. Let me ask your grandmother. Oh, well, the oven wasn't big enough. That's why we cut off the sides of the roast.

So that's most businesses is we just do the stuff we've been doing because we think that's what we should be doing.

And what we have to do in life and marketing in particular is to throw out the playbook. I mean, everything has changed today in society, in the economy, in marketing, certainly without AI.

And we are starving for attention and we're starving for creativity and new ideas. And marketing is more about standing out than anything else.

That if you don't get noticed, the game is over. If people don't want to pay attention to you, you've already lost.

And so many businesses when it comes to marketing are just dialing it in. You know, they're posting a couple of blog posts.

They're sending out some emails and maybe making a video, send some press releases. That's not marketing. Marketing is being noticeable.

Seth Goodwin would say marketing is being remarkable, being worth making a remark about. And if you look at the companies that do this and do it well, they're exceptional.

They're distinct. They're different. I'll take a couple of my favorites, but Rick Steves tours. I've been on several Rick Steves tours, and we've used his books.

If you don't know Rick Steves, look him up. He's a fascinating guy, but he helps people travel to Europe, what he calls through the back door.

It's the center of town. It's the little places that you wouldn't expect. It's amazing. And he has a cult following, mostly of the older generation, people who have the time and money to travel.

But it's an amazing business. It's an amazing place. And if you want to travel to Europe in that way, he's the only guy to do it.

That's standing out, that's being distinct. Baked by Melissa, another great company I love, they make little mini cupcakes and they ship them all across the country.

It makes a great gift. It makes a great treat for yourself. That's a great way to celebrate, but it's a distinct, unique.

Are they doing something interesting and different, and they're owning their lane? And you could say and argue, it's kind of like magic, right?

I owned the thing I had and did that, and it's distinct and unique. You have to find that in marketing.

We have such a challenge now of companies who, as you said, just want to be comfortable. And comfortable doesn't get you success.

And my mentor told me, and I believe it, the only way to coast is downhill. And that's what most companies are doing, is they're coasting, and you're just going to go downhill.

No, it's time to throw out the playbook, to think creatively, and to find your story and tell it, and to do so in a way that's memorable, that's distinct, that's unique, and that's powerful and meaningful to people.

 

Matt Zaun 

So I do want to touch on AI a little bit and kind of see where this goes. Because I believe, and this is kind of what I've experienced talking with different leaders, that when AI started to become popular in the last few years, people turned to AI almost as a crutch.

For their marketing, right? Because now they can go on, there's all kinds of AS.

 

Tim Parkin 

Big problem. And I'm somewhat guilty of this. In my former life, I did software. And back 20 years ago, we developed AI for games.

I was in game design, simulation, military simulation. And I know how some of the AI works. And really, it's just pattern matching.

It's not thinking. And the more stuff we feed it, we think the better. But all we're getting is the homogenization, the average of what we've given it.

It doesn't have breakout ideas. It doesn't have new ideas. And it's been shown that it's trained to congratulate you, to be flattering to you, because it wants your usage, your adoption.

And as much as I am a technologist at heart, I've tried to step away from all this, because I think there's so many dangers of AI from a behavioral perspective.

But also from a marketing perspective, as you said, a lot of leaders think, well, great, we can now be way more efficient.

We can pump out tons of content, and we can have all of our marketing there. Sure, that's true. From a volume perspective, absolutely.

AI will do everything that you want to do at scale. But if you don't have a point of view, if you don't have something worth saying, then saying you want

Or if it isn't going to help you. And this comes back to positioning, which is the classic of marketing.

Al Rees wrote the book with Jack Trout, Positioning, A Battle for Your Mind. And it talks about how, what is your position in the field?

How do you stand out from the competition? What do you have to offer? You know, I run the advisory board, which is the number one coaching group for marketing directors.

I only help marketing directors. And it's the only coaching group for marketing directors. So if you're a marketing director, you need to come to me, I can help you.

And if you're not, don't pay attention to me. And that's fine. But that's my lane. That's what I own.

That's my position. And it makes my message that much more powerful. But you have to have unique thoughts, unique ideas, and intellectual property.

If you don't, you're just having AI regurgitate stuff for you. And guess what? Your competitor can do the same thing.

And you're going to, it's the downward spiral of competing on price, competing on the same ideas. You have to be distinct.

You have to be different.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah, I appreciate you mentioned that. And one of the things that happened very recent in my life that was just a huge wake-up call for me.

And I've used AI. And I've And multiple ways that's been to my benefit, right? Just different things in life.

Feeding it all kinds of different things for my health journey, right? I'm on a current health and fitness journey right now.

And just feeding it different things on kicking back very specific recipes to me, what I would enjoy, what's really good for my health.

But one of the dangers was the exercise routine that it gave to me. And I was doing training. I set up a little bit of a home gym down in my basement, and I was doing training, and I was doing weight-burning exercises, lifts, if you will, three times a week.

And then I'm like, you know what? I need a little bit more. So I reached out to a personal trainer, and this one particular trainer is just an absolute expert in what he does.

I've done this for decades, and I went and I did an assessment with him. And he's like, everything you're doing has been wrong.

Your form's off. The kind of list that you've been doing, I would never recommend that you do because here's what we need to focus on.

So I had pain in my left hip and I had pain in my lower back. And he said, all these different things that you want to do, you are at least six months away from doing them.

Here's what we need to focus on. And he built a very customized exercise regimen for me that AI would have never kicked back to me.

And now I've been doing that for months now. And it's been this huge wake-up call. I've been lifting for quite some time.

I was doing it wrong. I was doing the wrong exercises. It wasn't actually serving my needs. It wasn't actually getting me to the ultimate goal that I want.

And I think it's interesting because I do think this relates to marketing is you'll have a leader and they have a specific goal in their mind.

They want X. And they come to you and you may say, you know what? I understand what you want, but what you're doing actually doesn't speak to your target market.

It actually doesn't. It's not. It's doing what you want. It's actually doing a great injustice for you. It's going to hinder your ability to reach your goal.

So I want you to speak to that a little bit because one of the things that I see quite often, and I'm very big on storytelling.

I was mentioning to you, your big focus of what I do is strategic storytelling, keyword strategic, right? Intentional storytelling that has a point.

And there are a lot of leaders that they can get good at stories, but they're sharing the wrong stories.

So I want you to speak to just from a marketing perspective, sharing the right stories to someone's target audience and the good and the bad with that.

 

Tim Parkin

Yeah. Stories are so important. And you have to know, as you said, the right story to tell at the right time and the right story to tell the right person.

And in marketing, I call this the mirror method. What people really want to see, what they need to see is you hold up a mirror and you show them themselves.

You know, we're very egotistical. Completely backwards. We talk about ourselves. We talk about the company and the product and the service and the benefits and the features.

And no one cares. All I care about is this simple question that everyone always forgets. What's in it for me?

What's the outcome that I want? You know, I love Zig Ziglar. And he always had a quote where he said, you can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want first.

And this is a rule that's been lost in marketing. People want what they want. They don't want what they need.

And there's a gap here. There's parallel lines. The line at the top is want, what they want. And the line at the bottom is what they need.

And those are parallel. They do not intersect. Which means your job as a company, as a leader, as a marketer, is to connect those.

How do we give people what they want so we can have a conversation with them and show them what they actually need?

And I think about this like going to the doctor. You go to the doctor, you say, hey, doc, my arm hurts.

And then they do a bunch of diagnosis and they say, it's not actually your arm. You know, it's your muscles or it's this exercise.

You it's your, you know, this.

 

Matt Zaun 

Right?

 

Tim Parkin 

Like, wow, that's a decent amount of weight.

 

Matt Zaun 

But what's interesting is in order for me to do that, it's going to be pretty boring. Right? So I'm going to have to track my eating regularly.

I'm going to have to have movement, you know, a certain amount of steps every single day. I'm going to need to work out two to three times a week with now I'm understanding workout routines that I don't think are the most exciting thing in the world.

Right? Right? So my trainer saying, no, like you told me you wanted this. Here's what we need to do in order to do that.

What you had said about that one and need doesn't intersect, like knows what I want. But now I need to do different things that I need to do to get these different wants.

So I want to touch on this because often today, a lot of people see these incredibly flashy marketing campaigns, and there's some pizzazz.

And there's, there's a lot of pride, if you will, on some really interesting, creative, powerful marketing will, on campaigns.

From a result perspective, what do you typically say to leaders that they want immediate results, right? They just want to do something and then get X amount of leads, or they want to do something and they want to see in real time it leads to more business.

What kind of coaching do you give someone from a results perspective on here's what they should expect from a timeline?

 

Tim Parkin 

This is a brilliant question, Matt, because everybody gets this wrong. And just today, I sent a newsletter out about this.

So the funnel, the marketing funnel, we've all heard of it. has these different layers. If you think about a funnel, there's the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and the bottom of funnel.

Some very complicated names here. But the idea is we fill up the funnel, we push people through it, right?

We get them to the bottom and they give us money. And that's how we think about marketing. If you think about a series of concentric circles, the layers of an onion from the outside in, what we do is we talk to people on social media.

Maybe we post on social media, run some ads on social media. The people come to our website, they're on our website.

Maybe we offer them something to opt into our email list. They get on our email list. We them emails, then we invite them to a call, we get them on a call, we talk to them, we give them a proposal or a quote, and then hopefully they do business with us.

Those are all the stages of the funnel. And what marketers love to do, what CEOs and leaders like to do, is we push people from the outside in.

We want to get them down the funnel into these layers deeper and deeper and deeper. And the problem is, that's the worst way to do marketing.

It's the slowest, it's the most expensive, it's the hardest, and it doesn't really work that well. There's so many points of failure.

The opposite is to go inside out. And this is easier, faster, cheaper, works better, and requires you to do less.

And this is where we start in my coaching group. Is we say, look, you've already got customers, right? Go to your customers and say, hey, are you having fun?

Are you enjoying this? Are getting results? Awesome. How about we work together more? How about we do more services?

How about we add stuff? How about continue our contract? No? Okay, how about you give us referrals then? You had a great experience.

Who do you know who you want to bring in? Let's reward both people. Let's compensate both people. Let's get some referrals.

That is the number one thing you can do today. And I guarantee every leader listening to this does not have...

have a referral program in place is not asking for referrals. I know this because I have an annual conference that I host, and I ask a room of marketers, who's doing referrals?

Raise your hand. And you know what, Matt? Zero people. And you know the worst part? Myself included. I don't even do it.

That's how I know people aren't doing it. And this is where we need to begin. We need to start from the inside and work our way outside.

That's just your current customers. Then we can go to the people you've already talked to. You've talked to people who you've given a quote to, who you didn't follow up with.

Or maybe now they said no, but it's been six months. Can we go revisit those people? Maybe they worked at new companies.

That's the fastest way to get business and leads and opportunity today is to work inside out. And no company does this.

No marketer does this. And I don't know why. Instead, we love the vanity metrics. We love to waste our time, to stress out, to work long nights, to waste our budgets, doing things that don't work, hoping because that's what marketing is supposed to look like, rather than just doing it inside out.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. Man, there's a lot that people can do with referral programs, although I'm thinking of it, based on what you're saying.

So I'm guessing that would work better for services than products.

 

Tim Parkin 

Yeah, for products, you can get testimonials, or you can get video testimonials, which are great for products, show the product, show the work.

mean, now you can show the case. There's tons of use cases here. I mean, most of my clients are B2B marketing directors.

So yes, it's more services, SaaS, software. But if it's products like Ecom or D2C, certainly it works. Get people to take a picture or a video, write a testimonial.

Again, you can compensate them for that. You can enter them a giveaway. You can give them swag or product.

You can feature them on your website, on your social media. There's lots of ways to incentivize people. But starting inside out is the number one easiest, most enjoyable, most effective, cheapest way to have results.

And to your point, your question was, how fast can we get results? Well, what we do is when you join our group and we coach you, we say, here's one email that we call the instant yes email.

It's a three-sentence email that we send that gets people to say yes by giving them something that they want so we can have a conversation with them.

And we send this email out and everybody. He sends it out, starts getting leads immediately. Some people the same day, some people the next day, some people the same week, but we get leads fast because that's what we do is we do this inside out approach to marketing.

Why waste time doing stuff that's going to take forever and not work?

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. I appreciate you sharing that. I would challenge everyone listening to think about that, right? There is a referral program that we can implement for multiple businesses.

So I think that that'd be an interesting exercise and an interesting challenge too. I would challenge everyone listening to set a timeline with this, set a point on the calendar where you can start implementing or for a program.

I think if you add some type of deadline, I think that people would be, from a motivation perspective, they'd be more inclined to get something out.

So I really appreciate you mentioning that.

 

Tim Parkin

There's a lot of wisdom in that. Yeah, Matt, I'll push that one further because I think it's a great point you made here that right now, after this podcast is over, go and email two or three people who are your current clients, just a quick email and say, Hey, Bob, Hey, Jane, it's.

A robot battle. It was the coolest game ever. This is back before graphics were really good and anything like that, but you would program robots and you would write the logic for the robot and it had a radar could detect things that could move and a little gun it could shoot.

And then you'd compete your program versus other programs and the robots would battle each other. And so I was really into programming at the time.

And I thought computers are going to change the world. know, this is back a long time ago now. And surprised they did change the world.

But programming I thought was so cool. And what I loved about programming, when what I love today is solving problems, figuring out there is an approach to solve this problem that is systematic, that we can follow these steps and we get an outcome, we get a solution.

And I feel like what you described, Matt, about the fitness and the same thing with marketing is true, that it's the fundamentals.

It's do these things and this thing will happen. There is some creativity there, but I think the big myth around marketing is that 90% of marketing is creative and 10% is process.

And what I brought to the table is 90 Right. 10 of marketing is process, and only 10% is creative.

That you don't have to be very creative to be a great marketer. That marketing isn't really about creativity. It's about doing the right things in the right way over a consistent period of time.

And that's where most business leaders get distracted because we chase the shiny object. We hear about AI. We see the competition's doing.

We want to be creative. We want to be different. We want to express ourselves. But if you want results, if you want success, it's put your head down and do the boring stuff and do it really well over a long period of time.

And that's success. And I've seen this lived out in many areas of my life that really that is the solution.

And so as a 13-year-old Tim, that's what I saw was that I love programming. I love the methodology, the step-by-step way of doing things, the process-oriented approach of things.

And I've carried that through my life that I'm very much a process person, a system person. If you can build a system to do something, you'll get the result, the outcome that you want.

 

Matt Zaun 

And that is so good. You know, it's something a lot of people don't want to hear. Like they want to hear.

Like Creative strategies and just crazy stuff, right? That's what we want to hear, but it is interesting how much process goes into it.

And I think back to my high school days, right? When I was in high school, I played football, and we had a coach that used to play in the NFL.

His name was Johnny Watson. He was the middle linebacker for the Washington Redskins. And I remember before he took over the program, we had a failing football program.

Like we constantly lost, and then he took it all over, and we were so excited because the thought of having a high school football coach that used to play in the NFL, my immediate thought was, wow, he's going to give us all of these incredibly creative plays.

Like we're going to really fake all these teams out. We're going to do all kinds of complex strategy. And what was interesting is that it's not what this guy focused on.

He focused on exactly what you're talking about, the fundamentals. And I remember being really frustrated. The first few months, because I'm thinking, what are we doing?

But his idea was, if you can execute these simple plays, but you execute it with mastery, you will gain the yards that you need to gain in order to get certain downs, in order to score touchdowns, and in order to win football games.

And what was interesting is we had a failing football program right before we took over, and it was the exact opposite.

Within one season, we had a dominant football team. And it really speaks to that process that you're talking about, those processes.

So I really appreciate you mentioning that. You know, my son, because you had mentioned, you know, when you were 10, when you were 11, the programming, and I have an 11-year-old son that is very into marketing himself.

You know, if I let him, he'll go on YouTube and just watch all kinds of marketing videos. He is into, starting to get into AI a little bit.

He can solve a room. Rubik's Cube in 38 seconds now.

 

Tim Parkin 

he's trying to get that time. Yeah, he's starting to get in competition time.

 

Matt Zaun 

He's really into chess. But I am concerned as a father for all my children, but I'm thinking of him in particular as it pertains to just marketing as well as just building and process.

What kind of future, obviously, we can't completely predict the future, but what should he potentially expect? And what advice would you give to him as a 13-year-old that as he transitions into his teen years, he's going to have maybe some of the fundamentals that he needs to know before he moves on to the next stage?

What he is really focused on right now, to give you an idea, he really wants to get into a STEM academy.

There's a STEM academy very close to where we live, and you have to have really good math scores. You have to have very good science scores.

But he wants to do something in the business world.

 

Tim Parkin 

What kind of advice would you give him? Yeah, this is so interesting because I almost dropped out of school in fifth grade for some health reasons, and I was going to be homeschooled.

And then the only thing that kept me in school was I was in the Gifted and Talented program. And not because I'm smart, but because I tested well.

And what I really enjoyed about the Gifted and Talented program was we did nontraditional things in school. And I think that school, my perspective, is it's a broken institution, that it's not for the times today.

And my daughter goes to a private school, and one of things I love about her school is they focus on communication.

They had a talent show recently. She's seven. She's in first grade. They had a talent show where all the kids got up and had to present some type of talent.

They do plays where the kids have to get up and present. They do public speeches and things of this nature.

To me, communication is the number one skill that every adolescent today needs. And frankly, every leader needs us. Well, this is why you do storytelling, right?

Strategic storytelling. Communication is fundamental to everything. If you want to launch a business or grow a business or hire a better team or do marketing, you need to be able to communicate.

And that's not just being able to stand up in front of people and speak. That is part of it.

But it's also understanding how to understand people, how to perceive people and how to read people, the words and language.

Language controls everything, how you say things. I'll give you a quick story of this. You know, my wife ran a business for many years, shipping out these subscribers.

And one time we had to drop off a lot of these to the USPS to ship. And so we had these massive bags filled with these heavy boxes, you know, six or seven of them.

And we take them to USPS. It's a deadline. They have to ship today. We bring them in. And the lady says, no, you can't.

You can't bring those here. It's too late. You know, you have to come back tomorrow or something. And we're like, it's Friday.

It's going to be the weekend. We have to ship these out late. Customers are going to be upset. We have to have all these support tickets.

And so just in the moment I said to her, well, what if we do it? What if we unload them?

And what we Thank And she just froze, Matt, like a deer in headlights. She couldn't comprehend what I was saying for a second.

And then she was like, uh, sure. And she let us behind, you know, the area and USPS. We had to unload all these boxes for her and load them up.

And we got what we wanted to ship these things out. And she got what she wanted, right? She didn't have to do the work.

And this goes back to the Ziegler quote about you can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want first.

But it came down to communication. I didn't just accept what she said. I figured out what her objection was and understood how to connect with her and how to communicate in a way that really mattered.

That is the key to life and to business. And for your son and for any leader listening, would say that is the secret to success is being able to understand people and communicate people.

And unfortunately, it's something that we're losing today with AI, with technology, and with spending so much time on our phones.

We're not connecting with each other, which is why listening to this podcast is great if you're doing that and have these conversations.

It's great to go out in the world and talk to people. And to your son, I would say, Do something, build something, launch something that involves people where you have to work with people or work with a team or pitch to people.

Anything that involves communication is going to be essential for the future. And the ones who can communicate exceptionally will be the ones who succeed in the future.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. Such a good point. Really appreciate you sharing that. Also, I really appreciate this conversation. I got a ton out of this conversation.

There's three things in particular that I'm going to remember after this conversation concludes. So I want to touch on this.

So the very first thing that you said that really stood out to me, Tim, is when you're talking about, you know, comfortability.

You mentioned you have to get comfortable in the uncomfortable. think that's really simplistic, but so powerful that I think we often forget.

And you asked that simple question, has what you've been doing working, right? If it's not working, you haven't put yourself in situations where you have been uncomfortable.

You need to kind of push a little bit to make sure that things are. So I appreciate that point.

The second point that you mentioned that maybe I knew, but I didn't really think of it in these terms.

And I think there's a tremendous amount of wisdom here. As you said, what you want and what you need does not intersect.

And the more I thought about that, like that is so true. Like there are different things that I want in life, but there are different things that I need to do in order to get them.

And they're not the same thing. It's very interesting. It's very fascinating. I'm going to definitely process that a lot more.

And then the third and final piece that I really appreciated that you mentioned is you mentioned the stages of the funnel, right?

I've heard this. Obviously, you've heard this. Everyone listening has heard this about top of funnel, bottom of funnel. But you talked about how slow, how hard, and how just downright expensive that can be.

And you really challenged us to look inside, inside out. And something very practical, that referral program. Is there a way that we can all set up referral programs in our business?

And I challenge everyone listening to that. Evaluate that. Try to figure out, you know, is that something that you can do?

So Tim, thank you so much. I really appreciate everything that you offered. If someone wants to get more information on what you do, they want to reach out to you for your services, where's the best place that they can go to get that information?

 

Tim Parkin

Absolutely. I have a podcast called The Marketing Director Daily. Go check that out if you're a marketer or connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'm really big on LinkedIn. have a big following there. I post several times a day. I would love to connect on LinkedIn.

And I'm a go-giver. So if you want to connect, if want to chat, if want some free advice, I'm here to help however I can.

Reach out to me. Let's connect.

 

Matt Zaun 

Let's have a conversation. Perfect. I will include that in the show notes. People could just click and go from there.

Thank you, Tim. Really appreciate your time today.

 

Tim Parkin 

Thank you, Matt.