SPI 418: How to Get Super High-Profile Guests, with Jordan Harbinger

SPI 418 How to Get Super High-Profile Guests, with Jordan Harbinger

Pat Flynn:
Not too long ago, here on the podcast in episode 346, a good friend of mine, Jordan Harbinger, came on to talk about how he was dealing with and coping with having getting booted out of his own business. He was the host of a very popular podcast, and his business partners basically kicked him out and they started to use the asset that he had been spending so long to build for their own benefit, leaving Jordan out on his own. We talked a lot about how Jordan relied on relationships that he had built over time, how he was able to survive and now get started with another podcast of his own called The Jordan Harbinger Show. And I’m really excited to give you an update today here in this episode with Jordan coming back on to tell us what has happened since because loads of things happened since, and his new show, The Jordan Harbinger Show, has just taken off.

Pat:
And today, more specifically, I wanted to ask him questions that can help all of us, myself included, how in the world are you landing these super high profile guests? And I’m talking about guests like Malcolm Gladwell, Tony Hawk, Laila Ali, and even the story about how he was able to land Kobe Bryant, rest in peace, on his podcast. Just an incredible man Jordan is; and he’s here to give us some insight about how he manages these relationships and also invites these amazing, really high profile people who you wouldn’t expect would have the time to be on a podcast to invite them on the show and knock it out of the park with interviews.

Pat:
So if you haven’t listened to The Jordan Harbinger Show yet, I’d recommend you do so. But for right now, we’re going to listen to Jordan here on The Smart Passive Income Podcast to help us understand how we can conduct better interviews with higher profile people. Let’s make it happen.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he actually pre-ordered a cyber truck, but he has no idea where he’s going to put it, Pat Flynn.

Pat:
What up? It’s Pat Flynn here and welcome to session 418 of The Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thank you so much for coming on today. And today we are speaking with, again, Jordan Harbinger from The Jordan Harbinger Show and his amazing techniques for landing high profile guests in addition to just how he interviews people. It’s really amazing. And a quick update from him on how he’s been handling things since getting booted out of his own business. If you want to listen to that episode, we’ll have it in the show notes, all the things in the show notes, but for right now, let’s just dive right in because Jordan’s amazing. We’re going to have some fun. Here we go.

Pat:
Jordan, welcome back to The Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thanks for being here, man.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, thanks for having me on, man. It’s always fun to talk with you, especially when it’s recorded.

Pat:
Yes, absolutely because now we can listen back when we’re old men and be like, “Oh, remember the times that we’ve chatted about this and that.”

Jordan:
Not just about our back problems and taking pills so that we can pee.

Pat:
Right, isn’t it weird like when we are older, it’s going to be so different than how the older generation of today reflects back on who they were when they were kids and what they did when they were working. We’re just going to have so many more photos, and I’m just very curious about how reflection is going to be when we’re older.

Jordan:
I also think about that and I think, because right now my dad’s like, “Oh, when we were younger we did this, this and this.” And you know how reflection works and you kind of idealize your past, and that’ll happen, but then what happens when someone’s like, “That’s not true.” Here’s 700 hours of audio where you have basically direct evidence that what you’re saying is not totally accurate.

Pat:
Yeah, let me check the cloud for one of the seven-million pictures that I think I remember happening during that moment. It’s going to be crazy.

Jordan:
Exactly.

Pat:
Anyway, first of all, thanks for coming back. I wanted to get a quick catch up from you because the last time you were on the show, you told this incredible, amazing, heartbreaking story about how you got kicked out of your other business that actually had your name on it, essentially Art of Charm, and you started your new show, The Jordan Harbinger Show, and we talked a lot about relationship building and how important the relationships you built prior to getting kicked out helped you get your feet back up and running again. And so how have things been with The Jordan Harbinger Show, your new business, your essentially new era of life?

Jordan:
Yeah, it’s actually been so surprisingly amazing. So, of course, at first I was trying to leave my old company and we were trying to do an amicable split. Well, I thought we were. That was the trick. We were not. I was. And so I was like, “Uh-oh.” So I found myself out on my keister and I was like, “I’m never going to be able to rebuild. This is awful. I got to call everybody I know who’s smart and ask them for advice.” Guys like you and other people that were in my life because you call your parents and they go, “Oh, we feel bad for you.” And you’re like, “That doesn’t really help me [crosstalk 00:04:45].”

Pat:
Yeah, “Do you want to move back home?” [crosstalk 00:04:46].

Jordan:
Yeah, not a ton of that. So I was like, “Uh-oh, I better get real advice.” And I’d spent a long time networking and building relationships in an effective way because that’s one of the skills that I taught and that I teach. And luckily I’d been practicing what I preach, which by the way, I highly recommend. If you’re teaching some people something, hopefully you do it yourself. And I’d been doing that for years and years, and I spent the next year, this is the previous couple of years. It’s been about two years now since I’ve been off on my own.

Jordan:
And after the first year, my wife, Jen, she goes, “Let’s take inventory of the past year.” And I was a little nervous and I actually procrastinated doing that and I said, “Let’s do it this weekend,” because I thought I was going to be bummed out and demotivated and I didn’t want to do that on a Monday. So we waited until Saturday and we did it and it turns out that our first year had been more profitable than the other company had ever been in a year. And that is incredible. We’d built something like almost to 80 percent of the record revenue from the previous company, but much, much more profitable. Something like twice to three times the record profitability of the past company.

Jordan:
So, in other words, we were making almost the same amount of money with a fraction of the team and overhead. A fraction of the team, a fraction of the output you could say, but we had been profitable, something like 300, 400 percent more than the previous company. So not only did we have the same size almost of impact, but we were able to enjoy more of it. And so I ended up giving bonuses to everybody on my team-

Pat:
That’s cool.

Jordan:
Which that never happened, and it was cool to have because I’d envisioned in the beginning—and I think this is the same with any major setback—I had envisioned being in the trenches and feeling screwed to be honest, for the next three, four, or five years. I thought what it would take to recover would be at least that long, and it turned out to be eight months, when you go back and look at the data, to where we were able to do it.

Jordan:
And looking at that first year where I thought, “Oh, we’re never going to be able to do this and all these plans are scrapped.” We took almost no lifestyle hit. Now I had an emotional lifestyle hit, which I can explain as being freaked out and sleeping poorly for a few months and working really, really, really hard. But you probably know this, when you’re doing something you really enjoy saying you’re “working hard” has a different meaning than going in stamping machine-metal parts or something that you don’t like for eight hours a day. I work really hard now because I really enjoy it and my wife will have to be like, “Hey, why don’t we go out to dinner tonight? Cancel that thing you totally don’t have to do.” And I’ll be like, “Okay.” That’s different because I really enjoy it.

Jordan:
So I found that not only were we able to rebuild so much faster, but I’m enjoying everything that I do much more. And not that the worrying was for nothing, but I can say, as is usually the case with worry, it was outsized. The amount of worry I did was outsized compared to what I thought I was going to have to do. And if I had to do it all over again, the separation and everything, I think I would have tried to be much more positive and excited about the future, and I know that’s what everyone says you’re supposed to do, but it’s hard when you have no income for the first couple of months. That’s tricky.

Pat:
Right, so the setback was definitely one of those examples of a blessing in disguise.

Jordan:
Yeah.

Pat:
And it’s like you said in that moment, you don’t really realize that. And the same thing happened for me when I got laid off in ’08, and you hear this story quite often that sometimes it takes these major setbacks to put you on a new trajectory and go beyond and even further. What do you attribute to the higher profits, to the better on this side versus what you thought your letting go was what you needed at the time? So what attributed to the new trajectory and the better success that you had than before you got let go?

Jordan:
Yeah, so what’s interesting about this from a business perspective was I’d always been trying to leave my old company for years, but my business partners were like, “You can’t. You have a noncompete. We’re going to enforce it…” But ironically, by dealing in bad faith and then being like, “We’re going to kick this guy out even though we’re in the middle of negotiation,” that, according to my attorney, and well, according to the judge, nullified the noncompete. So there was nothing to enforce. So basically, had everything worked out, I would have had a really hard time starting a business, which is so ironic. Had everything worked out perfectly, I would have been screwed. But since everything went to heck in a hand basket, I was able to pick up the pieces and start right away with something that I would’ve had a multi-year delay doing.

Jordan:
So a couple of my friends, especially, I think you’d know like Cam Harold and guys like that who are in business and I called another buddy who was the CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and he’s like, “I know that you don’t believe me, but I will tell you this.” And I think you told me the same thing, “This is probably a blessing in disguise. There’s almost no way that it’s not.” And, of course, when people tell you that, you just kind of want to be like, “But you don’t understand,” because you’re in the middle of this emotional storm, but all of you were right. And you knew that then, and now I know it, but you were right. Yes, it’s a blessing in disguise and it’s not… I want to be clear, a lot of times when people say, “It’s a blessing in disguise,” you do these rationalizations where you’re like, “Well, I didn’t like living in sunny California anyway and I’m glad I moved back to this really cold place because I’m closer to my family.”

Jordan:
Sometimes those things are, of course, true, but a lot of it turns out to be a rationalization. It doesn’t mean you’re not happy or happier, it’s just a rationalization like, “Oh good, it’s a blessing in disguise. I’m working harder and making less but I live closer to my aunt and uncle,” or, “I live in my parents’ basement. And that’s always nice.” That’s not my situation. It’s a blessing in disguise and everything worked out much better than I could have imagined, but I also realized that a light was shined on a lot of things that I wasn’t paying attention to, in part because I was powerless to change a lot of those things. So I thought, “Well, I’m working with people and there’s differences in personalities, but that’s just how it is working with business partners,” which is largely true. It’s just that when some people say they have different personality issues with their business partners, they just mean that they don’t always agree on everything, they don’t mean that every day is a pitched battle, which is like what we were dealing with.

Jordan:
So the blessing in disguise was not only are we making more money, not only are we happier in the day-to-day, but also my team is more productive. And when I asked them, I wouldn’t say surveyed them formally, but when I asked them why they thought they were getting more done, unanimously everyone said, “Oh, well, we’re just happier now because we’re not dealing with this and you guys aren’t in a clash about that and we feel like we can ask for time off.”

Jordan:
And there were all these problems that I didn’t even see, in part because I had my head in my own problems, but also because they were kind of invisible. So I have my team asking for time off and going on trips now and they’re saying things like, “Yeah, I’ve been trying to do this for three years, but I never had the guts to ask you for time off because I thought that we were hanging on by a thread and I didn’t want to get laid off.” And I’m like, “Well, that wouldn’t have happened.” And then they’re like, “Yeah, but it felt like it would.” And now they’re going, “We’re in great situations, so I’m just going to go ahead and take my wife on a honeymoon even though we’ve been married for 10 years because I never did it.”

Pat:
That’s cool.

Jordan:
And I’m like that is a benefit to everyone in the organization because they come back refreshed and thinking, “This is a company I really want to work for,” not, “Gee, I hope this company doesn’t go out of business and I end up with no job,” which is what they were thinking before. So there were a lot of benefits that are really apparent, profits, me and my wife, I should say, who I work with, being happier, but the side benefits are things like productivity, and it’s not just because my team has more resources, it’s because they don’t feel like they’re going to get the ax at the drop of a hat. Because I’m the decision maker and they trust me, whereas they didn’t trust the other people that could have exercised their power to get rid of them. Does that make sense?

Pat:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the last time you were on this show you talked about layoff lifelines and you gave us the exercise and I was so blown away by just the tactical nature of that, but also how important it was and we often… You would even mention how we don’t even just make the time for that. We do everything else in the business except that even though that’s likely the most important thing and obviously it’s worked out well for you to have built those relationships ahead of time so that you have those lifelines that you could reach out to when something like that happens.

Pat:
And you gave us the instructions. I actually, at FlynnCon this past year, I played the clip from that episode and I had everybody go and do something that you said to do which was to, this was live on stage in front of 500 people in San Diego, I had everybody turn on their phone, go to their text messages, scroll all the way to the bottom and just like for the bottom 10 people that they hadn’t connected with in a long time, just send them a quick hello and a message to see how they are doing. And then I made sure everybody turned on their phone so we could all hear the pings as they were coming in.

Jordan:
Oh that’s awesome.

Pat:
And it was just like “bleep, bleep, bleep” all throughout the whole space. And it’s just like every one of those was like a connection that was made that had potentially been lost and you never know, those are potential lifelines that you’ve just created for yourself. Please follow up. And I just wanted to publicly thank you for that because that was an exercise that turned into a lot of really amazing things at FlynnCon.

Jordan:
That’s funny. I wanted to do something like that. That’s a brilliant idea by the way. You did it better than me. I didn’t think about having them turn the alerts on their phones. I bet you everybody started laughing after awhile because it just got kind of ridiculous with all the dings.

Pat:
Yeah, and they always like came in later. Like one would come in five minutes, minutes later I’d be like “lifeline, lifeline” just as they were coming in. It was really cool. So thank you for that. And when you reached out to your layoff lifelines, what was probably the number one best piece of advice you got during that time while you were in that worry moment?

Jordan:
In the worry moment, and by the way, the moment was like four weeks long. So let’s be clear. I wasn’t like I woke up the next day feeling great. A lot of the self-helpy sort of Instagram influencer generation of people want to make you think that you can solve your problems instantly because instant gratification feels good. I just want to put it out there as somebody who looks successful, I would hope from the outside that I also have times where I go, “I’m getting a job at the post office. Life sucks.” I just want people to feel okay feeling bad sometimes. But one of the best pieces of advice that I got during that was to… Oh, there were so many. One though was to realize that if you did something once and you did it over a sustained period of time, that it wasn’t luck. And that came in different forms from a few different people.

Jordan:
What they meant by that was, look, if you invented some sort of gadget and it was early in the game and you were first to market and then your company fell apart, well, okay, there’s some element of luck there. And I thought, “Oh, but I had a podcast so early and that sort of early podcast, traffic, momentum, et cetera, is going to be hard to replicate.” And that’s true. That part was. But the other 99 percent of running a business, which is managing your people well, hiring and recruiting well, creating good content that people really love, which we were doing for The Jordan Harbinger Show for the last few years already, that type of stuff, that part is not luck. And it’s really easy to fall into, I guess it would be a cognitive bias where you go, “Well, this was lucky, that was lucky and that was lucky.” Because as a creator, as a business owner, you probably know which parts you got lucky doing, right?

Jordan:
Like you ironically got lucky getting laid off when you did and finding digital marketing when you did and focusing on these certain niches or whatever when you did. So that part looks like, look, what you don’t think about is the fact that you then worked for a decade and change on all these other things that were not luck. There were plenty of people who found digital marketing in, when did you start? Like 2007, 2008, something like that.

Pat:
Yeah, exactly.

Jordan:
So there were plenty of us because we started around the same time that found this stuff then and they’re not in the same position as you are or as I am, and it’s not because they’re bad people or something like that. There was some element of luck, but there were other elements of sticking with something even when the pay wasn’t good. Like if you started a podcast in 2008, Pat, how much money did you make before 2015 or something? If you’re anything like me, the money you made from 2008, 2009 to like 2014 is probably less than your 2016 revenue on, right?

Pat:
Yeah, especially from the podcast. I wasn’t really directly making any money from the podcast at all.

Jordan:
Right, it’s like I look at the revenue from 2018 or 2019 and I can add up the first, I don’t know, seven or eight years of doing the show and it does still doesn’t equal that number.

Pat:
Right.

Jordan:
So there’s all that. All of the stuff that got you through the first decade of your business, that wasn’t luck. Luck is finding a great idea or having something happen at the right time, but the other 90 percent of that is not luck. And you have to think about that. Otherwise, it’s really easy to just focus on the stuff that you couldn’t control and think, “But I’m never going to get that again.” And then you get down on yourself because you think that that’s some sort of essential ingredient when really it might’ve just been the original idea that you got. It’s kind of like the whip cream. It’s not the pie. And so I think I messed up that metaphor, but you know what I mean. That might’ve started you off, but it’s not what got you here. And unfortunately, for I think a lot of creators, we look at these things that are lucky or that we can’t control and we just assume that those were essential ingredients when really they weren’t.

Pat:
It reminds me of after I had found success with my LEED-exam architecture website, a big internet business website run by a guy named Yaro Starak back in the day, one of the OG entrepreneurial bloggers. And I was on his podcast. I told the story and a lot of great comments. But there was one comment in particular that basically said, “It’s just a flash in the pan.” And I had thought about that for weeks after that and questioning whether or not actually I had the skills and I could do this again or really maybe I was lucky and other people who maybe would get inspired by what I was doing maybe they had no chance and I got super lucky and maybe I was leading people down a direction that things like this aren’t really possible. So what I ended up doing was trying to find the truth behind that, because there was no way for me to know whether it was a flash in the pan unless I was to try something else and prove to myself that, wow, I can actually do this.

Pat:
And for some of us it’s, and like you said, the years of experience that you’ve had. So if I was to lose everything today, I know 100 percent I could get back up and do something new. No problem. It would take a lot of work and I would be stressed out during that time, but I can make it happen. I’m confident. But back then I wasn’t sure. So I ended up trying to find as many small wins as I could from, “Hey, I’m going to try this challenge with my audience and see if I could just get anybody to get service from me during this free challenge.” And then that was like proof, “Whoa, I can actually help people get results.”

Pat:
I started my first niche website around that time in the security guard space and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to take the knowledge that I had with my architecture website and put it into a space I have no business being in and then seeing if it could work.” And in 73 days, I got to number one in Google and started generating money from it. And then I think proved to not just others out there, but mainly to myself that I had the confidence to do whatever I put my mind to really, as cliche as it sounds, but I needed that proof or else I was just going to believe that, well, maybe this was really luck.

Jordan:
That makes sense. I think trying to test assumptions, which is a common thing that you do in business—or should be doing in business—it really does translate over to the way that you think and the way you are in your life. Like if you want to test ads, you test ads, but often we think that the things… I did a show about this on The Jordan Harbinger Show as well, where I go over a lot of brain science. It’s a common theme for the show; but there was somebody that said, “What we think we tend to automatically believe,” which sounds really obvious, but actually if you tell me something, I might not believe you, but if my brain tells me something, I automatically assume that it’s true even though it’s no more true than if somebody else just told you something. Statistically speaking, you think things that are wrong all the time. It’s just that-

Pat:
“What you think about, you bring about,” I once heard.

Jordan:
That makes sense. Yeah, and also, that has to do with what you believe. So again, if you told me something that was like, “Hey, advertising on Facebook works,” I might go, “Well, I don’t know. I got to test that.” But if my brain said advertising on Facebook has to work, then I might just believe that automatically. And so if you find like, “Oh, I can’t rebuild this because it was really hard the first time. It took me 10 years.” If somebody else told you, “Well, hey, you can’t redo what you did before it took you 10 years,” you might be like, “I don’t really like this person. They don’t really seem to believe in me.” But then you think it in your own head and you’re like, “Yep, I’m screwed.” You don’t think, “Hey, that belief sucks. Maybe I should test that and see if I’m actually right or if I’m just being hard on myself.”

Jordan:
So you got to be really careful with that, because I remember waking up many times in the middle of the night when I first started The Jordan Harbinger Show and I was really worried and really uncertain and that wasn’t helpful for my wife or for my team. If I’m texting them or sending them Slack messages at 5:00 a.m. and being like, “Hey, today we got to focus on this, this, this, and this.” They’re just like, “Dude, you’re freaking everyone out.” And that was funny to have team members who work with me being like, “Hey, put your pants on and stop complaining.” And I’m like, “How dare they talk to me like this?” And I’m like, “Good thing they’re talking to me like this.” Because some somebody has to.

Jordan:
You have to be really careful with what sort of, what’s the term— “head trash?”—you allow to take root. Like don’t beat yourself up if you think something negative or disempowering, but you have to be careful what you believe. Now if you say, “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t be in this business,” you can listen to that and think about it and evaluate it, but you shouldn’t just believe things automatically just because they’re in your own head. A lot of people have things in their own head that are just completely not based in reality. “Oh, I could never run a podcast. Pat and Jordan, they know all this online digital marketing stuff and you can’t be successful without that. So why even try?”

Jordan:
I would never tell someone else that. So someone telling themselves that in their own head, it’s just as factless or baseless I should say, as some random person sending them that in an email. It’s just that since it exists inside your brain, you think it’s more credible, but truthfully it’s not. And that goes for pretty much everything. And we see this in studies that have to do with things like prejudice and racism. People tell them things in their head about other people or other types of people and it’s no more true than if somebody else said it out loud in a room. It’s just really isn’t. It just has to do with the way that our brains work. So you have to question your own assumptions just as you do in business, just as you do when you’re testing something in your business, question the assumptions you have in your head. Sometimes they’re true, but often they’re just baloney that your brain came up with based on other bits of information that may not even be related to what you’re thinking about. It’s kind of interesting like that.

Pat:
Yeah, it’s all in the mindset. And I know that sometimes we just lose our mind and we lose ourselves and we lose our direction as a result. So I want to get into some stuff that you’ve done amazingly well that I want to pull out of you because I want to know personally how you do this too and I think it’d be really helpful for everybody. And it relates to your show, The Jordan Harbinger Show. And every time I see your Instagram posts or check out a new show that’s been published, I’m always blown away at the guests that you have on the show. They just, not only are they perfectly handpicked for the content that I’m looking forward to every single week, but just the caliber. And I’m always wondering like, “how did Jordan get access to that kind of person?”

Pat:
And we have a lot of podcasters who listen to the show. I’m 100 percent sure they would love to know your formula, techniques, system, whatever it is to help get really, really well known people on your show. I also want to preface this by saying you shouldn’t just try to get only well known people on your show. Some of the most powerful episodes here on the podcast have been with people who have been a part of the community, a part of Team Flynn, who nobody’s ever heard of before and they’re more relatable at times of course, but there is something to be said for bringing well known people on your show to build your own authority and obviously download their information from their brain and feed it to everybody else. What’s your approach for number one, who you choose to have come on the show and how do you get them to come on the show when I know they’re so massively busy. It seems like magic to me on this side.

Jordan:
Yeah, there’s a lot of what I guess you might consider dumb luck. So there’s some of that. So let’s get that out of the way first. But I think often if we examined luck enough, you can find things that weren’t just luck that actually put that opportunity in front of my face. So, for example, recently, I had the late great Kobe Bryant on the show and that looked like luck because I got a cold email from someone that said, “Hey, would you be interested in having…” Or I shouldn’t say it was that cold. I got an email from someone saying, “Hey, would you have Kobe Bryant on the show?” And I said, “Absolutely.” And then I followed up like 20 times to make it happen, and that was amazing.

Jordan:
But before that, I had been trying to get a comedian on the show who I failed to get on the show named Jim Gaffigan. And it turned out to just be a logistical nightmare. And so I kind of said, “You know what? Let’s just not do this one.” And the publicist who was booking him said, “Yeah, I feel bad. Sorry, I messed up the times and messed up the locations.” And he felt really bad, and so he said, “What about somebody like Kobe?” And I said, “Of course, are you kidding me?”

Jordan:
So the reason that that worked out was because I had emailed him about a comedian. He and I had gone back and forth and made a couple mistakes and he ended up offering me Kobe Bryant. So that in a way was lucky, but it was also the result of following up and having systems. And so what I’ve done, and what other people can do to replicate these systems are one, I keep in touch with publicists. If somebody pitches me and they say, “Hey, this guy invented a silly putty type stuff that you put on your shoes so that if it say, I don’t know, the sole starts coming off, it sticks on there.” And I’m like, “This isn’t a really good fit for The Jordan Harbinger Show.” But instead of ignoring it and deleting it, I’ll respond and say, “Hey, this isn’t a good one for me right now, but I’m open to other pitches. Here’s what I’m looking for.”

Jordan:
And I’ll almost universally get a response from a publicist or somebody else or assistant and they’ll say things like, “Wow, thanks for the response. I wasn’t expecting that. Here are some other people that I work with.” Now that’s really rare to happen. Why would a publicist work for me on that? Well, I’m making it easier for them to give me the types of guests that I actually want. So instead of just saying, “No, I don’t want to deal with this person,” and either deleting their email or responding and saying, “No, thanks,” I’ll say, “Anybody else you got? I’m not interested in the silly putty shoe guy, but I’m interested in other people that you might have. Here are some guests that I have.”

Jordan:
And often they’ll just reply, “Hey, nobody’s on my docket yet, but I’ll keep you in mind.” I’m making myself easier to work with, which publicists love because most people just delete their emails and never reply, which I think is just kind of rude. And so when you’re polite to them and you make it easier for them to pitch you, you get more pitches and yes, you end up passing on a lot of stuff because you get 10,000 silly putty guys a year, but you also end up with the occasional Malcolm Gladwell, Kobe Bryant, Dennis Rodman, Chelsea Handler, those types of folks.

Jordan:
So you end up getting opportunities that they find to be valuable because they like you because you’re easy to work with, but also they know you’re going to respond and respond quickly. So that would be the second or I guess third point of idea here is you want to make sure that you are easy to work with, responding very promptly because often, they’ll end up with somebody who’s last minute and if you’re the person they know will respond within a couple of hours or a day or so, you become the go-to.

Jordan:
So I think I got Chelsea Handler because they said, “Hey, she’s not available.” And I said, “Hey, no problem. Please keep me in mind if there’s any cancellations or openings in her schedule.” Well, I think a week before, they said, “Hey, Newsweek or ABC News or whoever it was, they moved the day. She’s got a three hour gap during her media tour. It’s in LA.” And I said, “Great.” And they emailed me about it because I respond really, really quickly and I have been really easy to work with. So they knew that it wasn’t going to be like they had to email 20 people then they got 16 responses and now they have to tell a bunch of people no and then those people get mad. They just went straight to me. So I ended up with, again, a lucky break because I was accessible, replying quickly, polite, easy to work with. And you want to be all of those things with publicists.

Jordan:
Now, the same tips go with non publicists. If you’re talking with someone’s agent, like I got Dennis Rodman through his speaking agent. Now a speaking agent doesn’t need to book media for him, but I was becoming friendly with his speaking agent working on other projects and I said, “Hey, if you ever have anything you want to do, let me know.” And the agent himself wrote a book about addiction and I thought, “This is a really interesting topic itself.” So we ended up doing two shows back to back, one with him and one with Dennis Rodman. So in a way, that worked out really well. Instead of me just bugging some agent who doesn’t get any money for media to hook me up with his clients, I ended up helping him with his addiction book and project and he said, “Hey, by the way, I’m going to be at this hotel with Dennis Rodman. We’re probably going to have a couple hours. Do you want to do your interview then?”

Pat:
That’s cool.

Jordan:
So that kind of thing sounds like luck, but really those opportunities are cultivated. The table is set, so to speak, by being, again, easy to work with, prompt to reply, and then also, I guess you would say flexible, but really it’s kind of outside the box thinking like, “Okay, maybe Dennis Rodman doesn’t want to go to some interview studio and do something, but if he’s got a day of meetings at a hotel in Hollywood and he’s got a three hour gap and he only needs one of the hours for lunch, maybe somebody can tip you off and set things up and put in a good word for you.” So those opportunities are good and easy to cultivate.

Jordan:
And you’d be surprised. Again, the Kobe Bryant thing, they were like, “He only will do a phone interview. He’s really, really busy.” And I said, “What if I fly down there, go to his office, set up in one of the empty rooms?” And they were like, “Well, if you’re going to do all that, fine.” And so I showed up to his office and I did it right there and nobody else was able to do that. I just knew that if I drove all the way down to Orange County with the whole crew that it would look better and be better and they said okay. I made that offer. I sold that opportunity. Before I was just going to be a phoner, but instead, I got to hang out.

Pat:
Let me ask you, with these kinds of celebrity guests, is this something that only people like yourself who has a long running podcast, lots of downloads, is it only possible for you guys or is this something that people who are even just starting out might be able to have happen?

Jordan:
So I won’t lie and say you don’t even need a podcast. You can just go hang out with the important people all the time. There has to be something in it for them. So downloads or reputation help, but it’s more reputation than it is numbers. So when people say, “Oh, how do you get all these guests? How do you get all these guests?” I look at my numbers and I say, “Okay, these are good numbers. Six million downloads a month for The Jordan Harbinger Show, not bad.” But what I tell the publicist in addition to that is, “and the people that are listening are really, really going to be interested in this book. They’re going to go out and buy the book.”

Jordan:
A publicity appearance for let’s say a celebrity like Malcolm Gladwell, he’s a brilliant writer. He has been all over the place. If you say “there’s a good chance you’ll sell a thousand books on this show,” that becomes worthwhile because he only has to do a handful of appearances that are going to sell a thousand books in order to hit the bestseller list, which is often what the goal is for a writer like Malcolm Gladwell. And so if you can show, hey, I have a super engaged social media presence. I may only have 10,000 people listening to or reading my blog or whatever it is that you’re creating, but they’re really, really, really interested in this very specific thing. That makes a lot of sense for somebody who might be an outsized guest. I guarantee you that somebody like Malcolm Gladwell goes on a podcast that’s like about running a business or is about writing. He will sell many more books on that show than he will if he goes on Jimmy Kimmel.

Jordan:
And Jimmy Kimmel has millions of people watching. It’s just that they’re not going, “Gee, I wonder what books Jimmy Kimmel’s going to recommend tonight in his three minute interview with an author.” They’re looking for people who are talking about what they’re interested in. So whether you have a podcast about running a business from home or whether you have a podcast that’s about, let’s say law enforcement. I had Frank Abagnale, who was the personality behind Catch Me If You Can. Do you remember that movie with Leo DiCaprio?

Pat:
Yeah.

Jordan:
So he’s the real guy. He’s the guy who posed as the pilot, the lawyer and the doctor, and he’s incredibly, incredibly busy and he doesn’t really like media. And he was doing a podcast about scams for AARP because older people, that’s the Association of Retired Persons. So that is a demographic, older people that get scammed a lot. So he was doing a podcast for them and I took the opportunity to say, “Hey, can you hook me up with him because we can help that podcast get better reach?”

Jordan:
Now, major media outlets wanted to do a piece on him and he’s like, “I’m not interested.” People who are reading a magazine aren’t necessarily going to go download a podcast. And he knew that people who listen to podcasts are going to be interested in that. So of course AARP was like, “Yeah, let’s get them on there.” So those kinds of angles make more sense. You don’t have to have two million followers on Instagram or six million downloads a month for your show to be a good fit for somebody you’re really interested in. You just have to be in the right place at the right time with the right value proposition. And the way that you do that is by showing whoever’s booking that person that you’re not going to make them look bad and that you’re going to deliver a good result for them.

Jordan:
And that might be, “Hey, look, you’re probably only going to sell a couple of hundred books, but you can do it by phone from your hotel room during your book tour.” And you might get a really outsized guest, so to speak, by being flexible like that-

Pat:
That’s great.

Jordan:
Because they might not be doing anything else and they might go, “Hey, the opportunity to sell a few hundred more books while I’m on my book tour? That’s literally the point of my book tour. So when can we do it?” You might end up through flexibility, being easy to work with, and having the right targeting, so to speak. You can get outsized guests that you, in theory, shouldn’t be able to get.

Pat:
Yeah, oh man, fantastic advice. I think the value proposition is the key there for all stakeholders involved. And I think that it sounds like you are targeting a lot of people who seem to have a reason to come on shows and might have something that they would want other people to check out versus just a random ask at a random time. But dude, I’m super stoked. I want people to download and subscribe to your podcast. Best place to go. Can you tell them where to reach you at?

Jordan:
Sure, so you’re listening to a podcast, check out The Jordan Harbinger Show in whatever app you’re listening to podcasts. And of course, the Jordan Harbinger show is always available at jordanharbinger.com but if you listen to podcasts from websites, why do you do that? You can also reach me @JordanHarbinger on Instagram or Twitter and honestly, people who listen to your show are probably awesome. So I don’t mind getting email from them. I’m just [email protected]. And I love engaging with people who are really into this stuff. So feel free to reach out on any of those platforms. But I’d love it if they listened to the show because that’s my body of work.

Pat:
And every episode just has so many golden nuggets. It’s one of the only ones I subscribe to currently. And so just make sure you check it out and we’ll have links in the show notes and everything for everybody. And Jordan, just thank you so much for your time today. I know you’ve got to run off, but wishing you all the best and thanks again for coming on.

Jordan:
Thanks so much, man. Much love to you. Thanks for the opportunity.

Pat:
All right, hope you enjoyed that interview with Jordan Harbinger. Again, you can find him at The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple podcast, Google podcast, anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can find him there. I highly recommend you subscribe and check him out. He’s amazing, and if you want to go back and listen to the episode that he was on previouslyto talk about how he had his layoff lifelines as he called them in his place to be able to help himself once he got kicked out of his own business, you can check that out and all the other links and resources mentioned here in this episode on the show notes page which you can find at smartpassiveincome.com/session418. One more time, smartpassiveincome.com/session418.

Pat:
Hope you enjoyed this interview. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, and look out for next week. We have actually an old high school friend coming on because he’s built something huge and he’s going to share with us exactly how he’s done it. And man, it’s kind of a blast from the past. So I hope you subscribe so you can check out that episode next week. Until then, keep up the great work and as always, #TeamFlynn for the win. Peace.

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