How Susan’s Contrarian Blog Helped Her Grow a 7-Figure Business

ThoughtLeaderRetreat.com – Episode #2

How Susan’s Contrarian Blog Helped Her Grow a 7-Figure Business

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Alan: Hey welcome, to Episode 2 of Thought Leader Retreat. Things are going great, and I’m having a good year so far.

I have got Susan Lassiter Lyons of Lassiter Marketing right here with us. She is the Chief Fun Officer, and she’s going to

tell us a little bit more about what she does.

You can’t see me right now, but I am still covered with sweat and wearing Under Armor because I did a little bit of

jogging during my lunch break along the North Bank trail of the James River, and didn’t have enough time to change, so

I’m still sitting here dripping.

But here we are. Susan how are you doing today?

Susan: I’m doing awesome and thanks for that visual I won’t be able to get it out of my head now.

Alan: No problem, no problem. I just got back from a very, very fun music and gaming festival. Just picture 18,000 nerds

filling up a Marriott Hotel once a year to do nothing but party, play video games, and listen to cover bands playing the

tunes from classic video games from the 80s and 90s.

I don’t know if you were much of a gamer, Susan, but can you imagine such a place? I had no idea it existed, until about

two years ago.

Susan: I can imagine such a place. I wasn’t too much of a gamer back - you know, I’m old - but back in the 80s, my big

games were…



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Alan: Pong.

Susan: Yes, Pong right my mom didn’t - she actually wouldn’t allow us to have Pong, because she thought that it would

ruin the television, which was pretty hilarious; but yes, I worked at Burger King at the mall. We were right across the

street from the arcade, and so I got in my hours of Centipede and Pac Man.

Alan: Oh my gosh, I remember playing Popeye the arcade game at Safeway while my mom was in line buying groceries,

and there was a race to see how much I could play before she’s finish buying the groceries and would be like “come on,

it’s time to go.”

Susan: That’s awesome.

Alan: So that’s what going on right now. This is my last day of work this week and then I’ve got to jet. I’m flying to

California for a show. I don’t know if you knew this Susan or my listeners, but I’m a musician and I like to remix video

game music and believe it or not there’s a whole scene for that around the country. One of the shows is a big one in

California, so I’m going out to do that. I’m glad we had the chance to knock this out before I head out.

Susan: Me too.

Alan: Why don’t we jump into then to who you are and what you do, Susan. I noticed from your website that you do a

couple of things in addition to the consulting that I wanted to chat with you about.

You’ve got the real estate division which looks like an emphasis on helping real estate investors get funding to buy deals,

which I know is important, because I’m an investor.

Small businesses as well, and then you and I were just talking about how you help business clients to get better results

with their marketing. So tell us a little bit about who you are and your story, if you don’t mind.

Susan: Sure, absolutely. I come from a corporate background, but I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit.

I always think it’s hilarious to tell the story that I had three businesses by the time I was 13, like selling candy, and I

started a babysitting syndicate, which was probably just - kind of a thinly disguised – basically, I was a babysitting pimp is

what I’m trying to get at.

I didn’t like babysitting, and so you know I just hired all the girls in the neighborhood and took half of their earnings and

it was pretty lucrative there for a while until we moved.

Anyway, I digress. I always had this entrepreneurial spirit and my grandmother, who raised me, came from the

depression era. She came from a real mindset of lack and scarcity, and so it was really kind of drilled into me, that “Hey,

you go to work for a company and you give them the best years of your life, and they give you a paycheck. You have job

security, and you retire and have a pension,” and all those great things that probably were true back in the 50s, that

really aren’t so true anymore.



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Then I went to work for the car rental industry when I was in college, and I spent five years at Dollar Rent-A-Car. Then I

was 11 years at Hertz working my way up the corporate ladder, and I ended up at the corporate headquarters of Hertz

Rent-A-Car in Parkridge, New Jersey, with an executive level title.

I was on the road traveling to some destination city in North America three weeks a month. I would leave on a Sunday

afternoon, fly somewhere, stay there all week, and then come home on Friday.

I did that for three weeks a month for about two years. I just decided that you know what, this is not what I want to be

doing for the rest of my life. I kind of climbed up the corporate ladder and took a look around and decided that I really

hated the view; and so I climbed back down, came back home to Denver, Colorado, which is where I live, and where I

love, and started looking for other endeavors.

Real estate investing was something that I had started when I was at Hertz. I didn’t have enough cash flow for my

investments to make that happen for me on a full-time basis initially, so I decided to take a job at a mortgage company,

where my sister worked.

I learned about the mortgage business and financing, and decided to leverage that expertise to not only fund my own

real estate investments, but also to open up a mortgage company where we could provide financing for real estate

investors. Everything just kind of mushroomed from there.

Alan: Well, first of all, you never struck me as a pimp, Susan.

Susan: It’s kind of a secret, don’t tell anyone.

Alan: It’s not a secret, you’ve got a fedora on right here in your Skype photo.

Susan: That is true, yes, that is true.

Alan: Well, here’s what I know about the corporate world, all right, because I’ve never been in it. I’m a bit of a freak; I

started a business in college and kind of skipped that. But, I’ve been networking and have been friends with people who

are in that world, or who’ve left it ever since then.

I don’t want to alienate people in it too much, because some of my clients are in that world, they’re in corporations. Not

everyone is a small business owner or a solo-preneur or whatever.

However, from what I’ve heard there’s pros and cons like anything, but the people who leave say they just don’t like the

environment, it’s competitive. You’re on salary and so that means 60 hours a week, no life, can’t have a business

sometimes outside of that, and it’s hard to leave with those golden handcuffs.



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Do you know what I’ve noticed about the people who leave the corporate world and say you know what, I’m doing

things my way, they get shit done. And it gets done a lot faster than others. I guess that’s some of the good habits that

you pick up working in that kind of world, would you agree with me there?

Susan: I do agree. It’s great habits, and look I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. I totally respect what you’ve

done and your ability to bypass the corporate world.

I don’t want my comments to appear to be bashing the corporate world, because I learned everything I know from some

really excellent bosses that I had and some wonderful mentors that were really instrumental in helping me kind of form

the discipline and beliefs, and the practices and philosophies that I have today.

In corporate, there’s good and there’s bad. I tend to be super casual, and there aren’t a lot of companies that just let you

wear flip-flops to work. I know that Hertz definitely wasn’t one of them. That was problem number one.

And I tend to be kind of blunt, and that’s certainly something that’s - at least the higher you go in companies, I find and

you rise through the ranks - the more that’s frowned upon, really being able to just speak freely and shoot from the hip,

and so what really was cool and worked when I was in the field at Hertz and in operations.

It didn’t work so well at corporate. I found it very stifling, but man I learned some great habits, and I learned some

awesome practices. And, even more importantly, in addition to learning what to do, you also learn what not to do.

Alan: I think having mentors would be very valuable, not to mention the whole water cooler experience of just

socialization with other people around you.

Let’s talk about being a leader though. In that kind of environment, you see more and more companies now where the

CEO is blogging, or the CEO is giving more speeches, or doing things through content marketing to get their name out

there so that the whole company will benefit from it.

What I’m seeing is a lot of organizations trying to change to be more innovative with their thoughts, to come out and say

things to really lead the pack, but at the same time, how is that possible when you’ve got a culture of “fit the mold, don’t

speak your mind, don’t come up with new ideas from below?”

Ideally, I think an organization would get ideas from everyone and then maybe the CEO or whoever the spokesperson is,

is the mouth piece representing everyone’s ideas. I’m curious what your take is on that, and what your definition is of a

thought leader in the first place.

Susan: Great question. To the corporate question, I think that it’s difficult to be part of a giant company. With Hertz, the

company that I was with, it was like “Oh my gosh, it was like a Herculean effort to get anything internally, let alone to

kind of go out and say, ‘Hey everybody, this is what we think.’”



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Hertz was very image conscious, it was very, very brand conscious and very brand protective. I remember I worked at

Hertz during the whole OJ Simpson debacle and OJ Simpson was a celebrity spokesperson of ours. Obviously you don’t

want your celebrity spokespeople to be accused of murder.

Alan: No, I don’t.

Susan: Probably rule number one in the PR Department, let’s not choose the murdering people. It was a system of

conformity as opposed to real leadership, I found. Certainly, I had the ability to affect change with the departments that

I ran, within certain limits.

Interestingly enough, one of the reasons why I was kind of like a superstar at Hertz was because I did something kind of

subversive that was against the Union rules with my crew on a graveyard shift at the lowest level.

It ended up - and it was a big secret - it ended up saving our division like hundreds of thousands of dollars and overtime

costs and production costs and all sorts of monetary savings over the course of a couple of quarters. It certainly it flowed

to the bottom line over the course of the year that we were doing it.

I got called out on the basis of, “Hey, what are you doing? This isn’t allowed, because it’s against the rules.” But then I

ended up being celebrated because I demonstrated enough leadership to recognize that there was an issue and a

morale problem and turned it and kind of broke the rules.

It was really kind of mixed messaging. It’s like you’re celebrated for breaking the rules and being a thought leader and

being a leader, and then they promote you, and then the higher you go the more they try to kind of beat that out of you.

I think that was probably the biggest issue that I had with it.

However, to your point about thought leadership. I think that for me it’s just simply being a free thinker, and not

conforming. It’s really easy, certainly in corporate, but even in like what we do, owning online businesses, and

information businesses, and training businesses, and coaching businesses, to really look outside and say hey what is

everybody doing that works, right?

We hear terms like swipe files, systems and tactics, and programs, and things that we can…

Alan: Modeling.

Susan: Yeah, modeling, and plug and play, and all this stuff. Just today I had a request from an affiliate who said, “Hey, I

don’t see any prewritten emails to promote a certain product of yours,” and part of me was like, “Oh, I can’t believe I

didn’t write any emails.”

The other part of me was like, “Why don’t you write your own damn emails?” You know, be a leader! Tell your people

why you think my thing is important if you want to sell it.



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I think that for me, being a thought leader is just having the ability to be confident in my own thoughts and in my own

path, and to be to effectively communicate that regardless of the circumstances or the perceived backlash that might

occur.

Alan: Well, it’s hard to do that when there’s people around you doing the opposite and making a lot of money, am I

right?

Susan: Well, that’s true - you’re absolutely right. I’ve got to be honest…when I first started this information business

and training business back in January of 2009, I had just come off of a devastating period in my life.

The economic situation in this country kind of ruined my real estate investing business for a while, and it led me to have

to close one of my businesses, which was a mortgage company.

It was a lot more comforting for me at that time to just plug into someone else’s system and copy what everybody else

was doing, because there was fear around hey, I need to get money in here to pay the mortgage. I can’t really afford to

(these were kind of my own thoughts)…

Alan: Can’t deviate.

Susan: I can’t deviate, right. I can’t afford to forge my own path, because it’s the unknown, and I don’t know it will

work. Honestly at that time, honestly Alan, I don’t know if I had enough confidence in my abilities to lead in this new

business at that time anyway.

It was just a lot easier to kind of plug into someone else’s system and copy what other people were doing. But now I see

looking back, like we spoke of earlier, I think I made a mistake in doing that coming out of the gate, because then you

end up attracting people and clients and customers to you that aligned with you when you were in that mindset.

Now that I’m out of it, there is a good percentage of the clients and customers I attracted at that time that are just not

my ideal client now. I don’t align with them at all, because I’ve evolved.

Alan: You know one thing I’ve learned…I don’t know how accurate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is, but we had to study

that like five times in college. We learned it in business. We learned it in psychology. We learned it in communication.

We kept learning it over and over; but the bottom line is…we have lower level needs, like food, water, shelter; and then

above those, there’s needs like relationships, and human contact, and things like that.

It’s not until the lower level needs are met that you can concentrate on the higher level needs such as your values,

making the world a better place, self-actualization, etc.

So when everyone is scrambling around to get out of this crisis that we’re in, and a lot of real estate investors or people

in that world were in a crisis. I lost my shirt in a few deals. It took me a while to clean it up.



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I watched everyone scrambling around. The same thing I think with people who pay for coaching, or pay to learn how to

do things in business, business services, marketing services…there just wasn’t the cash there used to be and people were

trying to take care of today’s bills.

The highest priority was short-term results, short-term results, short-term results. Everyone - I met a lot of online groups

and people were always talking, “Well, this gets results, clickbaity headlines get results, this kind of bait and switch gets

results…”

I’m like, “Yeah, but you know what’s more important than results? How about leaving the world a better place? How

about doing what’s right?” So, I love hearing stories about people who said “No. You know what? I’m going to do it my

way.”

I don’t know if you read John Loomer’s blog, but he has a blog about advanced Facebook marketing. And I was speaking

with someone on his team who helps him out about how he got started. He left the corporate world as well, and just

started making blog posts for over a year and a half before anything really happened, and then suddenly he blew up.

So imagine if he had jumped into it the traditional way? There is just something I love about the idea he ignores

everyone else and does their own thing, but even when people leave the corporate world and they become their own

person, the herd mentality still exists inside of you.

Susan: It does, yes.

Alan: You could spend a lifetime getting rid of it, because then what do you do? You go meet friends in different circles

and everyone just circle jerks the same mantras that that group of people holds in common. Have you noticed that as

well?

Susan: I have noticed that. I think you and I both kind of rebel against that. But I should say this, this business that I have

now - this is my sixth year - and before I took some comfort in that, you know it sounds weird, but I took some comfort

in that circle jerk.

I think of hey, here’s some other people doing you know what I am doing and having success in what I’m endeavoring to

have success in and so it felt like, “Hey, these are kindred spirits and these are people that I can rely on, and these are

my people, right?” My tribe…that’s the word that’s popular now.

Alan: That’s right.

Susan: Then you start to realize, or at least I did (I’ll own it), that it’s like “Well, these are not my people,” because like

you said, nobody has the answer. Everybody is just trying to copy someone else, or put their own spin on someone else’s

thing.



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It’s taken me a long time to realize that there’s a big difference between strategy and tactic. Tactic, right like you just

said, all that stuff is short-term. It leads to short-term results and people that are always trying to game the system for a

short-term gain.

Strategies are typically pretty timeless and if you align with a strategic vision in your business as opposed to a short-term

tactical one, I think that overall you’re going to be a heck of a lot happier in the long run.

Alan: I like that. Planning and strategy. Strategy is a function of leadership.

Susan: Um-hmm.

Alan: Management, or getting projects completed or the tactics, is a function of management, so the best leaders are

both, according to Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth, the best leaders are both leaders and managers and not just

one or the other because if you have a pure leader, then he’s very inspirational, a pie in the sky, big vision, but can’t get

anything done.

Anyway there is just the mantra of action, action, action, action, planning is worthless, when I’m like, “Hey, why not

both?”

That’s something I want this podcast and this community to be all about. I want “Why not both” to be written on my

tombstone, because it pains me to see people swing 100 percent one way or 100 percent the other when in reality the

truth is usually a harmonization of two polarities.

The question I had when I started this was, “Where are those people who aren’t like totally bought into the corporate

world and drinking that Kool-Aid or totally bought into “we’re going to be solo-preneurs and make money in our

underwear,” work from home, business opportunity types of folks. Where are just the normal people who want to grow

a business and apply what works and do something new.

Susan: Here we are!

Alan: Yeah, here we are, so this is a good start.

Susan: Cool.

Alan: Shout out to Mike Hill as well from Internet Marketing Super Friends for giving me the confidence to see that

there was a need for this kind of thing and that it could grow in popularity.

Well, tell us about what you do now, Susan. What kind of services are you providing and for what types of clients?

Susan: Sure. There are two divisions in my business. We have the real estate investing division where we provide

information, training, coaching seminars, and leadership to real estate investors across the country.



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My niche within the real estate investing niche is always around the financing piece of it, and you know I had a lot of

success and continue to have success in being able to raise capital from what we refer to as small investors in the

business, and that just means individuals as opposed to institutional investors.

I’ve been able to you know train people in how to do that so that they can take control of funding their own deals as

opposed to having to rely on the really stifling underwriting restrictions that come with doing business with conventional

banks. That’s the real estate side.

On the small business side, you know I work - the strategies for raising capital that I have used in real estate and to grow

my mortgage company and that I train to real estate investors work on any business. Once small business owners who

were entrepreneurs and friends of mine kind of figured out that “Hey, Susan has some magic over in the capital raising

thing, let’s pick her brain and see if it will work for our business.”

I kind of opened it up a little bit to create a division where I was teaching those strategies to small business owners; and

what I decided, just actually a few months ago, probably the last six months, I’ve been kind of on this journey of self-

exploration.

What do I be when I grow up, who am I, and all those kind of weird questions that we start asking at a certain point in

our lives and our careers, was that I think there’s a better way that I can serve people at a higher level.

So I’m moving into the area now of just you know straight up business coaching and business consulting with a focus on

profits, growing revenue, and affecting growth, monetization, profit maximization in businesses, so working with lots of

different types of business owners but on a deeper level and it’s pretty fun.

Alan: It sounds like you know a bit about that. I saw on your Facebook page that your business had reached over seven

figures in the last year.

Susan: Oh yeah. The business that I started in 2009, the information business, hit six figures in the first seven months

that we were open and that was my first kind of revenue goal.

Then, I set my sights on cracking a million dollars in sales annually, and we did that in 2013, and we did it by August of

2013, and then we did it again last year, in 2014. For me, here’s the thing, you know we talk about strategy versus tactic.

I wanted to get away from the conversations of what’s the tactic, what’s the tactic, teach me the tool, teach me the

thing that’s going to get me the short-term reward and I want to…

Alan: Spell it all out for me.

Susan: Yeah.

Alan: I’m as dumb as Homer Simpson, I need to make it push button for me.



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Susan: Right I want to get away from that, and I wanted to focus more on helping business owners with the overall

strategy and helping them understand what’s important in their business, and this was - it was like this giant watershed

moment for me.

When I realized this, I was standing in a workshop for my coaching students on the real estate side, and I had warned

them, I said you guys we’re going to dive into your numbers, right, when you come to this workshop I want you to come

with your recent profit and loss statement.

We’re going to dive into the P&L, we’re going to look at our margins, we’re going to understand what we need to do to

create a plan to increase our margins and focus on revenue, and focus on profits. I was having that kind of let’s manage

by the numbers discussion.

Two things happened. One…I got questions about “What’s a P&L?” which was horrifying. Next, at the actual workshop

no one and I’m telling you, Alan, I felt more like crying. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, people.”

Alan: Who was there? I mean what kind of business owners are we talking about?

Susan: These were real estate investors, people who had been investing in real estate. And when we got there, I asked

the question. I said okay, let’s go around the room, right, because you want to establish the gap, I want to know where

you are right now, and I want to know where you want to be, so that we can figure out what our gap is, and we can

create a plan to close that gap. You know…business 101.

I said I want to know what your net profit was in the previous year, and everybody just looked at me really blankly,

“Well, what do you mean, net?”

I’m like, “What do I mean, net?” What was your net profit, right? Not your gross income or your gross sales, I want to

know what your net profit was for the year. It should be obviously there on your P&L.

Well, we don’t understand what you mean by net. I felt like I was standing in front of a group of people that like didn’t

speak my language, suddenly, Like I was all of a sudden speaking in Chinese and they’re looking at me like I have four

heads, while I’m like, “These are generally-accepted terms in business.”

Alan: You were talking business to non-business people is what it is.

Susan: That was sad for me to discover, because all along I had just assumed that they were business people, and they

weren’t.

I realized very quickly, you know what, this is not - these are not the level of discussions that I want to be having. When I

talk to someone I want to - and I say you know what was your net profit last month, I want them to be able to tell me.

I want to be able to establish a gap, and I want to help them close that gap. I want to work with people at a higher level,

so that I can affect more long-term change in their companies and in their lives quite honestly. That was my big moment.



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Alan: It is refreshing, and they often have the experience, they have teams, they can figure out the tactics, once they

get clear on the strategy. If you have to spell out how to create a YouTube channel, I don’t know how far you’re going to

get.

Tell us about clients right now that you’re coaching and consulting? What size, industry, what kind of cultures? What

specifically do you do for them?

Susan: Sure. Here’s the interesting thing, and this kind of goes against the grain, right but we’re kind of outliers and we

don’t always follow the rules, which is one of the things I love about us.

Everybody is “Oh, if you’re going to start a new business, or if you’re going to start a new division of your business, then

you have to get clear on your target market. You have to go after a certain focus or niche,” right?

Is it going to be chiropractors? Is it going to be real estate brokers? Is it going to be you know whatever - insert whatever

occupation there, and I was like gross, you know I don’t want to like spend the rest of my life helping chiropractors.

Nothing against chiropractors, I mean because you know I have a great one and she helps me, but it’s boring.

I think as an entrepreneur, I want to be able to have variety in my work day just like somebody else probably wants to

have variety in theirs. Instead of focusing on a specific industry or market or niche, instead, I got really super clear on my

idea client, and what that person was like and created an avatar around that, both male and female.

I decided hey, this is the type of person that I’m going to attract, as opposed to you know they have to be a chiropractor

or else I can’t help them, which has been really cool.

Now, I get to work with like super cool people and even though they’re from completely disparate industries and

markets, and nobody does the same thing, what you find very quickly is that business is business.

Certainly when I’m teaching people about growth drivers and about the things that really move the needle on profits.

There are essentially 18 different growth drivers that we can focus on, and not all 18 are going to be universally

applicable across all businesses. But, there are about five or six that are hard core, move the needle, completely

universal and applicable across just about every type of business.

I recently bought a new house. I was in my previous house for like 16 years and I had affectionately referred to it as the

Gold Digger, it was a 110 year old Victorian and I was just really tired of putting money into it, and I wanted a nice new

modern house.

I wanted to upgrade that level of my life. So I hired a real estate agent who was really familiar with selling properties in

the area that I lived, and she fit the exact profile of my ideal client, and even though I was like “I don’t even want to have

a real estate discussion anymore, so I don’t want to attract anybody in the real estate business,” I realized very quickly

that she was the exact kind of person that I wanted to be working with, so she was one of the very first people that hired

me for this new venture.



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Now we work together on helping her grow her business and take her business to the next level.

Alan: Good for you. I’m glad you finding the kinds of clients that match with your vision, what kind of business and

company you want to have.

Susan: It’s true, and you know I heard something recently too that my mentor shared with me and it’s a hard thing to

hear when you’re just starting out or when you’re kind of low on that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs of having to figure

out where your next meal is coming from, or making sure that there’s enough money to pay the mortgage this month.

He said in terms of client selection, “Sometims the best thing you can ever do for your business is to disqualify someone

and refuse to work with them,” instead of “do everything you can to entice them to work with you.”

It’s been interesting to have the conversations with people that I’m thinking, “Well, there might be something there”

and then as I speak with them, I realize very quickly that this is not my person, that I don’t want to be “married” or

“partnered” with this person for the next year or so.

It’s an interesting experience when you’re having a sales conversation with someone who’s considering hiring you for

consulting and you just kind of end the conversation and say, “You know what, it’s been great chatting with you, and I

wish you all the best,” and you don’t make an offer, because then they’re really confused. They’re like, “Why don’t you

want to work with me?”

It probably could be some sort of backdoor sales strategy, but for me being able to disqualify quickly on the front end is

really important this time around.

Alan: If it’s not a good fit, it’s not a good fit.

Susan: It’s not.

Alan: It’s kind of like a relationship, it’s like…I don’t want to say a marriage because you have multiple clients, but you’re

with them for the long haul—6 months, 12 months, several years, you get to see things change over the long run and if

you’re not working with your friends, as Matt Church says, then who are you working with?

Susan: Exactly.

Alan: Well, let’s play a game then, I’ve got my definition of what a true thought leader is, and it’s not necessarily

confined to business. There’s people creating change, nonprofits, government, etc., who have some new way to add to

the collective sum of knowledge or really change things by having original ideas and getting them distributed.

Let’s say in a given business, there’s plenty of companies that are very similar and with your clients, you’ve got clients

from all kinds of industries and so do I, and the way to grow, and the way to help people, is often the same regardless of

the product.



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So how do you believe someone can become not just another product, or service, or want to be celebrity, or blogger, or

whatever, but how can someone become a true thought leader to set them apart from the rest?

Susan: I think it has to do with being original. I think to a certain extent it has to do with putting on blinders. It’s like

with music. A lot of times you’ll hear you know when someone comes out with a new hit song, there will sometimes be a

lawsuit from someone that will say that they lifted that beat, or they lifted that melody, or that was my song, and I’m

suing them now because that’s my original work.

I think that to a certain extent it’s difficult to insulate yourself from that. If you’re too much in the space, trying to absorb

the space, trying to absorb everyone else’s thoughts, and everyone else’s content, and everyone else’s information, it

would be really hard.

If you’re an artist, like a musical artist to like listen to music for inspiration, and then think that you’re coming up with

something truly original, and then you might hear you know these kind of echoes of oh, that is kind of a familiar melody,

or a familiar you know set of words or whatever.

I think the same thing happens across all industries. I think that in order to be a true thought leader you have to try to

put on blinders and you have to insulate yourself from that as much as possible. We talk about blogs, we talk about

books, and people in our industry and our space and what they’re doing, and there’s a certain school of experts or gurus,

we’ll call them, who say that you have to do competitive research and see what everybody else is doing.

For me, I’ve always said, “I don’t give a shit what anybody else is doing.” It’s not important to me. I am doing what I’m

doing and they’re doing what they’re doing, and why do I have to waste my time looking at what they’re doing? Because

in the long run, I know in my heart of hearts and in my core that what they’re doing is not going to be what I want to be

doing. Does that make sense?

Alan: It does. Can you picture Elon Musk doing keyword research on electric cars and saying “hmm, this doesn’t look

like a profitable niche.”

Susan: What are they going to be searching for, you know.

Alan: I know, right. He’s like “No, I think I know people or a certain group of people well enough to know that this would

be the shit and I’m just going to do it, because I have that confidence, or I’ve actually proven it through trial and error.”

Susan: Right, like I have a friend who just bought a Tesla, and it has insane mode, right you push a button and crazy ass

things happen. And I could just imagine if that was part of like the Ford Motor Company and some engineer said, “All

right…we want to put an insane mode in this car,” the people from the safety department would lose their shit! It would

never get into production, you know what I mean.

Your point is well taken, and that’s exactly the point that I’m trying to make.



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Alan: Good, because someone’s originality, their ideas, their value, their true leadership, I can’t create that for them. I

consult with people, I help them to get their name out, get more sales and all that through content marketing, but I can

put a Michael Jackson jacket on someone, but it doesn’t make them Michael Jackson.

Susan: Exactly.

Alan: So that’s something - that’s something they have to bring to the table, but what I found is after that with a little

help, you can really leverage that thought leadership in order to grow your business or whatever cause that you’re

working with.

How about we jump in right now, I want to get some examples from you or best practices, things that you found to be

helpful with content marketing, because I’ve seen you post blogs over the years, we’re in that same world of online

marketing. You’re certainly an expert at online marketing.

The four pillars as I like to call it, for lack of a better model for now of content marketing, are the strategy and the

planning, making the editorial calendar, the plan, what are we going to put out and when. And I would be surprised if

five percent of people actually do this.

Then comes the content creation, and then the actual promotion. Then I’d be surprised if five percent of people do this,

the measuring of how effective it is through tracking, analytics, etc., so that we know this is working.

Can you share with us some of the case studies or the best practices you’ve seen for someone with a plan, creating great

content that gets noticed and how it helped to serve their business?

Susan: Sure. First of all, it helps to be polarizing. I can look at my blog, for example, and my blog started, you know in

terms of like content, this goes all the way back to when I had my mortgage company.

I decided to start a newsletter for my customers and some of my loan officers are like, “That’s dumb, you know why are

you wasting your time on this newsletter, right trying to educate them about stuff, we’re a mortgage company, we’re

just going to do their loans.”

I thought the more that I can educate them about how this process works, then the easier our job is going to be in the

long run, because investor loans are difficult to do.

I also thought that if I could provide them other solutions, like for lead generation and you know introduce them to

other tactics and tools, which might be able to lead to you know more deals and more profits in their company.

It just meant that eventually that was going to lead to more deals for me to finance for them, and more profits for my

company. My whole kind of thought process with developing content was self-serving. I wanted to educate my people

and make them more successful in the hope that they will do more business with me.



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I started this super cheesy little newsletter. It was called the Investor Insights, and oh my God, it was the worst. Looking

back now, it’s kind of hilarious, like in Microsoft Publisher, like clip art, and all this stuff, because I am a money person

and a business person, I’m not graphics designer.

The content was good, so then when blogs came about then I took it online and started posting my thoughts and my

advice up online at www.investorinsights.com and we were voted a couple years running the number one real estate

investing blog online, which was very rewarding.

I think that it comes from not just a willingness to kind of curate really great information in an effort to make your

people better and more successful, but also not being afraid to take a position.

Alan: Was the content itself polarizing or just your decision to use a kind of marketing channel that no one else was

using?

Susan: My content itself was a bit polarizing, because when I came out of the gate, I really kind of positioned…it was like

us against them, right, it’s us against the banks.

If Goliath is the conventional banking system, then we are the David. It’s going to be the mission and I’m going to be

your leader around creative financing strategies, raising capital from individual investors, as opposed to institutional

investors, helping you understand how to structure your deals so that you can take control of the financing, and you

don’t have to worry about third party banks or anybody else you know telling you what to deal.

There was some backlash, you know some of the old boys were like “Hey, we go to banks and that’s what we do” and

I’m like “Fine, but I raise private capital and that way I can control it.”

Then, when your bank lines get shut off, and your banker says he can no longer loan to you because there’s a giant

mortgage meltdown happening like in 2008, you’re going to come around, and you’re going to realize that my way is the

better way and that’s when we’re going to be off to the races.

It’s been polarizing all the way, you know there’s an awful lot of “who do you think you are?” and “I can’t believe that

you’re recklessly teaching these small real estate investors how to rob Aunt Millie of her retirement savings to lose it on

real estate,” and stuff like that, you know?

It’s been interesting, and I often speak out against…I mean, real estate investing, the stuff that’s out there a lot of times,

you know kind of going back to the short-term tactics, it’s really scammy. There are so many scams.

I try to speak out against that. You know, I can think of one specific example - business lines of credit. There are people

that are like, “If you want a business line of credit, you have to have a seasoned company. I’ll sell you a seasoned shelf

company and charge you thousands of dollars and then you can get credit and blah, blah, blah.”



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I basically took a position and said, “You know what, that’s all bullshit. That doesn’t work, and that’s - a dumb idea and

expensive idea anyway,” so here are the six steps to establishing a business line of credit if you’re willing to put in the

work.

To this day, I think that post on the blog has gotten like the most attention and reach in terms of shares and comments,

and people bring it up to me all the time, and the feedback that I get is “thank you for being so honest. Thank you for

being so real. Thank you for not just like kind of regurgitating what everybody else is out there regurgitating to us.”

Alan: It sounds like your real estate blog was wildly successful. I mean what led to that? Awesome posts like you

described? How often did you post? How did you come up with topics? How did you get the word out about your posts?

What led to that success?

Susan: So, I was one of those people that you kind of made fun of initially where I really had no strategy or overall plan

for the blog. I love to write, right, that probably still is a secret dream of mine to be able to be a writer and certainly I did

an awful lot of that when I was young.

I was like I’m just going to - whenever something pisses me off, or whenever I feel like I have something to say - that’s

when I’m going to write about it, which is probably not the best way to run a blog, right, especially in business if you’re

hoping to attract clients that way, or you know use leverage or content to revenue.

I realized I’m going to have to get serious about this, and you know it’s kind of the whole “Am I going to be an amateur

at this, or am I going to go pro with this?” to kind of lift from Steven Pressfield. I decided if this is going to be a staple of

my platform, my hub site, then I have to get serious about this, and I have to commit to doing this, and I have to go pro

with this.

We developed an editorial calendar around topics that came out of surveying my people. I basically just used the very

highly technical and little heard of tactic of just asking them what they want. Hey you guys, what do you want learn

about?

What are the topics that are important to you? Tell me. And then, I used that feedback to create like 12 different

categories, and then we planned so each month was built around that specific category.

Then we would write articles and blog posts that were specific to that topic. And we would often times either have a

webinar or release or promote a product on an affiliate basis that had something to do with that specific topic.

That was how we got better and kind of went pro with that.

Alan: That’s cool. I don’t know how much viral sharing, or social sharing played into that, but what is cool these days is

when you’re planning what to write, the sheer knowledge of what people want to hear alone is enough to know that if

you write an awesome post on this awesome topic, that people are probably going to like it, they’re probably going to

share it, they’re probably going to read it, as opposed to before, it was nothing but numbers and keyword research.



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What’s the most popular? Oh, this is what the computer says is popular, so I’m just going to fit that mold and write

about whatever it is people are searching into here, when it could be off your topic, off your core message. You might be

all over the place. I like your method. It’s more personal.

Susan: Honestly, it speaks exactly to what we’re talking about. It’s the thought leader approach as opposed to the

keyword research/herd approach. Sure, if I were to do the keyword research and say “Okay, here’s the list of articles

that I’m going to write,” then a couple of things would happen.

I’d probably get more traffic, right? Absolutely. My blog doesn’t get a ton of traffic, but it would be boring as hell - not

only to read, but it would be super boring to write, because I’m not passionate about those topics.

I don’t have any sort of vested interest in if the FHA is changing something to do with mortgage insurance premiums. I

don’t care. Who cares? So they did it.

You know somebody wants to see me call bullshit on something, or help them in a deeper way and that’s what I’m

about. So I think that it helps align people to you, because they’re like “This is something different that I’m not going to

get everywhere, this is not just what the ‘keyword research’ or what Google is telling them that they should be shoving

down my throat. This is actually what is important.”

Alan: Did you get feedback and adjust your strategy and tactics along the way? Because it’s one thing to just plow

ahead and do things your way, but then sometimes you’re wrong. How did those two balance out?

Susan: I’m going to say on this I wasn’t wrong, and on this I really followed my heart and it worked out well. Now, I say I

wasn’t wrong. When I have had people look at my business and in order to establish a business value for example, or is

that a salable business, or do I want to promote your stuff?

Are you an A list person or expert in this niche, or are you a Z list expert or person in this niche and they see the kind of

traffic that my blog gets, they probably think “Wow, this isn’t a very popular blog.”

If I were doing it for that purpose, then I would probably be a lot more judgmental about my tactic and the strategy that

I decided to pursue.But that wasn’t the reason why I did it. I did it because I wanted to speak to my core audience and so

what we find is that yeah, we get great search engine traffic.

I know that there are going to be certain hot topic issues and certain pieces of content that people are looking and so I’ll

certainly allow for that, but for the most part, it’s me speaking to my core audience.

To really answer your question about making adjustments, I can probably answer yes, because here is one of the things

that I recognize pretty quickly in doing research, not to kind of see if I was making the wrong decision strategically for

my blog, but to just kind of see what people are looking for.

This was before I even really had my own list of people to ask, so I went online and I noticed what a lot of people were

searching for were real estate forms and real estate documents. I thought “That’s something that I can provide.” I’m not



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an attorney, but certainly there are real estate forms and documents that are distributed freely online and even some

that you can buy and license to offer to your own list.

I decided to add kind of a free forms section of our blog as a way not only to attract search engine traffic for people that

were looking for those forms, but also to generate leads, because then we put it up behind an opt-in gate, to say here’s

the free form that you’re looking for. Opt-in if you want to download it.

It was in the hope that okay, so they’re looking for this form, if they’re looking for the form, then they’re seasoned real

estate investors. They’re actually actively investing in real estate, so that means that they’re not newbies, they’re not

looking for a how to invest in real estate post, they’re probably more interested in some of the advanced topics that I

talk about.

That is one adjustment that I made that I guess was different than this overall strategy that I’m talking about following

my heart with it.

Alan: We somehow got the idea that bigger is better.

Susan: I don’t think so.

Alan: I don’t think so either, but it’s just ingrained in us in this culture, that bigger companies are better. We want our

company to be bigger, yada, yada, yada. I have seen very small subscriber lists respond many times more than lists that

are in the tens of thousands.

Susan: Right.

Alan: And really how much is enough? We live in a culture where it’s more, more, more, and then once you get there,

it’s time to get more, more, more. Well, no, what if you need to go sideways? What if you need to go back down again?

What if you need to do something completely different?

I keep talking about Michael Gerber, I love the book The E-Myth so much, I went through their training program, The E-

Myth mastery program, all about how to systematize and grow your business and there was one module on growth and

the first question was “how do you define growth?”

Does it mean more revenue? More customers? Better service to your existing customers? Does it mean more efficiency?

More change in the world? Better lifestyle? You should always be progressing or moving towards something, but growth

maybe isn’t the best word, because it implies getting bigger.

Susan: Bigger, yeah.

Alan: That’s right. I don’t know, moving forward is something we all do and should do, however we define it, not the

way that our culture and conditioning defines it.



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Susan: Agreed and you know I’ve been on a real quest in just the last few months about this same topic, and I think that

growth, for me the definition has changed. Because I used to be one of those people that is going to arbitrarily chase the

revenue, and once you know I hit $100,000 in revenue early on, now I want to go to $200,000 and then I want to go to

$500,00, and now I want to go to $750,000 and now I want to go to a million.

You know and then I want to go to one and half, and now I want to go to two. It’s like, where does it stop?

Right, because there was a point there where I just started to feel really tired, like “Oh my God,” like the effort that it’s

going to take to grow beyond this point means that I’m going to have to give up something, and for me that means

giving up time, giving up some freedom, and that’s just not something I’m willing to do.

So for me, the growth that I’ve been seeking in the last few months has been like internal growth, and core growth, and

asking , “How do I personally grow more as a human being and in an effort to have a business that matches up with

that?”

It’s not necessarily about chasing that arbitrary financial goal anymore. In fact, 2015 is the first year where my business

plan has actually called for me to do less revenue than the previous year on purpose, and that came out of that growth

process.

Alan: I like that, because it’s not like you’re just making up excuses. You’ve done it.

Susan: Yeah.

Alan: And you’re one of the few people who said hey I’ve done this, I could continue this, but I choose not to. When I’m

online and I see rah, rah, mantras like “whatever it takes” being thrown around, I get scared. I can picture some kind of

psychopath saying “whatever it takes!” Would you kill a man to reach your goal? No.

Okay, extreme example, but let’s draw the line somewhere. You can do too much. The real thing is not doing whatever it

takes - it’s doing it enough and still keeping with your values.

Susan: Right.

Alan: I don’t mean to cut you off, but I do want to move onto the brain pick section. Let’s do this week’s brain pick. I’m

going to ask you a couple of rapid fire questions.

Susan: Sure.

Alan: Number one, what thought leaders have influenced you, and how?

Susan: Three, actually. Tim Ferris was one, because he helped me understand systems and the importance of having

systems and process, and honestly the importance of like removing myself from those systems and processes and

automating them as much as possible to grow even more.



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That was early on his Four Hour Work Week, even though you know that’s complete bullshit, and just a catchy title, I

think that the message. His core message rang true for me.

More recently, you know I am really admiring Marcus Lemonis and he has a television show. He’s the CEO of Camping

World and he has a TV show called The Profit. And I love the way he does business; I love the way he thinks.

I like the way he builds mini-empires, and I kind of like the way that he builds, and by mini-empires I mean he looks at his

businesses as disparate as they may be, he looks at them synergistically.

Sometimes when he has business acquisitions, he’ll acquire a cupcake store, and then he’ll acquire a sign shop, and

you’ll be thinking “My God, how is he going to manage all these business interests?” Then you’ll see - you’ll watch the

acquisitions process and you realize “Oh, okay, I get it, he’s building these mini-empires of these synergistic businesses

that are going to be able to feed each other.” I like that.

He also came out recently with a press release that he had increased the wages across all of his companies - I mean

thousands and thousands of employees - to his own kind of internal minimum wage, which is close to 70 percent higher

than what is called for, which I admire.

Then a guy named Carl Richards is someone that I adore. He wrote a book called Behavior Gap, and his blog is at

www.behaviorgap.com and he’s a certified financial planner, so he talks a lot about financial issues and investing, which

as you know is something near and dear to my heart.

The broader message is about simplification - simplifying and paying attention to your gut. He does these little drawings,

these little back of the napkin type doodles or sketches, and I just love how simple he can make a very complex issue,

and how every time I look at one of his sketches or read one of his blog posts, I’m just - it’s like an ah-ha moment to me

of “why are you making it so difficult?”

Those are probably the top three right now.

Alan: Great. I’m going to have to check that last one out. The Profit, I did listen to that episode that you recommended,

and it was pretty touching. It’s good stuff.

Susan: He’s a good guy.

Alan: What’s a really good quote from a thought leader that you’ve heard?

Susan: I’m going to go with one from Carl Richards, the Behavior Gap, and let me bring it up here, just so I make sure I

read it exactly.



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He says, “Whatever you have to do to gain self-knowledge, do it. Find out who you are, and what you want, then you

can stop wasting your life energy and your money on stuff that doesn’t matter to you and start making financial

decisions that will get you to your true goals.”

Alan: I love it.

Susan: Me too, and it was - you know the hook for me was, find out who you are, and what you want. I think that so

much of that is either lost or ignored in this you know “whatever it takes” effort to just generate more and more money.

Alan: Yeah, even at the expense of your relationships, your health, etc.

Susan: Right.

Alan: Self-awareness, man, don’t even get me started on that, we’re running out of time. Don’t get me started. There is

this really good book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, and their definition, Nathaniel Brandon’s definition of self-esteem is

more like a mental health type definition, not just how high is your picture of yourself; because if that’s too high, then

you’re getting narcissistic and that’s not actually self-esteem, that’s just an imitation.

But actual coolness, confidence, the first pillar of that is self-knowledge - and then only once you know who you are can

you move onto self-acceptance.

Once you say “I know what I am, I know what I’m not, obviously I need to work on some things, other things I’m good at.

It is what it is,” only then can you move onto self-responsibility.

And the mantra we get caught up in is “Skip the first two. Just shut up and get off your butt and do something about it,

and be personally responsible.”

That’s a quick fix, because that’s what leads to people being motivated for like a month or so, but without that

foundation of knowing themselves inside and out and accepting that, then you’re just moving from one extreme to the

other.

It’s a good recipe for depression. Lastly, let’s talk…

Susan: Nobody wants that.

Alan: No, no, because in this community we’re all about long-term sustainable growth. I don’t want to see anyone

excited. I don’t want to see anyone through the roof manic, because tomorrow you’re going to be at an equally…you’re

going to be at a low that’s as far from the baseline as your manic high was.

It almost seems like people are addicted to positivity. Oh, I’ve got to think and feel and act positive! No you don’t. You

obviously don’t want to feel negative, but who says you have to be positive, what if you just chill all the time? What if

you’re just neutral?



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Susan: Yes.

Alan: Anyway, let’s talk about the free resource that you’re offering. What is it, and how can it help the business owners

who are listening?

Susan: Sure. Well, I put together a pdf document, I’m huge on profit acceleration, and revenue acceleration. I alluded a

little bit earlier to the 18 growth accelerators and I’m just calling them the top 18 profit accelerators, and I’d love to

share that with your community.

Alan: That’s awesome. Everyone listening, I want to make sure that’s available on the page where this podcast episode

is located. So if you’re listening by internet right now, you probably know where it is, otherwise check it out on

http://thoughtleaderretreat.com/thought-leadership/susanlassiter/ and you’re going to find my interview with Susan

here.

Susan, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to be on this with us. I am glad that we met years ago.

Susan: Me too.

Alan: I’m glad that we’ve gotten to discuss some of these things, because it really pleases me to see the kind of values

and thoughts and strategy that we’ve discussed becoming more and more commonplace in the business world. Thanks

so much for you time, today.

Susan: You bet, thanks for having me, I loved it.

Alan: You’re very welcome. Everyone else listening, thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of success with

growing your own business and your own thought leadership through content marketing. Have a good one. I’ll see you

next week.

How Susan’s Contrarian Blog Helped Her Grow a 7-Figure Business

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Transcript of How Susan’s Contrarian Blog Helped Her Grow a 7-Figure Business