File: POP 245 – Christopher Lochhead Wants You to Level Up Your Practice
Duration: 01:02:51

[SPONSOR TALK]
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[MUSIC]

This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session #245.

[MUSIC]

[A STARTING WITH INTRODUCTIONS]
Joe Sanok: Welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I am Joe Sanok, your host. I hope you are doing amazing today. I am here live in the radio center two building. We are helping practice owners to find innovative ways to start grow in scale our private practice and we are really happy that you are here. I love interviewing people that are super interesting, and especially people that the average kind of counselor doesn’t usually have the access to. You know, it’s fine to interview practice owners and actually next month we are going to be talking to a bunch of people that are experts in scaling a practice. And so if you are at that 100,000, and you really want to level up, how do you do that? And so I have some practice owners, some consultants. It’s going to be a really busy month, all about growing and scaling kind of that next level type stuff.

But Christopher Lochhead, who I had been interviewing over the last two episodes, this guy is a pillar in the business community. I mean he has been in fast companies, he has been… I mean the guy… If I go through his credentials, it just gets kind of annoying at a certain point… you know, Harvard Business Review… and so the reason that I have dedicated three full episodes to him is for one, we did a two hour conversation. But also he is just an amazing guy. So really excited to have him on again, and we are going to be wrapping up this interview. I actually ended the interview kind of short, didn’t even like say, hey we are going to cut right here in the last episode because I didn’t know how long we were going to just keep on talking and we ended up talking for quite a while. So I am going to actually back that up little bit. So if you heard the last one, you hear kind of my last statements before we go in. So it’s not a repeat. It’s kind of go into the remaining kind of 30 to 40 minutes of the interview. But if you are new to Christopher Lochhead, I would highly suggest you go back and listen to the last two episodes, so that you brought up to speed at this point. And also please be aware that if there’s kids in the car, if you are in a place where swear words are not okay, Christopher is a call-it-like-it-is kind of guy. He uses some profanity. And if for one reason or another, you are not okay with that because of where you are, just want to warn you about that. So without any further ado, I give you Christopher Lochhead.

[MUSIC]

[HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN BUSINESS – FINDING A NICHE]
Christopher Lochhead: And so first we start with problems. What’s the problem that we solve and we want to get really steeped and soaked in that problem.

Joe Sanok: And I want to underline what you just said because I see this all the time with my coaching clients where they are like, I am going to get this certification, so that I can attract this client. This is going to serve them well, but that’s not going to be what gets those clients. They don’t care that you have an extra five letter after your name or that, your (crosstalk)…

Christopher Lochhead: …and we don’t know [Inaudible 00:03:49.20] C-F-D-F-I-D-D-O-G–F-A-R-T. We don’t know what any of that shit means.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, and so that’s the mindset of higher education learning which isn’t bad, but I think you nailed it on the head. I wanted to just underline that and say so many therapists in particular or you know any practice owner who wanted to go back for more and more education – and I think part of that’s the fear of marketing themselves. They think that if I get that extra piece of paper, then people are going to come. You are saying frame the problem.

Christopher Lochhead: Frame the problem, and then when you position yourself, position yourself in the context of that problem. So you are actually… So the second piece of this is have a provocative engaging point of view. So legendary category designer… so I’ll give you a simple example. One of my favorites is a Sara Blakely that category designer of shapewear and the founder of SPANX. So you think about SPANX as a product, right? And I am married to a woman, so I have the shit in my closet. Right? And what do I know, but it looks like a modern girdle to me. Right? And so if she was a tech entrepreneur, she could have easily called this the girdle [Inaudible 00:04:59.07]. That’s what happens in the tech industry. We put [Inaudible 00:05:03.10] after things we don’t know what the hell to say. But she didn’t do that. She wanted to – and I am going to use these words on purpose – distinguish herself from everything that came before, and category designers want what comes after to be compared to them. See… Steve Jobs… there is no fucking way that guy was going to let his iPhone get compared to what the guys of Blackberry were doing. Absolutely, no.

Joe Sanok: Right (laugh).

Christopher Lochhead: The experience he wanted the world to have is there was nothing, and then there was the iPhone. And everything comes after that. And even today people forget that there were decades, generations of mobile phones before the iPhone. No, no, no. They are the category king. Everybody goes away and they become the reference point. And so category designers differentiate themselves by A – getting really grounded in the problem. And we can talk about the types of problems if you want. And B – they develop a provocative and engaging point of view that explains to the world why this problem matters. And there’s an incredible thing, psychologists and therapists sort of in that domain would get this – when you and I hear somebody articulate our problem better than anyone else, we assume they have the solution.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher Lochhead: And so legendary practitioners who are category designers are actually marketing the problem. They don’t market their service. They market their point of view.

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm. I mean you think about in our industry, Dr. Gottman. So the Gottman’s and his work – John Gottman started studying couples 40 years ago. By studying couples in a laboratory, within about 15 minutes he was able to, with 92 percent accuracy, predict divorce – in the next 10 years they are going to get divorced or not. So he started with the problem that we really have no idea why people get divorced. And so as he developed that problem more, he then looked into communication styles, he looks into other things, then informs practice rather than saying let’s just create a better way to help therapist do practice. No, let’s go back to the problem. We have no idea why people get divorced. We have no idea why people stay together. And that’s what the best research does and then they translate that into something different. If you look at Brene Brown or other people in our field that stand out, it’s exactly what Christopher is saying – what you are saying here that they define that problem so well. I know for me, I naturally go back to the features. How do you push back on that to look at that value and that problem or is it just a matter of practicing it?

Christopher Lochhead: So you could practice it. I prefer you do a stop, change, start, and just cut it out. And I will help you cut it out.

Joe Sanok: Okay.

Christopher Lochhead: Most practitioners, more innovators of any kind, most entrepreneurs and CEOs, they get very excited about their drills and their drill bits, their product. Customers buy holes, not drills. Legendary category designers – and you said it Joe – they differentiate themselves and there’s a big distinction to be drawn between different and better. See, most of us make an unconscious, unquestioned choice to compete on better. Oh look, I am a C-F-D-I, F-I-R-T – CFDI, FIRT – certified. I don’t know what. You know, they are not or whatever the hell, like and it says all you are saying is look at my drill. My drill is better than theirs. Oh, theirs is a 4-second drill, mine is a 3-second drill. Oh, they have a 3-second drill, I am the 2, you know… and it gets more and more ridiculous as we have this features conversation. We want to be the point of reference. So, you know, simple example. I recently had the pleasure of being on the Ziglar podcast. And Zig Ziglar taught me how to sell. If you go back in time, you know he is of course sales and motivational speaker. There weren’t many of them, so he was pretty early. There were some. Here was Zig’s point of view. Zig declared this thing called the automobile university, and that what there is to do in the automobile university is to learn, and put that automobile time to good use. If you roll the clock back 30 years ago, of course there were no mobile phones and there was no… you know, we weren’t listening to podcasts in our car – none of that stuff was happening. Right? And so the minute Zig says automobile university, what he is doing is he is opening the world up to hey, wait a minute. I have all this downtime in the car that I sit there and wait. I could be listening to, in this case, Zig Ziglar tapes and filling my brain with great new ways to sell and motivate and so forth. And so here’s my point. The minute Zig says, hey, automobile university and the light bulb goes on our head that says, you know what, yeah that’s right. I should put that downtime to good work. The minute we acknowledge the problem called I am wasting my time in my car, I then don’t go think, oh, what other sales motivation tape training should I look at. No. I go and I immediately fucking buy Zig Ziglar tapes. And so that’s a very simple way to differentiate. And particularly in this world, have you heard this expression Joe, niche down?

Joe Sanok: Yeah, yeah.

Christopher Lochhead: Yeah. I think it’s a very powerful idea – to find a very, very tight area of expertise. Be known for one small, powerful thing and that thing is the problem that you solve. So for example, my accountancy guy named Greg Finley in San Jose. And Greg Finley is the only reason I have any money. And you think about accounts as a category that’s been around forever and very hard to distinguish ourselves in that category, right? So what does Greg do? He needs to stand. He decides fairly early in his career, he is going to focus on personal tax for technology executives. Because he discovers there’s a set of needs they have which I can explain if it mattered, that is actually quite different than typical executives, particularly around the use of stock options and how to deal with them and how to think about them, taxes, is very complicated. So “niches down” and he becomes the category designer where he specializes in solving the problem of the technology executive who owns equity in their company and he becomes one of the most successful accounts in Silicon Valley. In a category that you would think, you couldn’t ever differentiate. And so what problem do you want to be known for solving, that’s the seminal question. And the next one is do you have a powerful and provocative point of view that captures people’s attention about that problem and opens them up to it, i.e. automobile university and then they get pulled to you. Because once we see the problem, we can’t unsee it.

Joe Sanok: Man! Okay, I want to be respectful of your time. Do you have time to go into the types of problems? I know don’t have a hard and right at the hour, but I want to make sure I am sure respectful of your time.

Christopher Lochhead: I am retired, Joe. (laugh)

Joe Sanok: (laugh) Why? I know you are doing lot of podcast interviews too.. So, cool! Is it okay we keep going then?

Christopher Lochhead: Absolutely.

[HOW TO IDENTIFY A PROBLEM]
Joe Sanok: Man, I am loving this. Okay, so you said types of problems that if we wanted to, we could dive into how to articulate types of problems. I think that would be really, really valuable. What are the different types of problems that people can articulate? And I think that’s going to help us, get a real spinning in applying to our own businesses.

Christopher Lochhead: Such a great question and it’s such an important distinction. So there are problems that the world knows it has, that you have meaningfully reimagined in some way. And so in this world, the person that I know the best is my therapist, Manny Camara. He is a founder of MyoTechnology in San Jose, California, and he is the category designer of a new space called “Mixed Method Recovery.” He is the Mixed Method Recovery expert. And he starts off in massage therapy and over time he realizes, you know, there’s all these techniques and technologies that are coming to the fore and if I reimagine myself as not a massage therapist, but as somebody who solves a problem called, I am a person – in his case mainly athletes who wants to and needs to recover as quickly as possible from injury or even just from excessive training or just sitting in the chair (laugh). And so he like every legendary mad scientist, he starts trying stuff and experimenting with his early adopter clients. Right? So today he uses oxygen therapy. So when you go to see him, he sticks oxygen in your face. Right? He is a pioneer in what’s called percussion therapy. So imagine going to Home Depot, taking a drill, and putting a hard rubber ball on the end of it, and using it to massage people, because with the drill, you can “pgadagadagada,” you can get in in a way that you never could with your hands. And on and on and on. Lots of different approaches… chiropractic… lots of different approaches. And so when you go to see Manny, he can… I just had a problem with my neck… “p-boom”… he solved me very quickly. Now, when he goes to the world and says, hey, I’m a massage therapist, I am this… the world goes, ha, I don’t know. That’ll be a one of a billion. And then he says, at MyoTechnology, we are the world’s first Mixed Method Recovery specialist. Everybody goes, what’s that? And he says, well, as you know, in order to optimize the intelligent design of the body, you need to use a number of different therapies to optimize your ability to recover from an injury or frankly from life, and we know how to do that. So you want to recover fast, you come to MyoTechnology. And so that’s a very simple differentiation, but here’s the thing. Once you hear it, you go, you know what. That makes a lot of sense. Why would I go to just a massage therapist or just a chiropractor? All of a sudden, what he is doing is he is changing the way a market category of buyers think about the problem. Lot of people, who… of course they want to recover if you go to a chiropractor or massage therapist, but what you’re really thinking about is chiropractic or massage, because those are the category names. He flips the conversation. So he goes from drills which is massage to holes which is recovery. And then he tells you the kind of recovery therapist he is – he is a Mixed Method. Those two words were never used by anyone else in the space. And then you go, what’s mixed method. Now he goes from having to have this long conversation about, well, you know, I do “littllle” this, I do “littllle” that (laugh) and nobody remembers what the fuck he said to three words. “Mixed Method” tells you about what he does, at least at a high level and then he has the magic word “recovery.” So all of a sudden he has created a, if you will, a niche for himself centered around a very clear problem and guess what? It’s very fucking hard to compete against Manny now because he is not just another therapist. And if you talk to him and you want to shop so to speak, when you call therapist B, you say what? Do you guys do Mixed Method Recovery therapy or what you do? That’s when you know you’re creating the rules for the category. You are changing the way people evaluate, in this situation a body therapist. And once you do that, you are the category designer. You are the one everyone’s compared to. You are the one now that has pricing power. You are the one who’s now the thought leader, and look I know a lot of people, Manny included, go into this businesses because what at their core is they care about people. They want to make a giant difference. And when you are differentiated and therefore unique, you pull the market to you. You have a lot more clients, a lot more people you can make a difference to as a function of making yourself different, designing your own category, and evangelizing a problem.

Joe Sanok: Christopher, what I love about what you are saying is it’s so applicable for people at private practices. Because in any given town, the ability for practice is to market themselves in the competition. It’s just such a low bar. I have one of my first kinda in my email sequence for new practitioners, there’s this exercise that takes 3 minutes and I have little YouTube video that walk through [Inaudible 00:18:07.03] www.practiceofthepractice.co/start. But what people do is they google just their town plus counseling or their town plus massage therapy or just to see the competition. And overwhelmingly because I have people actually email me back and then I email back to them – I don’t just throw them into some like email function. They don’t fall into a deep hole. I actually talk to people, yeah shocking.

Christopher Lochhead: Wow.

Joe Sanok: (laugh) And so they’ll email me as, oh my gosh, I discovered that the top three people that are ranking have websites that look like they are from the 90s. They are super [generalist 00:18:40.12]. They don’t even have their phone number above the [fold 00:18:42.27]. So they are starting to think differently and the things you are talking about are so simple, but they are so advanced. It’s probably one of those things that there’s different layers to it. At first it’s probably simple, then you are like, wow, this gets really complex, right? Could be so much with this. But in any given community, you look at how many practices are really going after these advanced skills. It’s one, maybe two. So the ability for anybody listening to dominate the market quickly is so profound that it’s like the low hanging fruit of money and of being able to help people, whereas there is other spaces that is highly competitive in every single town, every single industry. And the world of counseling in particular, it’s just not that competitive. So I love what you walked us through with that first problem and how to frame that out because it’s low hanging fruit for people.

Christopher Lochhead: Well, let’s talk about competition. Competition is for losers. Don’t fucking compete. Stand alone. Legends Steve Jobs did not compete with the Blackberry. That’s not what happened. Sara Blakely did not compete with girdle manufacturers. She created new category called shapewear. We want to stand alone. We want to distinguish ourselves. We want to niche down. We want the world, our competitors in particular, to be compared to us. I will give you another example. My doctor, Dr. Cathy Hallsten, god bless her, she has been my doctor for about 20 years. And she is a category designer. She is one of the first doctors in the Silicon Valley area to pioneer a new niche called – and this is exactly the phrase – Concierge Medicine. And so her thinking was, you know, she becomes a doc. She is a Stanford doc, incredibly smart. And everything you would ever want in a doc. Giant, giant IQ, giant heart [Inaudible 00:20:38.28] like the exact person we would all wish to be our doctor, is Cathy Hallsten. Right? So she goes into doctoring and she has this aha’s as a young doc, which is the paradigm in the industry is such that she doesn’t get to spend very much time with patients. Right? And I don’t how she would say, but you know she is like making hamburgers. She is like, no, no, I want to be like a doc. I want to know my patients. I want to be in their… I want to help, you know, etc. etc. And what you realize is the paradigm of the category is not going to allow her to practice the medicine that she wants. So comes up with a new paradigm, right? And I could explain the details of it if it matters, but she has a fewer patients. She charges them more money, and as a result of that if I email Dr. Cathy right now, I will have a response probably within 3 hours. I have talked to her when she is on vacation on a chairlift because she cares. Right? And she is a concierge doctor. That’s the service. So now, when she goes to “compete”… by the way, her practice has been shut, the entire time I have known her (laugh). She only takes family and friends of existing patients because she has technically been shut for 20 years. And the reason she has been shut for 20 years is she is not a doctor, she is not a family doctor. She is a concierge doctor. Now, the first time you hear that, you go, mm-hmm, what is that? I don’t know. Now she gets to tell you her point of view. Well, the traditional paradigm – you got 4332 patients. It’s like making hamburgers and I don’t really get to be a doctor. I wanted to be a real doctor. I wanted to care for people. I wanted to actually go back in time where you knew your doctor etc. You had real relationship etc. etc. and the only way I could figure out to do that was to be a concierge doctor and here’s the model and here’s how it works – and all of the sudden, you go, okay great. If you have the money, you are signing up for that shit. There’s no way you want a regular family doctor any more. You want a concierge doctor.

Joe Sanok: Right. What I love about that…

Christopher Lochhead: And that’s the power of category design.

Joe Sanok: Yeah. So many practices are moving in that type of direction for similar reasons and you’re speaking to my listeners because they are moving away from insurance. They are moving away from kind of being held to, “I can only be this creative.” Because in order to make a living, I have got to see 35 people a week. I only get $61 and 12 cents per session. The only way to make more money is to see more people. Whereas, exactly what you’ve said, if you can focus in on what type of person I want to solve their problems, what kind of category do I want to have in my town or my city or my state, and how do I then raise my game to match that category, I mean that’s the stuff we talk about. Even little things I hear at Mental Wellness Counseling. Even we have a big refrigerator full of Frappuccino and full of new coconut water and we are in a small northern Michigan town. We use the Muse Biofeedback headband to teach meditation in sessions using medical grade EEG. Like there’s people who have crappy websites in town that can’t even do counseling well, let alone do a whole new category. So it’s when I can say everything Christopher is saying – you are saying it has worked for me, I didn’t call it category design. I just knew I had to be different, it is that snowboarding mentality, like I am not going to have an ugly website. I am not going to do that, but I am going to create something that’s entirely me and then other people compare to it. So amazing. So we are getting towards the end of the interview and I know that… yeah, I just feel like… you just feel like a day-long seminar with you. What are some bigger takeaways? I know maybe there’s a lot of other things that maybe we could have hit on. I want to make sure if there is any other bullet points. You want to make sure people take away, we hit those. And then we kind of go into how people can connect with you more.

Christopher Lochhead: Yeah, the other one I would share is as you’re grounding yourself in what’s the problem and you are beginning to build your point of view around that problem, there is an exercise that I’d really recommend – and we talk about it in the book – it’s to get grounded in… we lovingly refer to them as [Inaudible 00:24:49.19]. So what most people do is to attack the existing market in a sense they have a marketing dialogue that’s says we are better. We are better, fast, and cheaper. Right? It’s their 4-minute ads or 3-minute ads. Look here’s what I am going to tell you about that. That’s a race to the bottom. That’s a race to commoditization when we have that conversation. Right? So when we differentiate, we go to a whole new place and one of the exercises you can do is if you take… you know, let’s say I am a marriage counselor today. That’s my primary discipline. That’s my primary differentiation. And as I think about it I go, you know what, I am going to write a list of everything I think is wrong and/or should be different in the domain of marriage counseling today in a way most people think about it, in a way most clients or patients, if you will, buy marriage counseling. So you write a list of the way the marriage counseling category is today from the perspective of a client. And you go, you know what, I don’t like this. That’s not right. I wanted to be different, right? Then you write the corollary list for how you wanted to be. Those are the two’s. So the way it is, you want the world to view that as it from and your vision for the future i.e. your point of view of the way marriage counseling should be is the two. And rather than compete with the from, their 4-min ads or 3 min ads, say, hey you know what, for the last 20 years marriage counseling has been pretty much about these three things. And while those things are important, we don’t do with those three things. We are different. We deal with a different three things and here’s why. And then this is the part that gets really hard to wrap your head around. If you want the three things that everybody else in a marriage counseling industry category does, go talk to them. And if you are interested in solving this problem, which we think is the higher order bit, come talk to us. And so differentiation is about forcing choice. And most of us compete on a comparison dimension as opposed to a choice dimension. So if I say to you, hey Joe, what do you feel like tonight – Sushi or Sashimi. That’s not much of a choice. Right? But if I say to you tonight, hey, what do you feel like, Sushi or ice cream, that’s a fucking choice. I am forcing that choice on you. Right? And here’s another one I’ll say. Legendary category designers have brands that some people love and some people hate.

Joe Sanok: But it seems like they crave having people hate them because it gets the people that are a waste of time or not their ideal client, not even on their map. Just this morning when I was doing that keynote using Star Wars, I was talking about how defining who is in the rebellion and who is working with the empire, it was part of the discussion, and how category designers do this. And part of that was we have a local business here. It’s one of the larger businesses in Michigan. It’s called Hagerty Insurance. They could have just been a regular insurance company, but instead they only do classic car insurance and on their website, they have this whole thing that’s you treat your classic than your everyday car. You are not going to find empty bin of French fry underneath your classic car. You are going to park it in a safe spot, your classic car. And they are one of the leading providers for classic cars. When J. Lennon needs classic car insurance, he calls Traverse City, Michigan. They are not going to insure my Pontiac Vibe. They are going to say, even when it’s a classic, we are not going to insure it because it’s a Pontiac Vibe.

Christopher Lochhead: (laugh).

Joe Sanok: But it saves them so much time, when they only have their ideal client who can afford their insurance and then wants to be valued like a classic car owner is valued. The same thing can happen in counseling world and the practice world as well.

Christopher Lochhead: Yes that’s a legendary example and it doesn’t mean your brand needs to be hated by people who it’s not for, although maybe it is. But to your point, it’s a hardcore differentiation. We attract exactly who we want to attract and we repel everybody else.

Joe Sanok: Well, and so many people, I think, will just try to compete on their lowest common denominator. And that’s something we have tried to intentionally be two to three times more expensive than the average counseling practice here. And every time we raise our rates, we get more clients because I think there is also then that assumption that you are going to get better quality. It forces us to continue to raise our damn thinking in an innovative way where people are going to pay two to three times the regular rates of counseling. We better the offering, something that stands out and that we are not even competing in the same pool as other people.

Christopher Lochhead: I love that you do that, and, and… I don’t know how much time do you have…

Joe Sanok: (laugh).

Christopher Lochhead: …there’s a couple of really giant points here, they are [Inaudible 00:29:59.09] (crosstalk)…

Joe Sanok: [Inaudible 00:30:00.06] yeah, this is awesome. I have time.
[HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF]
Christopher Lochhead: Okay. So… businesses differentiate essentially on three main dimensions: Skill, scale, or time. So Skill. That’s what a counselor is. That’s what a chiropractor is. So scale… you do, you do at such scale that you can do it cheaper than I can. So for example, FedEx. If you and I need to send a document across the country, well, we could fly across the country ourselves or drive across the country ourselves. We could have our own truck and Jimmy or Jenny to drive it across the country. All that stuff is really expensive. Or we could pay 5 bucks or 12 bucks or 15 bucks or whatever it is and FedEx does it for us. Right? So the scale play is you do what you do at such a volume, you could do it at a price for which virtually nobody else can. It’s a scale play. And then the time play is, I may think I have the skill, I may think I have the scale, but my resources are deployed elsewhere and I need to get this done now. So those are the three kind of domains if you will, that companies can actually compete. Now, here is the interesting thing. In this world, the practitioner world, by definition you are at skill play. By definition. Now, here’s what drives the success of skill plays – The size of the proceed skill gap. Said a different way, the problem and the bigger the skill gap between me and you, and the bigger I identify with that problem, the more I need your help. So you know I will go back to Manny, the Mixed Method Recovery guy. Well, I was having a problem in my neck and upper shoulder on my left side and it was causing me not to be able to serve. That’s a very urgent problem in my life. I tried to resolve it myself. I rolled around on it. I asked my wife to massage it. I have a home Manny drill that I drove myself with it, you know etc. etc. and it was still not working. So I go to see him and he fixes me and literally the next day I am surfing. So it’s very obvious that he knows shit that I don’t know and when that knowledge becomes important to me, I need to see Manny, right, the fuck now.

Joe Sanok: (laugh) Well, it sounds like the skill, then also the time together makes it, so that gap is even more pronounced.

Christopher Lochhead: Yes. So what the hell does all this have to do with building a legendary practice? What a point of view gives you is the ability to mark it a wide skill gap that is unique to you and here’s the aha. The bigger the problem, the more time, money, and energy people are going to put towards it to solve that problem. I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, Joe, who say, you know, here’s the problem in our business. We’re way too much of a vitamin and not an aspirin, and what they are saying is our category doesn’t matter. Our category is not urgent and a lot of therapists of one sort or another find themselves living in a world where there are vitamins. Legendary therapists differentiate themselves. And they use a point of view to create – and I use this word on purpose – an impression in their market category that A – there is this giant problem and B – you can’t solve it on your own. There is a skill that is required to solve this problem and we or I depending on the practice are uniquely qualified to solve that problem. And when enough people in the world agree with you about that, you become Dr. Cathy Halsten, where you have a practice that has essentially been sold out for 20 years.

Joe Sanok: Well, I think that what happens often and what I see in practice owners is there is a self confidence, like I don’t want to position myself as the expert. There is all these people like Brene Brown and Dr. Gottman, but in your area you are – and especially if you define a category. And you look even just the stats of 8 percent of US citizens have a masters degree. Of that 8 percent, how many have a counseling or a therapy masters degree? A very small percent. So how much are we willing to pay a plumber to fix a toilet that’s overflowing so that we don’t have crap in our kitchen (crosstalk). A lot, a lot.

Christopher Lochhead: I don’t have any crap in my kitchen.

Joe Sanok: Exactly. (laugh) so, but then people say, well, I am going to just like drop my rates because these people are hurting and I feel like I am taking advantage of them. Like, that’s where I think therapists need to do that self-work of valuing themselves and pushing back on that.
Christopher Lochhead: Can I tell you another Pablo Picasso story?

Joe Sanok: Do it.

Christopher Lochhead: So there is a story, goes like this. I don’t know if it’s true. Who the hell knows, but it’s a great story. Picasso sitting in a cafe in Paris and this lady comes up to him and she says, oh, Mr. Picasso, I am terribly sorry to bother you, but you know I am your biggest fan. Could you just do, do something on a napkin for me, and I will pay you whatever you think it’s worth. And he says it’s all right. And he did something and he hands it to her, looks her straight in the eye and he says, that will be $40,000 please. And she says, but it only took you 20 seconds to do that. And he said, no. That’s where you are wrong. Took me 40 years to be able to do that. And so legendary experts of any kind often undervalue their value. And that’s not what legends do. Now, if you want to do pro bono work, go do pro bono work. But differentiating on price is a very, very powerful thing to do. Right? If you say, hey, what’s the average price of whatever kind of practitioner you are in your market. What if you said, okay, we are going to be five times that.

Joe Sanok: Well I think also allows you to do that bigger work. We are talking about [Inaudible 00:36:33.12] and microfinance and these other things. Yes, maybe I still have a heart for the kids in foster care, that I used to work at when I was making 30 grand a year. I then can say, I am going to take a kid at the state rate of $61 a session because I care for those kids, not out of guilt or trying to like work out my own issues through my client, but I can now actually serve the world better because I know my value. I know my category, and I can then say, I know I’m awesome working with these kids and these kids need really great therapist. That’s way different than just saying I am going to limp along at 60 bucks a session because that’s all I think that I am worth.

Christopher Lochhead: Yeah, and I will tell away something else. It’s something that you could think as studio 54 marketing. I don’t know if you know the story of studio 54, but these two guys buys this essentially kind of warehouse space in New York where nobody is. They are like how in hell we going to fill this place. So first of all they put no sign. So every bar in the history of bars is a giant flashing sign that says, bar. Come here. Drink alcohol. Spend money. Right? No sign. And here’s the genius. One of the owners stands outside of the building, inside of the door and puts up a red, velvet rope. And as people see [Inaudible 00:37:50.06] what is that? It is the hottest bar in Manhattan. It’s called studio 54. And he goes, ah, I have never heard of that news. [Inaudible 00:37:55.29]…

Joe Sanok: Guess probably why, because it’s so hot. (laugh).

Christopher Lochhead: You are not [Inaudible 00:37:59.17]. You shouldn’t have heard about it. Right? [Inaudible 00:38:02.06] will go, “What, what?” And then line start to form, and then they go [Inaudible 00:38:07.29] you can get in, you can get in, you can get in. The rest of guys you fuck yourself. They will go, “hey, hey, hah, hah. I can get in. I was ahead of her.” I don’t care, right? And so what happens is the minute you create a velvet rope and you only let certain people in, everybody goes mental. They have to get in now. And I have known this for a long time and I have used this device throughout my career, but Joe, I have had the most profound experience of it in the last 12 months or so. So, “Play Bigger” is a book in a company. And I retired from the company when the book came out. And my co-authors and now former partners continue in the company. And I just drift away. And it takes about 6 months, I think, for most of my world to realize [Inaudible 00:38:53.00] that big of a deal out of it to realize that I am kind of gone retired. Well. Can I tell you a funny secret about that?

Joe Sanok: Yes.

Christopher Lochhead: Retiring was the greatest thing I ever did for my career. And now I have this crazy, fucking dilemma which is there is more demand for people who want to work with me than ever and you know I don’t really want to do that much work anymore. I want to focus on Legends and Losers, and I want to make a difference for entrepreneurs, but being tied up with one individual company or another is not… no, I want to do some of it, but not lot of it. But here’s my point. I even forgot about the power of studio 54 marketing because the greatest thing I did in my own career was to write a book and say, sorry you can’t have any more of it (laugh).

Joe Sanok: (laugh) That’s awesome. Well, similar to it, a couple of years ago, I see it would have been summer of, allow me to think, ’15, I decided to take Friday’s off as an experiment to just see if I could work four days a week. So I limited my schedule. It was amazing. So I had 3-day weekend every weekend. Then the summer of ’16 I decided, well, let’s see if I can do Mondays too. Let’s just see how little I can work and how much I can outsource and limit what I actually touch. Market, it continued to go up. Our practice grew, the consulting grew – I was able to charge more because I knew I am only working these many hours a week. I am going to spend all the rest with my 3-year-old and 6-year-old. So, same sort of thing where you limit your schedule, when you limit your access, you can charge more. I mean there’s so many takeaways from this.

Christopher Lochhead: And the amazing thing about it is people assume if you’re scarce, you must be amazing. And the minute you say sorry, they won’t offer you. Or you can’t have that. People lose their fucking minds. Right (crosstalk)…

Joe Sanok: I did that when I had a full time job and just launched the practice on the side. I would say, “I’m here. Mondays and Wednesdays, here’s the only times that I have. I have a 4:45.” It was on the hour, because I wanted them to feel like they are getting squeezed in. “I have a 4:45 or I have a 5:30.” And so then people knew to be done on time, they knew to be there on time. They paid the full prices. They never negotiated because they felt like I’m in and I don’t want to be out.

Christopher Lochhead: I got a great story. You want to hear a great story about this.

Joe Sanok: Yes.

Christopher Lochhead: So there is a young man who lives just down street from me. You know, I live in this town called Santa Cruz, California. It’s the quintessential California beach town, and what I love the most about it is a real, in the parlance of our times, legit community. Right? I know my neighbors. We have a community garden we share with our neighbors. We have six hens. We share our eggs. Yesterday… two days ago, I am walking down the street, two doors down my neighbor, [Inaudible 00:41:45.13] says, hey Chris, just want to let you know we are having another big party at the front of our house on Sunday. Hope you can come. I said, all right I am in, what’s the theme and he tells me the theme. “Okay, what can we bring?” And you know, we have a neighborhood email. So we live in a real neighborhood. Right?

Joe Sanok: We just bought a house in that kind of neighborhood, and I can’t wait to move in.

Christopher Lochhead: I’ll tell you Joe, I never lived in a neighborhood like that, and this may sound crazy as a 49-year-old man, I have never had a profound experience of community until the last five years. And I never want to live any other way. I always thought it was better not to know your neighbors. You know, good fences…

Joe Sanok: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah…

Christopher Lochhead: …with neighbor. All that shit. Fuck that, if you live in a good place. You know, the thing I also love about Santa Cruz is it’s more than a location. It’s an ethos. (laugh).

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm. The people want to be there. It’s an intentional community, it sounds like.

Christopher Lochhead: Very much so, and people say, hello and good morning. There is no honking in Santa Cruz. If you honk at somebody in your car, it’s because you are waving, you know him.

Joe Sanok: (laugh) Yaw.

Christopher Lochhead: Or maybe, there’s a whole bunch of us at the stop sign, and you are honking at them to go first and they are honking at you to go first. That’s okay too in Santa Cruz. But it’s that kind of a place. I am not saying we don’t have ever problems. We have other problems, but it’s a community that deeply cares about each other and is connected to each other. It’s a shared ethos. Okay, so that’s it. There is this young man that lives down the street from [Inaudible 00:43:05.10] named Evin, and I forget what Evin does as his main job. He is in his mid-twenties, but his side hustle is he is a baker. And he builds what is an illegal bakery in the front of his house. He creates a fire burning oven, a brick oven, and he bakes. And because we are a community, and there is actually a community email, and there is a community Facebook page and so forth, it’s easy to communicate with people in the community. So here’s what happens. When he starts this side hustle, he is now going to bake for our local community. He tells a handful of people. He gets on the email distribution list. Well, guess what? He sold out every week. And the email comes out on Tuesday. He says, this is what I am baking this week. What you want? We all place our orders and you go pick up in Evin’s front yard on Thursday. And he has got cookies and bread. He makes these things called galettes. I didn’t even know what the fuck of galette was! But man were they ever good. It’s like a… normally got fruit in it and it’s like a thin pastry, awesome thing. Anyway, so guess what? The whole community is buzzing about Evin, and because he is a scarce resource with a legendary product and everybody knows that and everybody knows this is his side hustle, there are people who you will see them on Wednesday. They may be like, ah, damn I missed the Evin email [Inaudible 00:44:31.18] I am not going to get my cookies or my bread or whatever it is. And so there’s this growing demand. Well, guess what Evin’s doing? Evin is proactively looking for space in the neighborhood to start a bakery to convert just like you did Joe, to convert his side hustle into his business. And what’s made him so successful…. yes, he has a legendary product. Once you have one of Evin’s cookies, that’s all you want to eat, but he has done it with this scarcity model. And he has now created a little bit of panic in our community, because if you don’t get your order in, you are fucked, because he could only bake so many things. Right you follow. Right? And that’s legend whether he realizes it or not. From the beginning, Evin has been doing studio 54 marketing.

Joe Sanok: I never thought of my mother-in-law as legend, until you just told that story. She makes upper peninsula pasties. So in Michigan, it’s sort of like a hot pie, hot pocket that has like meat, potatoes, onions. They are amazing, and she is known for some of the best pasties. But for the longest time, the only way to get her pasties was [Inaudible 00:45:41.21] some sort of fundraiser for some kid that’s raising money for something. So she would sell out 500 pasties. People would stock their freezer full of these pasties. So then she decided to sell them at farmers market. And she got to the point where she just said I don’t like this anymore. So already there was a limit to it where every week she would sell out within an hour of being at the farmers market. So what happens is the White House ends up contacting her about her pasties and she turns them down (laugh) like my mother-in-law could have fed the White House, you know, when this Michigan Senator was hosting some dinner at the White House. But she chose not to make it into a business, similar to how you are at the retirement phase. But it just goes to show you how you say, here’s the lifestyle, here’s the boundaries I want to set, how that’s not usually something that’s going to break the bank. Instead it’s going to help your business thrive. It’s going to help you stand out. My gosh! Christopher, where…

Christopher Lochhead: Big scarcity. Big scarcity, and here’s the other thing. There is only one way to differentiate a skills business, and that’s what the thought leadership point of view. I will give you a simple example, right? One of the greatest service is category designers. There is a guy named Marvin Bower. Most people have no clue who Marvin is. Marvin – I am going to call him the founder of McKinsey. He wasn’t, but I am going to call him the founder of McKinsey because he made McKinsey what it is today. So here was the aha. McKinsey was – if I am not mistaken – an accounting firm. It might have been a law firm, but I think it was an accounting firm. It was one or the other. And when Marvin takes over, he takes over because he has this aha, which is we spend the most of our time giving advice to our clients about their business and/or accountants. We are not doing debits and credits, right? I mean… I guess they must have done some of that. So he said, what if all we did was give advice? And literally that simple insight creates the Management Consulting category. So they go from being an accounting firm that gives advice to niching down, right – that seemed like a small niche, right? So they niched down to this new thing that no one ever has really specialized in. And they say, we are a management consultant and we are different from accountants and lawyers. And today, you as a entrepreneur business owner, you go to your accountant or lawyer for business advice, what we are saying to you is when you need accounting or legal work, that’s where you go. Where you need business advice, come to the people who specialize in business advice – “paboom” – an entire industry gets created, off of that one simple insight that in reality was a niche down.

[CONCLUSION AND LINKS]
Joe Sanok: Ah, my gosh! Christopher, we got to stay in contact. This has been insane. Everybody has to go read “Play Bigger.” Follow Christopher’s podcast. It’s Legends and Losers. If every private practice owner in the world were listening right now, Christopher, what would you want them to know?

Christopher Lochhead: What I want them to know is if you truly believe you do legendary work, then your work deserves to be in the world. And the way that work gets into the world most powerfully at a scale that you want it to be, is to differentiate yourself around a unique problem that you are uniquely qualified to solve. And if you get that right, you get to make a gigantic difference in the world. Look, we had Amy Morin, on Legends and Losers. She wrote the amazing book and blog post, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” And she is a therapist who has distinguished herself on this concept of mental strength. That’s what she has hung her hat on. And she took her own story of tragedy – and if you don’t know Amy, I would encourage you to check out her on our episode. She has also got an amazing TED Talk. She is an extraordinary woman. So her personal story of tragedy coupled with her commitment to her clients and her practice, and then little bit of getting lucky – “paboom” – she is now one of the most sought after and self-help gurus in the world, and she differentiated herself on this notion of being mentally strong or mentally tough. That’s a very powerful thing. There’s a lot of therapist you say, “I can help you with your life and with your relation, that “hehehehehehehjha.” You are having a Wal-Mart conversation.

Joe Sanok: Yes.

Christopher Lochhead: Right? Amy did what Marvin Bower did. Amy did what every legendary category designer did. And so the other thing I would share with you is, get really, really clear. What’s the difference that you want to make? What’s the problem that you want to solve, and get very thoughtful around how you would language that problem. What we call shit, changes shit.

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Lochhead: Right? So there is this black and white animal that lives in the ocean and we don’t call that a sea panda. We call it a killer whale, and if I say it’s a sea panda, that changes the way you think about it as opposed to when we hear killer whale. When I was a kid, the people who lived on the streets were called winos and bums. Today, they are called homeless people. Why? Well, you and I relate to and treat a homeless person much differently than we treat a bum. And so category designers move the world from the way it is to the way they wanted to be and it happens in the business realm and it happens at the social realm. Joe, when my mom got her first summer job as a 16-year-old working in a factory in Canada, I think she was making 50 cents an hour. And a 16-year-old boy working next to her made 75 cents an hour. That was the law in Canada. And I said to her, mom, what [Inaudible 00:52:06.09] bullshit was in the world that made it okay to pay women less. And she said, you know, we never thought about it because the paradigm at the time was women are no workforce for very long as they are going to go have kids and men need to provide for family. And so men by law were paid more than women. Well, guess what, just like “The Big Lebowski,” somebody looked at that and said this aggression will not stand man. This is a problem. Right? Then no one knew it was a problem. Today, it’s… as a matter of fact, if you do it today as an employer, you can go to jail. Right? And so what happens is a group of people identified this as a problem and they began to evangelize the problem with a powerful, distinctive point of view. And that point of view is summed up in a phrase that says equal pay for equal work. And once that point of view tips, laws change. And so what I want for every practitioner who is a legendary is I want them to take responsibility for their category positioning because categories make practices. Not the other way around. The problem we are known for solving is what makes us crave. And so I beg you to pull that third lever to take responsibility for how your position, to figure out what your management consulting is, to figure out what your niche is , to be very thoughtful about the language that you use, so that instead of “going to market,” you can teach the market to come to you.

Joe Sanok: Ah, Christopher. This is insane. You are insane. I am so glad that world has you. If people want to connect with you, your podcast, your work, what’s the best way for them to follow you and get more of you?

Christopher Lochhead: (laugh) Well, I don’t know that anybody wants more…

(laughter)

Christopher Lochhead: …but the best place to find me is legendsandlosers.com. You can find all my other places online off of there. You know, come, hang out with us on the show. We have a pretty unique business podcast that, you know, I could tell you about if you like. But yeah if you want to find me, legendsandlosers.com, you can email me off there. You could follow me on all social sites. You could do whatever you want to do or you know, tell me whatever you want to tell me or tell me to go f*** myself or whatever you want.

Joe Sanok: (laugh) Well, what I love about the podcast is kind of what everyone has heard right now in regards to using story and examples and having this very straight forward way of talking. That comes across within your podcasts, within your interviews and it is a very unique podcast in the space and very engaging. And now I see why it’s so long. Because you guys have done this awesome tangents and it’s like, oh, we can’t just stop recording now. We got to keep going. So thank you so much for being at Practice (crosstalk)…

Christopher Lochhead: On that one, Joe, I hate to interrupt you, but…

Joe Sanok: No, no. Keep going (chuckle).

Christopher Lochhead: Podcasts are an incredibly unique medium in that regard. I am a podcast – as my friend Eddie Yoon calls it – super consumer. I am a podcast evangelist. And here’s why. This dialogue that you and I have had now over two episodes, you can’t get this anywhere else. You can’t do this on TV. TV time is way too expensive. If somebody were to transcribe this entire dialogue and put it up as a blog post, it looks too long. Most people aren’t going to read it. Nobody is going to put this on the radio because, again, the radio time is too long. And so if there’s a topic or there are individuals that are interesting to you or important to you for whatever reason, to the best of my knowledge Joe, podcasts are the only way to really get in underneath the covers to get past the 140 characters and the emoji’s and info graphics and the Kardashians and all the other bullshit in our world, to really have an authentic dialogue with people that are interesting about things that we find are interesting and important. Podcasts are the only way I know how to do that. And as a consumer, I was and I am a huge podcast consumer long before I ever started to be a podcaster. And the interesting thing Joe is, I find what’s happened to me over time is I get less and less interested in traditional “interview shows,” whether they are on television or the radio, and I actually, I feel sad for podcasters who essentially just take a radio show and put it on the internet or do a radio show on the internet. We don’t have to do that. I don’t want. You know, we just had Jason Calacanis on Legends and Losers. He is the most successful angel capitalist in the world. He just wrote this incredible book called, “Angel…,” and I want to have a long conversation with him. This is important dialogue that I have. Right? And if you watch him on CNBC, you get two minutes.

Joe Sanok: Yeah.

Christopher Lochhead: Two minutes. [Inaudible 00:56:50.05] all I am saying is I really appreciate what you do because podcasting is a medium that allows you to get into stuff in a way that wasn’t possible before, and you have niched down by focusing on people with these kind of practices. And you have delivered to them really awesome content in this incredible new medium that allows you to open shit up and to get into shit in ways that we never could before. And I think that’s amazing. So I just want to thank you for what you do and thank you for using this incredible medium of podcasting as a unique way to open people up to a whole new set of ideas to do legendary things in their practices.

Joe Sanok: Yeah. I am totally with you and I feel like being able to have conversations with people that you wouldn’t have had a reason to really have a conversation… I mean if I had reached out to you and said, hey what do you think about jumping on the phone for 90 minutes where I could pick your brain about business, you know, 10 years ago, you would have been like, well, here’s the price. You know! Or you would have said, “I don’t know, like why I am jumping on the phone to [Inaudible 00:57:47.08] therapist in Michigan. Whereas [Inaudible 00:57:49.09] when it’s a podcast, it’s this win-win relationship – people that you wouldn’t have connected with now know about your book. They know about your work. So it’s a win for you. But I get to talk to amazing people, pick amazing people’s brains, and practice my own abilities to interview, to key notes, take the knowledge I have and then maybe get some consulting clients out of it as well. So I am with you podcasting. And it’s still the wild west of podcasting. You look at how many podcasts are there to how many blogs. I don’t know why more people aren’t jumping into it. So…

Christopher Lochhead: Well, I find it sad that less than a quarter of the American population, who tends to be technologically advanced, has experienced some podcast in last month.

Joe Sanok: Yeah.

Christopher Lochhead: I ask everybody, hey listen, if you are into podcast, introduce five people you love to five podcasts you love.

Joe Sanok: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Lochhead: Let’s expand the pipe for everyone. I think podcasting is the most [Inaudible 00:58:44.07]. To your point Joe, whatever topic you love… if you love Swedish boat building, there’s probably a (crosstalk) [Inaudible 00:58:52.03].

Joe Sanok: [Inaudible 00:58:52.08] it’s you. What? How are you doing? Just kidding.

Christopher Lochhead: Right?

Joe Sanok: Or your grandma gets her new car, show her how to have a podcast on there where she can listen to something she cares about, like how cool would that be if at thanksgiving grandma was like, “Oh, I heard this new podcast. Thanks for setting that up on my car.” Like, we now live in a world where every new car has the ability to listen to podcast. Grandma can listen to those podcasts. She can talk about it at the dinner table. She can have content she cares about. So it’s just this whole new world of being able to consume what you find important in the world.

Christopher Lochhead: Yeah. And the amazing thing is all the stuff exists. We just shot an episode of Legends and Losers with Professor Tina Seelig, who runs the entrepreneurial center at the engineering school at Stanford. Now, her content that she puts out, that Stanford puts out is approaching that of like TED like distribution. And, you know, whether at Stanford and what Professor Seelig’s is doing or many other Universities, whether it’s a podcast or something that feels a lot like a podcast, the smartest people in the world on almost any topic you want to imagine are giving their knowledge away for free on the internet.

Joe Sanok: Yeah.

Christopher Lochhead: There is no excuse for being stupid that I (laugh)…

Joe Sanok: No, it’s just a matter of finding that content or knowing who to look for, going down their rabbit hole deeper than maybe the other people are doing… man! I am so glad that we connected and so glad that your book was sent to me and that we could do this interview. I know this isn’t going to be the last time I have you on Practice of the Practice Podcast. You are the essential of retiring. You’re getting re-tired. You are getting tired again by helping instructing the world. Christopher, thanks so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast.

Christopher Lochhead: Joe, it’s been legendary. Thank you brother.

Joe Sanok: See you.

[MUSIC]

Joe Sanok: Man, oh man! Three amazing episodes with the one, the only, the never replicated Christopher Lochhead, one of the co-authors of “Play Bigger.” The podcast was bigger than any of that I have done, and this guy rocks! And he graciously is having me on his Legends and Losers Podcast which is just killer because there is so many amazing people that have been on that podcast. So we also really want to thank Brighter Vision for all of their support. Go over to www.brightervision.com/joe if you are looking for an amazing website that’s affordable and is going to get your ideal client. Again, that’s www.brightervision.com/joe. Really excited about the work that they are doing. And coming up in the next month – we are going to be having interviews with practice owners that have scale, that have grown beyond themselves. They’ve moved past just them sitting in a chair, making money. Instead they have launched unique things. They have launched retreats. They have launched having a group practice, all sorts of things that took them to that next level. So we are going to be doing a whole series on those next level practices, what they have done, and I am going to be talking about what I have discovered, like interviewing a bunch of next level people and working with those next level people at Slow Down school. It’s amazing to watch, and I know that you can get to that next level too. Thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great week.

[MUSIC]

Joe Sanok: Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your music, and this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering any legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you need a professional, go find one.

[MUSIC]

[END OF PODCAST]