Jonny Cooper Jonny Cooper, a lifetime entrepreneur, business coach, and marketing guru, joins Tonya Dawn Recla to talk about entrepreneurial skills. He has built a financial business from zero to 8-figures before selling to a public company in 2003. Since then, Jonny “fell into” coaching through being asked for advice on growth and exit strategies by former clients and his wider network. He attributes the spectacular success of his early venture to his ability to define a clear and simple marketing message, and in identifying and engaging with an audience for that message. Listen in as he discusses important entrepreneurial skills for transformational professionals.

Hello everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert and we have a delightful guest on today. We’re going to be talking about entrepreneurial skills for transformational professionals, and we’re talking today with Jonny Cooper.

He’s a lot of things, piano player, international race car driver, business coach, the British entrepreneur. Though what really caught my attention about him, is he also operates a Facebook group called Jonny Hates Marketing, so I know a lot of you, especially in the kind of woo-woo Jean Jay light-worker fields out there, can probably relate to that concept. We’re going to talk about why Jonny hates marketing and all kinds of fun stuff, regarding entrepreneurial skills necessary so that you can do your work in the world.

Really decided to have this conversation today, please join me in welcoming Jonny Cooper to the show. Welcome, Jonny.

Hey. I love that. That’s one of the best introductions I’ve ever heard I think.

Yes. Yes.

I just hope I can live up to it in some small way.

See, marketing can be fun, marketing can be introductions. It’s my sole mission on this show to convert you to love marketing. No, just kidding, it’s not, not really. Okay, so let’s follow protocol, because we’re nothing of course without protocol, and ask you, what are your superpowers?

My core super power is clarity.

Yeah. I thought long and hard about this, and I think my core superpower is clarity. Clarity of thought, clarity of action and bringing, be able to bring clarity into other people’s practices. As you’ve described, I’ve worked with Transformation Professionals who I sort of categorize as therapist trainers, coaches, consultants and that whole world. I find a lot of them are at the point either starting off in practice or even with an established practice, where clarity is badly needed and in a very noisy world in which we live in, noisy digital world.

If you want to stand out and cut through the background clutter, it seems to me you can do that best with a single clear message, about who you are and what you do. If you can’t describe to someone in 10 seconds what they’re going to get from you if they work with you, then you’re making your whole life more difficult. You have all your work ahead of you as they say. Yeah.

Well, go ahead.

Bringing clarity, in summary, is my superpower.

Awesome, and what we found in our journey was that I mean there’s levels of clarity right? I mean there are times that we thought we were clear, you know and people kind of still looking at you with that confused dog look and you’re like, okay, maybe we’re not as clear as we thought we were. Then there’s another level 30 and then another level, and so I think that I don’t know if every entrepreneur kind of goes through that, but we sure did.

I talk with a lot of people who kind of go through that. Do you have plans to come to you thinking that they know, and then you’ve got to kind of break it to them and be like, “I think we need to, there’s a little more work here,”?

Yeah, absolutely, and the lack of recognition and perhaps even acceptance that you have a fairly modeled offering is something that I help with regularly. I’ll give you an example. One of my early clients when I started coaching in this way, was a personal trainer. I met him because he was training me basically and he said he was doing okay.

I said, “Well, you know, what do you tell people they’ll get?” He said, “Well, I’ll make people fitter and I’ll make them healthier.” Just at the time, it just sounded a bit vague to me. We had a couple of sessions where I was trying to help him build his business and grow his practice, because what you should know if you’re ever thinking of being a personal trainer Sonya is that, that a lot of people are doing it.

He was working in the gym with 30 other personal trainers and they wore this uniform that said PT on the back you know. I’d go to the gym, I wouldn’t even recognize him. I would be thinking, “Where is he? Is it that guy, is it that guy?” It was just this terrible kind of amorphous blob of personal trainers. We worked out that his passion was core building, building core strength and specifically around about our abs. He was very boastful about his abs and he was posing on Instagram you know that sort of thing, showing off his six-pack.

We just, I said, “Let’s just try something.” We rebranded him as the rock-hard abs guy, and he had a business card done because business cards are still a thing in those days, it said the rock hard abs guy. He started pushing that through all his social media and all his communications, and he got more and more and more and more customers, who were attracted to it because they wanted rock hard abs as well. They could see that it has the very clear outcome they’d get from working with him. He was no longer just an amorphous personal trainer like all the others. He was the rock-hard abs guy.

The success there just got me thinking, “Well, surely we can bring that into most kinds of practices.” Whether it’s a therapist or a trainer or a consultant or a coach. What is it you do? What’s your one big thing? If I’m going to work with you, what are you going to do for me? How will I be changed by you in the next three months? They say if you can’t say that in 10 seconds or less, then you need to strip some clutter away, don’t you?

Well, it’s so fun. I’m super fascinated with this kind of topic because I have been playing around in people psyches and observing human behavior for decades, and you know both an academic and then as a counter intel agent, now as an entrepreneur. What I’ve watched with regard to referring, it’s quite the conundrum and it’s really counterintuitive if we think too hard about it.

Like people are really hesitant to narrow down their niche because it feels like they’re turning down business. It feels like they’re walking away from the opportunity. What’s interesting, what happens in the human mind and this is just my theory and so I like fun cool stuff, but what happens is that we have to be able to put people in a box in our mind, because if not, it’s like it’s just noise. Where there’s so much noise out there right now, that unless it’s super pertinent unless we can kind of get it in the course of like two seconds, we don’t know what to do with it. If we don’t know what to do with it, we can’t refer.

What I find is that the people who are willing to be really bold and courageous and super, super, super, super specific, I can refer so much easier. It is a challenge to get to that place, and I saw it was superpower experts early on with the due diligence business, everybody kept saying, “Oh, so you do background checks?” I’m like, “No, no, no, what we do is much greater. We have top secret clearances, and we’re way cool.”

If we’d been smart, we would have said, “Yes, and we do it a little bit more than the average bearer,” because people understand background checks. Like they have a box where they were giving us the box to put ourselves in and then we just, we’re resistant to being put in that box. Same with coaching, “Oh, so you’re a coach?” “No, no, no, no, what I do is different than a coach.” All this stuff, but it’s like, if you don’t have that box, people can’t really grip it and of course, a coach is not a good enough box.

What I found with superpowers was, people, got it. Like they didn’t even need, and actually, there were aspects of that process that we’re still going through. For the most part, the superpower thing was intriguing enough and people understood it enough that they’d be like, “Oh, you’re the superpowers first, oh you’re the superpowers first.”

They may not have understood what we did, because, at that point in time, we didn’t even know what we were going to do. Kind of like the Jonny Hates Marketing, it’s like, “Oh, you’re the hate marketing guy, like oh yeah got it.”

Yeah, I am.

You’re the superpower person, it’s like okay, sure, I’ll be that now. I looked even at my own life and I was never that person even as a kid, like well, what’s your favorite color? It’s like that was way too much commitment for me. I couldn’t, I’m like how could I possibly choose a single color, and so I do think that we have this innate tendency to want to leave our options open.

Yeah. Totally.

One of the things I got really vocal about was, you’re not your brand. I think that the whole personal marketing thing, it’s kind of has thrown some people off, because you as a person have a million messages. Your business needs to have one, and so while you may represent your brand, I think the challenge is most people try to fit themselves into a brand or develop a brand that’s broad enough that they’re okay fitting into. It creates a lot of confusion.

The brand name doesn’t have to tell everyone what you do.

Now, that’s correct. I mean you covered a lot of ground without … One of the things that I had then was, the brand, the brand name doesn’t have to tell everybody instantly exactly everything you do. Jonny Hates Marketing says a bit, I’m kind of in the marketing niche, but it doesn’t tell people what I do and what happens when they work with me. It doesn’t have to.

This is just the bit that attracts them to you in the first place, like your superpower thing. As long as you can go on from there and within a single sentence to learn what you do. People say, “What do you do Jonny?” I say, “Well I help transformation professionals find more of their ideal clients more easily.” That’s just a single sentence that tells people, everybody, tells people everything I do.

I’m laughing at myself. Yeah, I was laughing at your brand name doesn’t have to tell everyone what you do like that. Anyway, I can only imagine that you have some finesse when it comes to helping people really work through that. I know that on our side of things, we tackle it more from the kind of inner personal kind of fear-based conundrums and everything else.

Whereas with taking that business focus with things, I can imagine that’s an uphill battle with some folks.

Sure.

Anyway, we’re going to, I want to take a quick break. We’ve been talking with Jonny Cooper today about entrepreneurial skills for transformational professionals. When we come back from the break, we’re going to really pick Jonny’s brain and say, okay, so let’s say that what you’re saying resonates with you and you get it, and you’re one of those people that maybe doesn’t have as much clarity as you need to have, we’re going to see if we can drill down a little bit and get you some tips on how to get more clear. Find out more about Jonny Cooper at jonnyhatesmarketing.com.

Stay with us we’ll be right back.