How to Measure the Unmeasurable: Tracking Resonance with Jay Acunzo

I like to say make calm your new KPI. But can an idea or a concept really be a KPI? I'm Susan Bowles, and this is Beyond Margins, the show where we deconstruct how to engineer a calmer business. And for starters, let's talk about what a KPI even is in the first place. So KPI stands for key performance indicator.

It's a measurable target that shows how your business is performing against your goals. So the point of having KPIs in your business at all is to make your company's values and priorities both explicit and measurable. We're basically using KPIs to clarify what success looks like. And if you have a goal or you have a value, you can totally make a KPI around it. Anything can be a KPI, even a kind of amorphous idea like calm or like resonance.

Today, I'm talking to Jay Acunzo. He helps business leaders become stronger speakers and storytellers. And if someone somewhere is talking about resonance, I can almost guarantee that Jay's name is gonna come up. His rallying cry to storytellers is resonance over reach. Resonance is his North Star in the same way that calm is mine.

It's his goal for his own work, but also for the work he does with clients. And that's great. We all want our work to resonate. But how do you know if it does? Well, Jay actually designed a KPI and a system to help measure resonance, and that's what we're geeking out about today.

Okay. So one of the main focuses of your work is resonance, this idea that resonance is more important than reach.

I don't think it should be a radical idea, but I think it does turn some heads to say that I do believe and explore this concept everywhere I go, that you should prioritize resonance over reach to grow your business, to grow your audience even, to serve your customers, your partners. It doesn't matter. Like, reach is how many see it, and resonance is how much they care. And no amount of reach guarantees that they care. Like, the three tiniest words that have the biggest possible impact on your business is make me care.

And I serve as a public speaking coach and adviser as a sort of message designer and strategist. Like, I serve clients who arrive with ample expertise. Maybe they lead a whole company or a team. Maybe they're soloists like you and I, but they are earning a living on their expertise and their competency. And so I like to say that what they know matters, but what they say and how they say it has to make that clear.

And that's a surprisingly big gap for a lot of people. Like, can you make me care? Can you open your mouth or write your words and do so in a way that actually resonates with me and gives me that energy I need to want to take an action. Like, there's this urge to act that you can impart with somebody. Maybe people listening right now or maybe people who listen to you in general, they feel that when they hear from you or maybe from me.

And so, yeah, like, the sort of punchline to all this is I wanna help people who have substance, who have something to offer and something to say, find a way to say it to differentiate and to resonate so that they can market less because they matter more.

I love this, and I have loved it forever. And literally, I have like, your voice is in the back of my head all the time.

Sometimes literally as a podcaster. So yeah. Also true. That helps. Helps.

And I think the idea of resonance is great in theory. It sounds fantastic to say, yes. Resonance is important. It's important that people care about your work. Like comb, it's something that is a pretty cool KPI to set, something to aim for.

But the real question is, how do you know if you're doing it? How do you know if it's working?

I think of it as and we can use marketing parlance if it's easier for people. Like, awareness versus affinity, you can buy a lot of awareness based metrics and results. You can't buy anything related to affinity. You can buy proxies for that or what you think needs to happen first. It'd be like akin to walking the earth at some giant cocktail party.

Let's just call that offline party the Internet. And you're so obsessed with the handshake, and you can buy your way into certain rooms to shake hands. Right? Great. But then what happens next is you actually have to, like, interact with these people, build a relationship with these people, earn trust with these people.

Like, the affinity part is actually the vast majority of what we're after and what we need to build a business. And delineate between reach and resonance or just to understand, like, what are we measuring here is you're trying to figure out and measure that which can only be earned, not purchased. So I'll give you an example. I recently gave a speech in Boston to a group of marketers, and I have this metaphor I use about me making espresso. It's, like, halfway through the speech.

It's this hilarious little bit I've been working on and reworking and reinventing it, and it finally, like, clicks. It works in the talk. It's about me making espresso. Okay. A woman ran up to me after the talk, and she was like, Jay.

And I was so excited. I've had a long night because I have a six year old and a three year old, and I was tired. I was like, I could use some energy from the crowd here. Here comes a compliment my way. And she goes, I gotta say, when you started talking about espresso, I almost looked at my phone, and I was like, womp womp.

But then what she said next is actually a signal I resonated. She goes, but then as you told the story, I stopped thinking about espresso because I don't like coffee. In fact, I hate it. But I started thinking about, oh, I go through something similar when you make espresso when I deal with my car. And I was like, okay.

That to me is actually the strongest sign that you have resonated with someone, which is they reflect back their own story and experience because of your ideas. That is an instance of a metric that I made up called URR. Because if it's not an acronym in my world, you can't be taken seriously. URR stands for unsolicited response rate. Without being the frenetic YouTuber who's like, what do you guys think?

Drop a comment below. Without being the kinda showy, chess beating LinkedIn bro, like, comment want for my ultimate guide to growth. Without gaming it, can you share something with your audience that compels them to respond? Unsolicited response rate. And I think the best, strongest unsolicited response is somebody invests time and really their reputation to do something as high friction as reflect back their story as it connects to yours.

Right? It's so much more powerful than, like, nice. Thanks. This is great. I'll reshare it.

That's good too. So So there's, like, a spectrum of these unsolicited responses, but we need to start by embracing. Resonance is that which must be earned and can't be purchased. How do you measure that which can only be earned? This is a signal I've come up with, URR.

I think it is an interesting way to actually try to grasp at something that is kind of ungraspable. We're talking about measuring essentially a concept here, a very high level feeling of something. I'm a data geek. I want data. I wanna know if things are working.

I want to have something to help me evaluate whether or not what I'm doing, whether that is financial, whether whether that is making a friend, is it working? What matters? And what direction do I need to put my efforts? Because I'm a big fan of let's not do things that don't matter and just waste time.

Yes.

So talk me through how you kind of developed this measurement system. How do you evaluate and actually quantify that URR?

It started in a simple place. I'm such a fan of comedians. It's like this ultimate almost democratization of the material. Like, it doesn't matter how famous or not you are. Jerry Seinfeld has this famous quote where he talks about, I get to be Seinfeld on stage for five minutes, then I have to deliver.

And, like, they are not on stage ending a joke going, please laugh. Or, you know, do you agree? Laugh if it's if it's true to you. Again, back to Seinfeld. His book title, Is This Anything?

They just put out the joke, and then within their head, they step back and observe the audience reacting. And then they go and refine their ideas and sharpen them and improve them or kill it. And we don't do that enough. We don't aerate our thinking and our thoughts actively, publicly enough. We just think of anything we do publicly as, like, distribution and marketing.

I actually use social media much more like a comedian who uses a small comedy club. It's me sharpening my thinking. And, oh, by the way, as I do that, I am gathering fans and followers and customers. So, anyways, the way I look at this is, okay, if I'm gonna compel people to respond, it's the strength of the idea I'm looking for. And I'm not just looking for that one post.

I'm looking to create IP, like signature stories or a signature framework, methodologies I can teach everywhere, key terms I can define like resonance or you have, you know, a default decision is something I've heard you define before. That's one bit of your IP. And as I'm looking to collect and craft and strengthen my IP, I'm also gauging how effective I am today at explaining it the right way so it resonates.

Jay and I are almost opposites in style when it comes to how we operate. He tends to focus on his intuition, but I really need to have some data behind it. It probably comes from having started my career as a data analyst. For Jay, he spends most days thinking about and observing resonance. So he's developed a pretty good internal compass for his own work.

He can kind of intuitively tell whether or not a particular piece of work resonated because he's carefully honed his internal dataset over the last decade. For you and me, probably not the case. So Jay developed the URR as a tool for those of us mere mortals trying to build our own internal dataset. It works on a sliding scale where you can earn zero to six points for each response or lack thereof. Here's how Jay describes it.

If I'm working with I don't know who's a good example. I know this person. She's wonderful. You should follow her. Her name is Susan Bowles.

If I talk to someone like a Susan, I might say, well, here's a point spectrum you can actually log and track. And I've done this for so many years. I no longer need to, but may it serve you, fictional human I just invented named Susan. Here's the spectrum. So you put out a post on social media.

You put out an episode. You deliver your newsletter, and you're like, did it compel people to respond? Do they have the urge to act and engage? Not because I gained it, but because it actually was unsolicited. Well, you get no points for no response.

And it's not that you drop the idea. If you have conviction around the idea and it got no response, that's still data. Maybe it's not the problem with the idea itself. Maybe you're in front of the wrong crowd. Or maybe it's actually the right crowd, but you're not articulating it in a way that they need to hear it in that moment from you.

I think a lot of us will drop something after trying it one time, but I want more high conviction storytellers and communicators in the business world. So no response equals no points in this scoring system, but that doesn't mean you're done with that idea. It might mean you go back to the drawing board entirely or more likely is you just have to tweak how you were helping people get into your ideas. Alright. So really quickly, the the rest of the way through.

For disagreement, I assign one point. I say something. I share something. I write something, and they're like, I disagree, and here's why. And it's not that you're hunting haters.

I hate that idea. It's like you don't need to hunt haters. Right? It's like you're not saying anything meaningful unless you have some haters. Like, no.

That's an overly sensationalized, simplified version probably popularized by, like, hardcore business bros. No. But disagreement, that's a healthy data point. You get one point. It is a type of unsolicited response, and and you can ask questions around it.

You can go back and forth with that person. It's really useful for learning. So disagreement is one point. Like, general questions they ask you, follow-up questions, that would be two points. They're really interested in leaning forward.

This is getting harder to parse because of AI, by the way, especially on LinkedIn. Right? Those BS AI commenters, like at susan boles. What a great way to think about operations and finance, period. Second sentence just regurgitates a point from the post, then the last sentence is a question with, like, a thinking emoji.

Like, it's like they're like digital gnats. I'm just swatting away. Anyways, so general questions about your ideas, maybe follow-up questions about what you do, that's a really strong sign. That's a good form of response or you are are. Give yourself two points for that.

Passionate agreement. Like, you feel like, oh, I have a fan here. That's three points. It's worth more. You have a lot of real, like, traction with your idea and that person.

So congratulations. Pat yourself on the back. Three points for passionate agreement. And then there's three more points. Building on your ideas.

That's huge. Four points. Because to build on your ideas is to stick my neck out and invest my own, like, reputation in okay, Susan. That made me think of this. And here's here's what I'm gonna say to that.

Like like, in this case, I see it forming like this. Or, you know, actually, if you translate it over here, I think it changes a little bit, and here's your idea. They're spending real time with you to build on your ideas, and they're also investing part of their reputation. It's scary. They have skin in the game to build on your ideas.

That's four points. Five points is much more personal questions. Like, they're not asking about the idea. They're not like, oh, okay. So would you say that one should this when telling stories, Jay?

They're personalizing it by saying, like, hey. You know, in my work or my business, I was doing this, and and here's some data or in information about me question. That is also harder and scarier than, like, a general broad theoretical question. Five points for that. And then the tippy top is what I mentioned before.

Six points is they reflect back their own story because it takes the most time and the most, like, emotional labor, the most amount of their reputation. So if I were waltzing the earth, preaching the message of resonance, and someone asked how do you measure it, I would say, u r r. And if I met some fictional person who thinks, like, very analytically named Susan Bowles, I would say, and here's a scoring system you can use. It's a sliding spectrum, and you always wanna see more of it towards the top than the bottom.

I love it. And I personally I use the system now.

Again, purely hypothetical.

Pure purely hypothetical.

Me coming up with an example from nowhere.

And for me, it was really helpful. We worked together over the last few years. And as we were starting to work together and you were like, hey. You're testing your ideas. Are they resonating?

And when you said that, I was like, I have no idea. How am I supposed to note? Like Yeah. People liked my post on LinkedIn. Right.

Does that count?

It's so problematic too because on LinkedIn like, here's an example. Some one person on LinkedIn has a hundred thousand followers. One person has a hundred followers. Followers. And I'm like, maybe.

But what if everybody of the hundred themselves are influential? And everybody of the hundred thousand, they have zero followers themselves. Or you reach a company, what if you reach the CEO, not the entry level employees and interns? Right? Like, we've conflated followers and influence, and those two things have never been further apart.

Likewise, I think we've conflated engagement signals on these platforms and with the value, like, the total engagement with the value of that engagement. Right? It's not all people created equal. It's the right people for your business or for that moment in time for your ideas or whatever. Like, I would much rather have five let's go back to this fictional person, Susan Bowles.

I'd rather have five Susans engaged than, I don't know, 1,500 people who are in house corporate marketers who just started their jobs. I love helping those people. I have nothing to sell to them. It's not gonna anchor my business. But Susan Bowles represents this, again, fictional model of, like, the perfect client for me.

Right? And so I think what we need to do, and this is why it came up with that scoring system, is we need to weight the type of engagement and even could do it with the type of person so that we're not just like, oh, I only got three people commenting. I'm like, it's not about the totals. It's about the value. It's not about the reach and how many see it.

It's about the resonance and how much they care. Because then on top of that, if you wanna go for totals, if you wanna grow your reach, you have a much stronger foundation to start.

As you were saying that, I am now wondering, do you weight it by platform? So what I mean by that is maybe a comment on LinkedIn is super easy to do, but something like somebody listening to a podcast episode, a full podcast episode, and sending you an email, those are technically the same level of engagement. Say they're both reflecting a personal story back to you, but do you weight it based off of which platform it comes from?

I mean, that's how I built the scoring system. It's how high friction was the action they took because they need more energy to act, more motivation to act. They need to deeply, deeply care to do something higher friction. And higher friction could mean I invested more time to pull off this reaction. Like, I chased Jay down in the parking lot after the event versus I happen to be in the front row after his speech.

Right? Or it could also mean it takes more reputation points. I'm putting myself on the line and what others will judge me to be by doing or saying this. And I do think that a past version of me was too much colored by all the business models of the platforms that we operate on. Those are media platforms or advertising based platforms.

I don't sell ad space. And so what they want from us is to manufacture free ad inventory. Right? So they're like, play to the bottom of the pyramid, one zero one level tips and tricks out the wazoo. You wanna create lots and lots of, like, sensationalized hooks and all these things.

All those platforms really care about at the end of the day is their ad business, and we're now, like, colored by their model. But that's not mine. My model is high ticket services. You know, public speaking, coaching, and advisory work, storytelling and messaging, coaching, and advisory work, and the boot camps they're in. So, like, I shouldn't care about the same things.

I have different incentives. So now although I don't, like, track this, I do pursue and appreciate the combination of it was high friction, and it happened in a place that's actually private that won't gain me any new followers or reach or notoriety. So an example might be someone reflecting back their own personal story in a LinkedIn comment comes with it this really ego stroking, oh my gosh. This is cool. It's happening publicly, and look at all the comments and look at all the love.

But that person could be being performative. They could be using my followers as a signal that they should engage with me to increase theirs. Like, there's definitely some questions I have about the benefit to me and also the authenticity of that person's intentions. If they do that same thing in an email reply, now I'm much more excited, not only because the context has changed where they clearly care about my ideas because there's no one watching. It's just for them that they wanted to respond and engage.

I take that more seriously, and I have an opportunity to go back and forth in a meaningful way. That sits closer to the bottom of my funnel. They're closer to really being a true fan and or client if they respond in the same way over email as they did on social. You mentioned podcasting. It's really clunky and hard to do things like share a podcast episode or hunt out that person and contact them to tell them how much they love that show.

That's also very high friction. Like, I value that way more than a social post. So that's the way I'm thinking about it.

What Jay has essentially done with the URR is quantified something that, at first glance, seems kind of unquantifiable, this idea of resonance. But really what he's done is figured out what potential indicators he might see if something did resonate and then work backwards into a scoring system using those signals. So if you're trying to create a KPI out of something that initially feels like it can't be quantified, the best place to start with this, just brainstorm some signals that might indicate you're headed in the right direction. Remember, the point of a KPI is to tell us if we're making progress towards our goals. So if you can identify signals or signposts that you think you'll see along the way, you can then fashion a system out of those things.

For example, if you're thinking about, I don't know, trying to run a calmer business, just pulled that out of thin air really, you might think about what signals or actions would tell you that it's getting calmer. Maybe something like how much you're resting. You could create a goal of days off work. Or maybe for you it's more about feeling aligned in the work you're doing. So you could create a rating system that you track at the end of each day or week.

Something like how you're feeling seems super hard to quantify, but it is a signal you're on your way to having a business that feels calmer. But even something as simple as rating your day from one to five according to how you're feeling that day, that's actually a system you could use to quantify the feeling. We're gonna take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. But when we come back, Jay and I are going to talk about how Jay internalized his system and how he uses this data in his own work. When you were first thinking about this and you were trying to build your pattern recognition skills, You're, like, you're trying to build your database of data that lives in your head.

Did you actually track it? Did you, like, tick mark and add points and do all of those things in order to build up your ability to recognize when it was happening and then kind of intuitively know so you don't have to track anymore?

No. And I'll tell you why. You could kind of place me, you know, despite the focuses I have on premise development and speaking and storytelling. Like, you can place me more broadly into the, like, business self help genre. And I think everybody who's in that category as a speaker, content creator of any kind, eventually comes to the realization that, like, oh, I know I teach public speaking.

I know I teach finance and operations or whatever. But at the end of the day, what I'm really doing is teaching others to trust themselves more. Like, you kinda have this realization over time. It's hard to explain. But, like, I am white, straight, male, two loving parents, wonderful childhood, affluent neighborhood and and town where I grew up, great teachers, great surrounding family and friends.

Like, when I was born through no fault of my own, the door was ajar for me. And my hard work was shoving through it, but I was also already ajar. And then there are other people who they don't shoot out of the gate automatically trusting themselves. And so they might need more scaffolding. They might need me to construct a story or a framework or maybe a scoring system that is more robust than anything I would ever use myself because I would just trip myself up.

So, like, I am in my head making these calculations all the time. I am looking at that scoring system and going the way a, like, a cheesy nineteen nineties video game, like, a basketball arcade game announcer would sound. Like, three points, two points. Like, I'm going in my head. Six points.

No one knows I'm doing this, and I'm not documenting it anywhere. But I am like, okay. That essay contained a story, framework, or idea that caused a lot of people to engage in an unsolicited way. And a lot of it felt to me like high point total types of engagement. I will log that essay or framework therein or story in a file in my Notion to come back to it, to include it in a a speech someday, a book, to ask follow on questions so I can keep exploring that same train of thought, maybe even reference it, or just send it to people where I in interacting with a client, they might need it.

Right? So I am doing the work to, like, develop this IP. But I think if you were to analyze my business, Susan, you would be like, okay. You're not actually as rigorous as I'd feel comfortable being. And I think, yes, because that's what's working for me.

It's not what other people might need when I teach them to do it. So I've gone ahead and developed something very robust, and I use a percent of it myself.

Yeah. I think that's sort of part of being an expert in the same way that, you know, when I was originally starting out doing financial things. It would take me a really long time to review financials and try and evaluate it, and I'd be looking for different signals and all of those things. And after you do that process repeatedly for so many years

in so

many different instances, you essentially create an internal system. Now I can look at somebody's finances. In about fifteen minutes, I can identify, like, five red flags and, I have a question about this. Please explain this. And it's because for a long time, I did use a very formal process.

And I think once you do the the system repeatedly, it becomes internalized. You create that tracker Yeah. Inside.

What ends up happening is the more experience you get, the more exceptions you uncover, either in others, the way they do it is different than the the rule you knew or the prescription you have, or the way you do it changes. And you're like, I've done it five different ways. I can't tell you the one way. So, like, in public speaking, you get this question a lot where people are trying to develop a signature talk and really bring it with them everywhere they go, whether they're giving in person speeches or virtual webinars, or maybe they just wanna use parts and pieces of the speech as a guest on a podcast, almost like the comedian pulling from the Netflix show when they show up on a late night show. And so the question I get is, should I memorize my talk, or should I just have, like, this sort of internalized dialogue or bulleted list or whatever?

But, like, really the the thrust is, should I memorize my talk? And I'm like, well, think of it like this. You want your talk to live in your bones, not your brain. Because if it's in your brain, you're consciously considering every single move and slide and all these things, and that people can tell you can't react naturally to the room. You don't know how to customize and pace things up and pace things down.

Like, you weaken your power. You're like an AI avatar just, like, rewinding the talk and hitting play. That's when it's in your brain. When it's in your bones, you can do so much more, and it just flows naturally from you, and you can avoid any tech issues and just keep going, and you can react to the room. That person had a weird laugh, and we all heard it.

Or, you know, I have this ranty bit in the middle of my speech where afterwards, I'm shaking, and I can grab the water bottle if there's a water bottle and shake. Or there's curtains today in the gig I'm doing. So I'll hide behind the curtains. Like, I can't do that if I'm in my brain being like, what's next? What's next?

What's next? So my answer to that question is always, whatever it takes for you to make sure your speech lives in your bones, not your brain, let's figure that out. And some people do that by memorizing a whole script, and some people do that by going, here's the bullets, and I'll go ahead and do it several times from the bullets. And there's millions of other ways. Right?

So that's what it feels like with my URR measurement. It's like it like, this work lives in my bones. I know how to explain it, and I'm really authentically excited about it. And so I don't need to agonize over, like, is this gonna work or not? I kinda like a comedian or a speaker with the act in your bones, I know all the moves and how to expand or change gears around it.

So I'm not like, okay. Did that work or not? Track it in the spreadsheet. It can be more sensed. Would I recommend that for everybody?

No. You have to find your own way forward.

Well and I think that's the point of having kind of a North Star KPI is to help you develop the system, to help you look for indicators that what you are trying to do is working, whether that is a financial KPI, whether that is something kind of amorphous like having a calmer business or having your content resonate. The point of having a KPI is to actually track whether or not it's working. The more you track whether or not it's working, the more you train it into your bones. And so I love that, like, those kind of work together.

Yeah. And you're forcing yourself to really interrogate the thing you'd like to solve for. Like, I love the sound bite from you that if you want your business to be different, you have to solve for something different. And I'm certainly solving for resonance. I'm trying to help other people solve for resonance.

And before I have a system, because I think we wanna leap there too soon, I'm like, what do I mean by resonance? Oh, I should define that. Well, how do you sense and measure resonance? Well, you can't buy it. It has to be earned.

Well, how do you measure things that can be earned? Well, let's start by not you're not gaming it. It's your ideas authentically compelling people to respond. You're not gaming it. And also not all responses are created equal.

Okay. That sounds like a spectrum or a scoring system. Right? Like, eventually, as you explore what it is you wanna be driven by or towards several layers deep, you might find a system that works, whether that's like a visual framework to judge your actions or inform them or a scoring system like how to measure resonance or or any other kind of model or scaffolding you need to, like, stand up behind whatever the KPI might be.

You internalized this metric. How do you use that then to make choices about what you're doing in your business?

Yeah. What a great question. My goal with my content is not to distribute and market. That is a side benefit of most of the places I show up. In the surface area of doing that, you might see me occasionally promoting something or selling something.

But almost every time you see me show up, I am trying to explore my premise, resonance overreach, and craft and collect IP. So I mentioned before, it's like, oh, that essay had a high URL point total, whether that's sent by me or measured by fictional Susan Bowles. And so I'm going to log that in a notebook or in a in a Notion page as potentially something that I need to tour around or explore more deeply. Because over time, what I'm trying to do is develop a big idea and all the thinking behind it so I can show up everywhere and differentiate and resonate and really own that idea in people's minds. So I like to think of it as if you're an author, you have this awesome collection of IP in the book, and you see really savvy authors doing this where they're like, I'm gonna dip into this for the speech.

I'm gonna dip into this for the public guest appearance. I'm gonna have the course. I'm gonna they they have a whole platform driven by the book and the method they're in. I think we should all think a little bit more like that. And so that's how I'm, like, using or steering into or being cognizant of this stuff.

It's I am always using my content to sharpen my IP, find new ways of saying things, sometimes just turns of phrases, sometimes really large frameworks driving something. And then all the different ways people access that IP are all the things we mostly spend our time thinking about, hiring people for, learning about. So positioning and messaging, offers that you sell. You know, your boot camp is not gonna be a % of your IP experience. It might be the most important first twenty percent.

Right? Or maybe you have a master class. That's the first five percent. There's ways essentially through content offers, guest appearances, and positioning to help people experience and access and benefit from your IP in different ways. So I see it as I'm exploring one premise.

I'm collecting IP around that premise, and then I am both growing audience and awareness through it and developing a business with revenue from it. Right? But it's all centered on the IP.

My question for you then is if everything is focused on resonance, we're measuring things that are resonant. But sometimes things bomb. Right? Like, sometimes you put something out there and it's complete crickets. And you said earlier about having high conviction in your ideas, being a high conviction expert or storyteller.

When something bombs, when you try something and it doesn't work, how do you know when to drop it? How do you decide whether or not it becomes in the case here where we're talking about, like, a KPI, which is supposed to measure what's working, sometimes it also measures what isn't. So how do you approach it when it's maybe not working?

I have a one word answer, but I need to tee it up first. The way I wanna tee it up is this is what frustrates me about, say, business communicators versus a lot of other storytellers. Because in business, I think the Internet is starting to trick us too much with all the gurus and experts and frameworks out there into thinking that there's always an exact answer for everything. So my one word answer, like, is how do I know? Taste.

And, like, that's what an artist would think. That's what a filmmaker would think. All these people that have, quite frankly, way more passionate audiences than people building audience through a business in context have. So we look at them and we're like, nah. I can't learn from them.

And yet, like, Taylor Swift could whisper that she's got a new podcast reading dictionary definitions, and she'd have a million downloads in seven seconds. Right? Like, god, I want that. So, like, I am not looking at, okay. Here's the process.

I put out this essay, and it didn't work. I'm now gonna try to reengineer the intro. And if it doesn't work, I'll reengineer the body. And if it doesn't work, I'll reengineer the packaging and the graphics and the headline. I don't know.

I felt really convinced that this idea was really strong. Nobody seemed to give a shit. I'll try it out a few more times, and eventually, I'll decide, I guess it's not a thing. What I'm using to gauge that is just taste. It's just like I'm literally like a chef, like, sampling the work, how does it taste, adjusting a little bit, how does it taste from there?

Because there's just too many variables to consider. That's the work. Like, you get as close as possible with the scaffolding, but eventually, the scaffolding has to fall away. Like, eventually, you do have to trust yourself. And what I'm trying to get people to do is have a signal that carries them forward further than the metrics provided to them by tech platforms.

But, ultimately, what I'm doing is I'm going through enough revs of experimentation and trying and beating my head against the wall because I have higher conviction on this idea than the audience is signaling they have, and then I have to drop it. And how do I decide? Shrug emoji. I guess it's taste.

I have found the same with content and creative based work that I do, which is really my issue eight years ago. I wasn't talking about anything different. I just didn't feel like people were listening. And to be honest, nobody was there, so hard to get signals when you're shouting to literally, like, five people. Yeah.

And I gave up too early. And then when we started working together, none of those were new ideas. Nothing that I have put out in the last three years is anything that I wasn't talking about before. I just didn't try hard enough. I didn't put in enough reps.

And I think that can also apply in business. When we're talking about KPIs, the point is to give you signals, whether that is a signal of, oh, crap. I'm running out of money, or, oh, no. I don't have enough time. Or, hey.

I don't have any leads. All we're doing is looking for a signal to know where to focus our efforts. And Yeah. Giving us indicators of should I stay, should I go, should I pivot. I love that for your metric, it's really not actually about necessarily pivoting.

It's about tiny incremental pivots. It's try it try it this way, try it that way. Right. I think business is kind of the same way. It's It's not really about shifting your entire business model if something doesn't work.

It's a little tweak here, a little test over here, a little experiment, like, oh, I might wanna shift my offers. Let me throw something out. Let me go ask somebody that didn't buy for me why they didn't buy for me and see what they say. And maybe that tells me something to shift.

We all want gold, and so we grab our metal detectors and head to the beach. And then we just start using the metal detectors as shovels, frenetically digging as far down as we can or in as many places as we can. I'm like, but you know how a metal detector works. Right? Is it just gives beep gives you confidence to start to dig.

Then the digging gives you confidence that there's actually something in there. Like, it's tiny progress on route two, and I have gold now. And we wanna leap from zero to 60, ignoring all the steps along the way. And so I think getting a small number of people to react in important signal of success. And this is my pushback to people who go, Jay, I can't embrace your philosophy of resonance overreach, because I don't have enough followers to test my thinking.

I'm like, you reach because I don't have enough followers to test my thinking. I'm like, you reach somebody right now easier than you ever have. It could be five people. It could be 5,000 people. It could be on LinkedIn.

It could be on email. It could be at an event. It could be in a coffee meeting. You can reach people now. And when those few people who already, by the way, like you and trust you, don't respond with any level of passion to your ideas, why is our reaction to go, Well, the people who really trust trust me and give me the benefit of the doubt don't care.

I should put this in front of more people. Like, that's not we don't have a reach problem. We have a resonance problem, and we try to hold that at arm's length. Because if it's a reach problem, we can blame external forces. If it's a resonance problem, we have to blame ourselves and more importantly, how we've developed or not developed our ideas and how we articulate those ideas.

Well and for me, I I actually found it reassuring that nobody was list like, when I started to really try and test my ideas in, we'll go, quote, unquote, public because my audience, very small, that was actually reassuring. Like, me saying I'm gonna fall on my face, there's not that many people that are gonna see me fall on my face. And the people that do are mostly my friends. Yeah. They're not gonna be mean to me on the Internet.

They're gonna give me, you know, thumbs up emojis when they saw my post. And, you know, when I have friends that are like, hey. I'm starting to put my ideas out there. You know, I wanna show up and support them. And even if their ideas maybe aren't all that well developed, it's so cool to see people out in public actually trying it.

So I find it reassuring when I have a small audience.

It's harder to turn an aircraft carrier on a dime than it is a little speedboat. Right? Like, when you have a big audience, when you have a big business, when the stakes feel really, really high, it's really difficult to go, well, that didn't work. I better try something radically different over here. But when you're early, you do have that advantage where your ego allows you, I think, more readily to take radically different approaches on route to trying to find the operationalized direction.

And so that's what we want. We want some of this to feel repeatable. I'm not trying to sit here and go, you're building a business. Everything's bespoke every time out. I understand the power of systems and repeatability.

It's necessary for your business to be sustainable. I also understand if you follow me around the Internet, a lot of what I say rhymes or sounds very similar, if not exactly the same. Like, there's benefits to having stuff that is proven. But I disagree fundamentally with this assessment that people have of their own platforms that I can't figure out what resonates because I don't have thousands and thousands of followers yet. Like, the we're not that's like saying, like, I can't figure out if this dish is good because I'm not serving it to a thousand people yet.

Like, what do I do at home? I turn to my wife. Is this any good? Like, that's really most of the work. It's not glamorous.

It's not gonna get you a press hit or invite on a podcast necessarily, but you're also protected against, you know, bombing on a big stage. So have at it.

One of the things that I have enjoyed about the way that you write, and we've talked about this before, is that at the beginning of your content journey, you see people who have been doing it a long time and who do that thing very well.

Mhmm.

And we think it comes out of them like that, that they poop gold just out of nowhere. And the truth is it comes from a lot of reps. You came up with resonance over reach over the course of I don't even know how many years.

The first documented instance of me talking about that was nine not even now it's ten years ago. Right? Like and I ignored it. It was just like a line, and I threw it away in a post. And I, like, sort of talked about it and sort of revisited it.

But it was like, I think it's this, and then I keep exploring it. Nope. It's deeper. It's this. Then I keep exploring it.

Nope. It's actually over here. Like, it's a long journey to, like, really figure out what you're trying to say to the world. And I don't think the mess and the friction is bad. I think it's actually what sharpens your thinking to work.

Yeah. And I think that applies inside of businesses too. So, you know, people will see some of my systems. I had a call this morning where I was walking somebody through my automated onboarding client system. Mhmm.

And it is 85 steps with a bunch of automations and templates and forms and all of those things. So now eight years of doing that same offer, essentially, that process is super smooth and very streamlined. And I'm not doing it hands on, but that is an evolution of me having messed it up 82 times the first time and running into client red flags about, like, oh, I shoulda communicated that better or differently, or I need to build a template because this is taking me a really long time to deliver. And, oh, maybe I could automate this part, and maybe I don't need to do an interview, and I can use a form to collect information instead. It's eight years worth of me optimizing a process in the same way that Resonance Overreach is eight, nine, ten years of you hitting the same idea in different ways and finding what works, what doesn't, where you got tripped up, what people thought was annoying or stupid, what you liked, and amalgamating that all into one space, which is to say that I think when we look at, especially social media, and we see people out there saying, like, I make multiple million dollars a year by myself with no doing of anything and then telling people that they can do that, they get into business and they believe that they can poop out Resonance Overreach immediately

Yeah.

And berate themselves for not being able to do it. And they think that the fact that they made one LinkedIn post and they didn't make a million dollars makes them a failure.

You know what's so funny about this, Susan? So I host this podcast called How Stories Happen. You've been on it. You

had an excellent guest on there named Susan Bowles.

This is a real Susan Bowles, not a fictional one. It's people working out stories or sharing a signature story that's proven that they use everywhere in their business, in a speech, in a book, in a newsletter, what have you. And you kinda hear how it comes together. And to your point, you're like, I just thought people pooped gold. Then I listened to this show, and it was like, wow.

It's really intentional and a lot of effort, and I should feel better about myself as a result. So I like that byproduct of the show. You know, literally, it's how stories happen. So as a result of doing that show, I realized, like, I'm in the teens now of number of shows I've built and launched, whether for clients or myself. And I'm in the the I'm close to a thousand, like, episodes personally hosted in my career.

I can't allow people to think I have it all figured out. Because even in doing how stories happen, it still feels messy and hard. And so I created this four part, I don't know what to call it, YouTuber style series that is now coming out called How How Stories Happen happened. And the idea is to put on display my mess and be more honest and raw about, like, how this stuff really unfolds behind the scenes. And I was uploading episode one today, And I I look at the name of the file, which is always different than the title of the episode you give it publicly, and the name of the file ended v 10.

So that meant there were 10 versions of this episode, and and probably, like, 10,000 tiny choices that went into it and changes that went into it to get to each v. So I'm like, oh, I should tell people this. Like, oh, by the way, you're watching v 10 of the behind the scenes episode of a thing I was making and also already own and made. Like, to describe the thing I made, it's like, how many layers deep do you wanna get in terms of my meta type of business? But I'm like, well, that's part of it.

You don't see the file name that says v 10 or final final, no. Actually, use this one dot m p three. You don't see that. You just see this final thing, and you go, gosh. They're so good at it.

Why is it so hard for me? And I'm like, because either they've done it a while, did something tangential a while that helps them be good at that thing now, or you're not seeing the full picture here. You're just getting the final product.

What is your favorite way to make your own work calmer?

I actually thought about this this morning. I swear it wasn't because we were talking today. It wasn't necessarily I thought about this makes my work calmer, but it did quiet a lot of the voices and distraction. I was just shooting a video talking about a friend's book on Instagram. And I said something which caused me to think, oh, I should make a joke here.

And then I made this joke. And basically, what I did was let my quirks out from where they're hiding. And so this is not some grand strategic business strategy or approach. Honestly, it is when I can wink and nod to myself in a piece as small as an Instagram story that'll disappear or as large as a speech I'm giving to thousands of people or anything in between. There's a wink and a nod to myself before that goes out the door that, like, that little thing right there, yeah, that was just for me.

And, like, I hope other people notice it and appreciate it, but I I don't care. Like, it it sort of activates the me of it all in that piece or project. Because so much of business is thinking, like, what does the market want? What will the market bear? What works out there?

It really abstracts away the soul of it all and the you of it all. But in my line of work and I think more and more in most of our lines of work, that part matters. So what quiets the discussion in my brain of what I should do or how it should work or a million things I gotta get done is just me, I guess, having fun or at least being my true self, finding a quirk to insert in a piece, a post, a project, a conversation, and all of a sudden, I, like, snap into flow and things feel very calm.

One of the best ways to make your business calmer is just to work in a way that works for you. Jay and I have really different approaches to our work. I wanna have data to quantify what I'm seeing or feeling, and he's much more comfortable being intuitive about it. Your KPI should be that way too. They should reflect your goals, your values, your approach to your work.

Trying to smash your goals together with someone else's KPIs, it just won't work. So you need to sit down, figure out what your goals and priorities are, and then take a step backwards and figure out what the signals or signposts you might find along the way are. What are the indicators that would tell you you're making progress? And those are what you develop KPIs around. Part of my goal with this series is to show you all the different KPIs that folks have in their own businesses and to help you understand how you might start to develop your own KPIs, ones that are personalized to you and your business, not the defaults.

Look for the signals and then build a system around them. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. If you're a listener, a sponsor, or a partner of any kind, I couldn't do the show without you. You can support the show by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help new listeners find the show and hit play with confidence.

Until next time, stay calmer.