Hello everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert. I have with me a really awesome guest today. Rob Kosberg is all about the publishing, promotion, PR kind of space, and so I know a lot of you have questions. You’ve got your guidance, you’ve got the visions, you know what you’re here to do, but you’re not real clear on how you’re here to do it. And so I’m excited when we have guests like Rob on, who have some practical businesses built around doing just that.
And so we’re going to talk with him today about publishing books for the business entrepreneur. I know there’s a ton of information out there on these topics. Every time you turn around somebody is giving you advice about that, but what we’re going to unfold in today’s conversation is really how to make sure that we keep that in alignment with your vision.
Rob has a lot of experience helping his clients get on thousands of shows: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Entrepreneur. He’s the guy to listen to with regard to the systematization or at least the practical approaches of these things. I am really excited to have Rob on the show, so please join me in welcoming him. Welcome Rob.
Thank you Tonya. It’s great to be with you today. I’m excited about this opportunity with you.
Perfect. We’re excited to have you. As with all of our guests, we’re going to start by asking you what are your superpowers?
We’re also in the business of being known and having our message spread.
Can I answer it by saying this. I believe we’re all in two businesses. The business of the exciting thing that we love and the thing that we can do to help people, but we’re also in the business of being known and having our message spread. My superpower is helping people to do that very thing. Helping people to get known, to be seen as an authority, and to attract the right people into their life and their business.
Actually, yes, you can answer that way, and I’m very glad that you did because I think so many people are hesitant to set an event. I know that there’s layers of growth and confidence for saying that and especially when you operate in some of the spiritual growth arena as I know a lot of our listeners do. To come out and say I want to be known. I want to be known for this. I want to be seen.
A lot of times we have to grapple with the guilt that’s associated with this or fearing that comes from an ego space. For sure, that can come from an ego space. I’ll speak just from my personal journey. That was a big struggle for me to get to the place where I was willing to say, and own and recognize that that is how I’m going to do what I do here. I have to be known. The information has to be seen.
That’s a different statement than saying, “I feel like if I don’t have fame, and fortune and visibility that somehow I’m less than.” And so I think it’s important to make that distinction because there does seem to be this crossover, this tipping point that people get to where they have to work through that. It’s great to be humble, and it’s great to be want to take a back seat, and it’s great to not want to make it about you. At a certain point in time, you got to bundle all that together, and take it all up and step forward with it. And so I appreciate the fact that you’re willing to give people permission to want that and to recognize that it’s necessary if people are going to hear you.
Well, for sure. The bottom line is you may not want to be known, but you need to be known. If you don’t really approach it that way, then you’re going to be in trouble, and you’re always going to be playing small and not making the kind of impact on people on the world that you want to make. And so who ends up being the ones that are being known or made known?
They’re the ones often times that want to be, and maybe they’re driven by ego. I’m not here to judge them, but I know this. If you’re not known and if your business and what you do is not known, then what good is that to the world? And so you need to make a decision and you need to really go after this as though your life depends on it because if you don’t, somebody else will, and they’ll take the stage. Maybe they’re not going to be as good as you in making an impact on the people that you were created to make an impact on.
How do you help your clients work through that? Or, maybe I’m making an assumption. Have your clients pretty well worked through that by the time they come to work with you, or do you find yourself doing a lot of hand-holding in that arena?
I’d say most of its already been worked through. If they’re searching us out, then they’re at least under the impression or belief that they need to have a book, that they need to be seen as an authority in this space. They need to get on TV, radio, blogs, podcasts, etc. For the most they’ve at least worked out most of that.
Once we get to the point of the book is published and the book has become successful, then we start our PR. What we call the profit phase of our business. Sometimes we have to hold their hand in that phase. We have to let them know, “Look, you say you don’t want to be on TV, but the reality is we want you to be on TV because this is an area where you can be made known, you can use the footage on an ongoing basis to show additional authority, etc.
Sometimes we have to, or applying to work with us have already worked through that stuff.
Very cool. Do any of your clients ever hit that aha moment of, “I’m really going to do this,” when they’re faced with that reality? I think sometimes it’s different as a philosophy versus this is really going to happen. Do you have those moments with clients?
Yeah, 100%. They come out a little bit differently for different people. For some people it comes out in perfectionism where they just won’t pull the trigger on publishing the book because they’re like, “Oh, I need to change this, and I need to add this chapter, and I need to make an adjustment here.” And it’s like, “C’mon, you’ve been working on this thing for a decade. It’s okay. It’s good enough,” so there’s that. I’m sure that will resonate with someone. It does with me as well. We all have that characteristic.
With other people it comes out in their fear of the media itself. The fear of I don’t know what to say, or I don’t know how to be. And it’s like, “You’ve been doing this for 20 years. You know what to say. They’re not going to ask you a question that stamps you in your field.” You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It comes out differently with different people.
I think that, that’s a powerful statement. That’s a lot of what we work with people on. It’s being able to stand in that total confidence. We dominion so that you do go into those situations feeling untouchable and being able to say, “I don’t know, but if I had to take a stab at it, this is the approach that I would take,” or whatever the case may be.
I’m laughing at you because when I was working on master’s thesis. It was the second one that I wrote, so I had to write one while I was in the Honors College, and so I had to write one to graduate from the Honors College with my undergrad. I remember sitting in my apartment with these stacks of research because, of course, the internet wasn’t as popular at that time, but it was like stacks and stacks of paper, posted notes and everything.
It was really my mom who ended up holding my feet to the fire and put me on the calendar because it was like, “Well, but I really need to dive into this research a little bit more because everything begets something else.” The research piece to me was never complete enough, and as I’m laughing as you’re talking about folks with their book. That was 100% the space I was sitting in.
I was a full-fledged adult, but if it hadn’t been for my mother calling me and saying, “Hey, you owe two.” She didn’t even know what I was writing. Really had no comprehension, but put me on a schedule and helped me attainable-
That’s true.
… and it got done. But it was that state of paralysis of like, “But what if there’s more, and what if I’m not being totally honest. It’s not because I’m lying, but because maybe I don’t have all the information or maybe I haven’t expanded this far enough.” On some level I think that it’s good for people to take it that seriously and, on the other, I completely see what you’re saying because I’ve fallen victim to that many times of not really wanting to give into the good enough is good enough.
It’s just fear. It’s never going to be perfect. There’s no such thing. If you wait six months, you’re going to maybe have some new revelations or even some changes and modality on how you do things. That’s why people write two books, and three books and four…
And you’re like, “There are more books.”
Yeah. Let it go, man. Let it out there for crying out loud. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Done is always better than perfect.
That’s pretty funny. That’s awesome. How did you get into all of this? Where did you get your start, or why books, why publishing, why promotion?
I wrote a book 10 years ago.
I kind of backed my way into it. I don’t come from a traditional publishing background, but I wrote a book 10 years ago. If you remember what was happening 10 years ago, we were in the midst of the financial and real estate crisis. I’d been in real estate and very successful in real estate. I had several businesses that were doing over 100 million a year in transactions. This was all in the South Florida, Southeast United States area.
Those businesses came crashing down in 2007/2008. And so I was with a couple of mentorship, mastermind-type groups with some smart people in. I needed to reposition myself. That time I was in my early 40s. I had lived a pretty good life. I had three kids in private school, had been married a long time, and I’m like, “What do I do now? I have closed my business.” And so I asked for advice. Two mentors suggested that I write a book to position myself at a brand new industry.
I had never thought of it before, but something seemed to ring true to me. I wrote a book in financial services and launched a business in a terrible economy. The business immediately within 13, 14 months went to seven figures which at that time everything was crashing and not growing. I ended up getting on TV, radio, media. Probably radio was the big opportunity for me. I ended up getting my own radio show. I did four hours of live radio a week and just drove millions in revenue and thousands of leads a month.
I had been very successful in real estate.
People started coming to me asking me, “Rob, how are you doing this? How are you growing your business?” In probably 2010 I started helping people to develop books, and then in conjunction with launching the book and getting them on media, people also started growing their businesses. I fell in love with it. I sold my financial services company probably five years ago now and have been doing this 100% all in since. Love it, but, man, I backed into totally.
That seems to be the way. Let’s go ahead and take a quick break. We’ve been talking with Rob Kosberg today about books. I was like, “Where are we going with this?”
We’ve been talking about everything.
Truthfully, I went off on a trajectory. When we come back from the break, I really want to unpack what you were talking about because some of that I think is connected to having the confidence of being successful. We see a direct relationship, and so you were able to carry over that transferability of confidence into this new arena. That’s actually where my mind went off. I thought it was a fascinating topic, and so we’ll talk about that when we come back from the break where we’re talking about publishing books, writing books for the business entrepreneur. We will be right back.
To know more about Ros Kosberg you can check robkosberg.com
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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