Welcome to this week’s episode of The High Profit Event Show! I’m your host, Rudy Rodriguez, and today I had the pleasure of diving into the art and science of audience psychology with one of the world’s top marketing minds—Michael Drew, founder of BookRetreat.com.

Michael has assisted his clients sell over 55 million books, generating more than $3.85 billion in revenue. He’s personally promoted 131 books to bestseller status across the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Success Magazine lists. And he’s done this for industry giants like T. Harv Eker and many more. What Michael truly excels at is helping thought leaders and business owners build powerful, scalable platforms through books—and as you’ll hear, the principles he uses to grow authors' brands apply perfectly to building high-profit events.

In this episode, we explore how understanding the customer journey through personality archetypes can transform the way you fill your events. Michael walks us through how to use Myers-Briggs psychographics to identify who’s likely to attend, engage, and convert—and who isn’t. We break down the four major types: the competitive, the humanistic, the methodical, and the spontaneous—and why your event design, marketing, and follow-up should be tailored for each.

We also talk about what it really means to build a platform. Michael shares that marketing is one-to-many, while selling is one-to-one—and if you don’t create an intimate-feeling experience within a non-intimate environment (like your event or webinar), you’re missing the mark. He offers incredible insight on building “scaffolding” that supports your voice and deepens audience trust over time, rather than relying on one-off event wins.

And for those of you obsessed with attendee experience and retention, this is your blueprint. Michael teaches how strategic event design—based on how people take in and process information—can increase engagement, reduce refunds, and create long-term client relationships. Whether you’re drawing in the high-energy spontaneous types or the deeply skeptical methodicals, his advice is grounded in both data and decades of experience.

If you’re an event leader, speaker, author, or business owner looking to elevate your event strategy, this episode is a must-listen. It’s not just about putting people in seats—it’s about understanding who’s in the room, why they came, and how to serve them best.

Want to connect with Michael Drew?

Book Retreat: https://bookretreat.com/

Promote a Book: https://promoteabook.com/about

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrdrew/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michaelrdrew

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/promoteabookmd/

All right, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to today's episode of The High Profit Event Show. We have a special guest with us today, Mr. Michael Drew, welcome, sir.

It's a pleasure to be here, my friend. It's always good to see you.

Good to see you too, man. And I know not everyone can see you because somebody is listening, but I can see you and man, you look a lot healthier and a lot more fit since I last saw you, man. Congratulations on what you've been doing. I think you've been in the gym a lot.

Every day, I've added basketball into my daily routine as well, so that's always fun.

Health is wealth, man, health is wealth. That's awesome, brother. For our audience members, perhaps this is the first time we even know you, a couple of quick pointers just so you lean in, like, wow, this is a guy I need to listen to. Don't let his baby face fool you. This man has been around the block. He's one of the top marketers and book promoters on planet Earth. He has written several books himself, bestsellers, but even more notably, he's helped his clients sell over 55 million books and generate more than $3.85 billion in revenue as a result of that. Also accounting for 131 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Usa Today, and now Success Magazines. He's worked with people as notable as T. Harp Ecker, just to name a couple. In fact, somewhere near the show notes, you're gonna find his full bio and the people he's worked with. Go take a look, it's impressive. Michael, it's so great to have you here, my friend.

It's great to be here. Sometimes I forget who I am. So thank you for the kind words and the introduction.

You're welcome, man. You're very welcome. Excited to have you on this show, being a guest of The High Profit Event Show, one of the key problems, challenges, opportunities that I hear people mention a lot is, I'm doing an event, how do I fill the event? You and I were talking in the green room about the customer journey and some of the Myers-Briggs personalities that contribute to how you design and fill an event. I was like, man, that is so unique. That is so interesting. You gotta share with us. So let's jump right into that golden nugget, man. I wanna hear from you. What have you learned about customer journey and how people can use that to fill their events?

So the first thing before we get into customer journey that's important is that what we wanna look at when you build a tribe, when you build an audience, is alignments of values and perspectives. So the first place you have to start is by defining what your values and perspectives are and then defining what your outcome is. Then how you're measuring that success. Any product or service or event sells when there's alignment between customer and business owner. So the first thing that you have to start with is defining what your values and perspectives are and what it is you're trying to accomplish and how you'll measure that. Then you want to define who your customer is so that you make sure that the folks that you're speaking to have a shared set of values and alignment of perspective so that we know that they wanna be part of your audience or your tribe, if that makes sense. And so, again, first start with yourself. Know thyself, as Socrates said, and then know thy customer. The modeling that I learned a long time ago from Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg and Anthony Garcia was a process called the persona architecture. Now, most corporations today implement this process because it's integrated into corporate America and most major corporate marketing and advertising agencies also use this process. The idea is that we want to be able to map out the customer journey. Who are they? Where are they coming from? How do they get to the place where they have recognized that they have a need that you can meet? The customer journey is about them and making them the hero, not about you. You're just a facilitator and supporter of the customer journey, so to speak.

Now, what the Eisenbergs did is they actually borrowed a trick from Hollywood. Now, in script writing, there's two types of scripts that we look at. You have a story arc. Now, a story arc is what all adventure movies are. You have a character, something bad happens, they go on a journey to correct it, they correct it, and that's done. You can put it in any adventure movie, that's all it is. There's very little character and a heck of a lot of just action-packed things along the adventure. Indiana Jones is a really good example of that, but that is the story arc. The movies that win The Academy Awards, the ones that win the Grammys and the Emmys and all of the various awards, are the stories that focus on the other type of arc, which is character arc. The objective of the character arc is to talk about, take the character from where they're at, take them on a journey where something happens, and then they change their perspective and they become a different person. Usually, when we think about character arcs, when we think about villains becoming good guys, Darth Vader being an example of a character arc that most people are familiar with, from going from Anakin Skywalker, the Chosen One, to Darth Vader back to the light side of the Force, right? And so there's a dynamic in that character arc that we identify with. It's why he's the most recognized villain in the history of mankind, right? Because it's that of a story arc. And so what good screenwriters do, like Aaron Sorkin, Aaron Sorkin wrote The West Wing and a bunch of other TV series that we're all familiar with. What he'll do is he'll say, cool, I'm gonna create all the characters. I'm gonna know who they are, what they look like, their names and all that, but I'm gonna map out their entire life history up to the point where the show starts.

And so they'll know who the parents are and siblings and schools and friends and all of the things that get them from birth all the way to the, that they're on that show because all of those backstory things create the interests and the conflicts and the biases and the opinions and talents and all of the things of that individual. So what he'll then do is he'll map it out, not for one character, but for all of the characters within the show because where good writing comes in is when you and I as characters are on an arc and we intercede with each other. So now how does our past stories and experiences and all of those things, how do they interact with each other? That is where the conflict happens in the storytelling is because we're on different character arcs that happen to be interceding, that there's conflict there, good or bad conflict, there's some kind of conflict and it changes the trajectory of what that character arc is and that creates those award -winning TV shows and movies and books. So when Aaron Sorkin does a series like The West Wing, he'll write three to 10,000 pages of backstory on all of those characters because he wants to be that detailed and intimate in understanding those characters. So what Eisenberg said is like, cool, we should be doing the same thing with our customer bases. Now, big data along with AI in the future may allow every bit of communication that we see to be tailored to us. I think it was in Minority Report where Tom Hanks' character was, not Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise's character was going through the mall and ads specific to him were popping up. So we might get to a point where all of this becomes systematized within technology. But right now, the technology isn't there. We don't have enough big data yet and individual data to the point where we can perfectly emulate what we do with the buyer personas.

So what we do then is we take and we segment the audience base into three to five major segments that represent the majority of the customer bases and there's always exceptions. People that don't fit within that, but we don't market to the exception. We market to the masses. If we happen to appeal to the exception, then great, but we're not gonna worry about that. So we create three to five buyer personas and we create, using the demographics of the customer base, we create information about them. Demographics tell you about a customer. It doesn't tell you about their motivation. It doesn't tell you why they would make a decision. You have to make an assumption. So what we do and what Eisenberg has advocated in the creation of personas is taking the demographics, layering on psychographics, which in their case, they're using Myers-Briggs. As a caveat with that, Myers-Briggs is an amazing tool for marketing. I'm not going to convey that it's a good tool for dealing with hiring or firing employees or for psychosis work or anything like that. Some psychologists may claim that from our understanding and review of the tool, it's a really great tool for marketing because it's about preference. Marketing and advertising and sales are all about the preference of the individual and therefore mapping out those preferences is important. We don't find it as powerful as DISC or Anagram or other tools to do different types of business work. But for marketing, we find it to be the most powerful of the psychographic tools. So we layer the tool of psychographics, Myers-Briggs, on top of the demographics. Then we work with the client to look at their existing customers that they know, that they can tell their stories from.

And we build out and we build these fictional characters based on people that they actually know. What you find then is that if you market or communicate to a set of data, even Myers-Briggs alone or demographics alone, or even combining them together, you're talking about the customer in a bit of the abstract and your customers are not abstract. A click on a Google search is not a click. A click is a person. There's a real person on the end of that who is clicking on it. That is a person. So one of the benefits and values of this process is to humanize the experience of the other person, to not think about it as a click, but to think about it as a person, a human being, a person and how they are engaging and why they're engaging, and to think through both the stated and unstated felt need of the customer in helping them feel seen and heard by you as a business owner so that they know that they're not alone. That's how we build trust in the real world one-on-one. So you and I built trust, and that's how trust is also built through marketing and advertising and with that, one of the things that I wanna, I guess, take a step back on.

Real quick, I wanna make a quick point here because you shared so many golden nuggets, man. I wanted to do a quick reflection here. One, I love the fact that you said Darth Vader is the most famous villain of all time. I did not know that, but it makes sense, which is cool. But two, I wanna kind of connect some of this to events, because people can see where this is going. One of the things I forgot to mention, yeah, you worked with T.R. Becker, and you actually helped him with his book, and the book helped lead people to events, and his events enrolled people into other events, and he grew his business from 8 million to over 80 million a year, and what you're teaching right now was a big factor in, right, so in a moment, I know you're about to share with our audience, like how does this, how does supply to the customer journey in marketing to people when it comes to their events? So I'm really excited to hear how you're gonna break this down, man. This is awesome.

Yeah, so what you described is what we would call building a platform, and the definition of a platform historically is a stage that you would stand on so that you would be above the crowd so that your voice would go over the crowd. You speak into a crowd, and it's gonna get muffled. You stand on a stage over the crowd, and your voice can be heard. We can think about historically stages. This is why theaters are normally above the audience so that the voice of the actors could be heard by all audience members. We can think about missionaries and politicians who would stand on a soapbox, as the saying goes, to be able to stand above the crowd so their voices could go over the crowd so it could be heard. Technology has allowed for that amplification of voice to be done in a much broader and bigger way than the historical physical platforms, and so what we're talking about then is the building of the scaffolding and the structure that elevates the individual so that their voice is heard over the crowd so that they can then build a relationship with one to many people versus one to one, and what I was about to get to a moment ago was that selling is done in an intimate environment, one to one or one to few. Marketing and advertising are always done in non-intimate environments, one to many. Even speaking on a stage is not really intimate. It emulates to a degree intimacy, and there are things that it triggers from a mirror neuron standpoint within the brain that emulates it, but it's not actual intimacy because you're not talking to every one of the people at the same time, although you could talk to some of them one at a time necessarily. It's really the emulation, and even this podcast that we're doing now, you and I are having an intimate conversation, right?

We can see each other, we know each other, we have a rapport, and we're having an intimate conversation. Your audience, on the other hand, they're having a non-intimate experience. Now, because we're having an intimate experience and they're viewing that intimate experience, their mirror neurons allow them to emulate in their mind the feeling of intimacy. It's still not intimacy, but the feeling of intimacy, and so what we advocate is that, and what we believe is that what we do in an intimate environment has to be reflected in a non-intimate environment. So when you're looking at marketing or advertising, what we would do intimately has to be done in that intimate environment, and what happens is that we, on this call or in intimate engagements, we naturally change how we engage and speak to each other, the speed, the tone, the words that we use based on the response of the other person. We don't, the other party, we don't most of the time even consciously think about it. In sales, you'll be taught how to overcome objections, which are tools for people who are innately able to read the other party and to change, to be able to, those overcoming objection things are done to be able to help the other person feel more seen by you as a salesperson. When we move into marketing and advertising, and this is done in a non -intimate environment, you have to know what you're doing in an intimate environment and plan, and be able to plan all of those little things that you unconsciously or subconsciously do and make sure that you're consciously doing them in that non-intimate environment. So one of the pieces of that is this process that we're talking about called persona architecture and that is to help us look at the audience members in an intimate way, even though we're engaging with them in non-intimate environments. This is necessary as we're building the scaffolding of that platform. Does that make sense?

Yes, yes, it does. So building the platform, building the scaffolding and being able to help people feel like they're having an intimate, even though it's a one-to-many, but helping them feel like it's for them, to them, like we're speaking to you, you as an individual right now. One of the things that you were talking about in the green room here, which I thought was really interesting, like you really had my, I was like leaning in, is when you've made the statement that you don't sell an event to a competitive. Maybe they'll go to a mastermind, but they won't go to an event because they're a certain way, but a sensor-perceiver type loves events. I would love to hear a little bit more about that because that right there, man, I think is just pure gold for our audience to hear.

So I think to give context to your audiences, not everybody may be familiar with Myers-Briggs. When we build out the personas, we create these fictional characters that we treat as real people. We give them names and we refer to them. If you represented the audience types, we would refer to you as Rudy. And we talk about what would Rudy say? How would Rudy respond? Because we want to know that so that we have a clear understanding of the intimacy of that engagement back and forth. But noting then what an individual's psychographic is from a preference standpoint, back to Myers-Briggs, allows us to have a better understanding of how they prefer to be engaged with. So when we look at the singular point of psychographics in Myers-Briggs, what we have to look at is that in Myers-Briggs, there's four different dichotomies. The first is how we rejuvenate energetically for the individual. Extrovert versus introvert. Extrovert does not mean that you're good at going out and being around people. It means that other people feed you the energy that rejuvenates you. Introvert does not mean that you're incapable of going out and being around people. It means that you rejuvenate being by yourself. I'm an introvert, but I do public speaking and deal with people all the time. What it means when I do public speaking, as an example, I have to then go on vacation for a couple of days afterwards so that I can rejuvenate by myself. But an extrovert who's a speaker is able to feed off the energy of the audience and be energized from that. They don't need time off. They've now been rejuvenated. As it pertains to the online component, that introvert-extrovert element is not as relevant because everybody's acting in that online capacity in an introverted way.

But if you're promoting live events, the extrovert is more likely to go to a live in-person event. An introvert is more likely to go to an online event where they have a level of, people not knowing who they are, they don't have to if they don't want to. Not that extroverts won't go to the online events, but the introvert is far more likely to go to those online events. So noting that if you're running a live event, that the probability that people that are attending are primarily extroverts is important because from a design of the event standpoint, you want to make sure that there's enough engagement by those people at that event to where they're feeding off of each other, where they're up and being able to feed off of one another to be able to raise the energy in the room. So extrovert diverts the first dichotomy. The second is how we gather information. So intuition versus sensing. Now, intuition means that we don't need all of the details to come to a conclusion. We can see the pieces and make some assumptions and know that this is the whole. As an example, you could say A, D, F, L, R, Z, and an intuitive would know that you're talking about the alphabet, and so they're able to see the bigger piece together and gather information that way. The sensing type, conversely, uses their sense of tactile senses to gather data. So touch, sight, smell, hearing, taste. That's how they're gathering their data. To a very strong sensing type, if you gave the letters that I gave for the alphabet, they wouldn't make the assumption that we were talking about the alphabet. You would literally have to say A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z for the strong sensing type to know that we're talking about the alphabet.

When I do live events and we go through this process, I'll have the folks that are off the charts intuitive type and off the charts sensing type go to the front of the room and I give them one minute to describe a car. So the intuitive types will inevitably say freedom, self-expression, getting from point A to point B. And the sensing types will say four doors, black, stick shift, steering wheel, chrome wheels, the tactile portions of the car. So this NS split is how we gather data. So then the next question is, this is the most important in terms of preference decision-making is how we gather the data. Then the next question is, how do we process the data gathered? So if you're an intuitive type, the next most relevant dichotomy is thinking versus feeling and what that means is that thinking is, you're taking your information and logically processing it. If you are a feeling type, then you're using your emotions to process that information. There's about, in the population, there's about a 50-50 split on both of those. It's not right or wrong. It's just, it's your personal preference. Are you using emotion first to process it or are you using logic? We like to say, convince the heart and the mind will follow, which is very true for a feeling type. For a feeling type, you convince the heart, the mind will find a way to log that feeling to being real. On the other side, for people who are thinking types, they'll make a logical decision and then they'll use emotions to justify that thinking decision, if that makes sense. So in that dichotomy, the N uses thinking or feeling to process the information gathered.

So you have an NT, an intuitive thinking type and an intuitive feeling type. So the intuitive type sees the bigger picture. They read all the details. Then if they logically process it, we call them the competitive. We call them the competitive because they see the bigger picture, but they're logically processing it and to a competitive, it's about goal and the weight of the goal. That's what's most important. The Nf on the other side takes the data and processes it emotionally. We call that type the humanistic and we call them the humanistic because they care about people. The greatest stereotype of a humanistic is the stay-at-home mom, always making sure that her husband and her kids are taken care of first. Now you can be humanistic and not, but you could be a husband, you could have a job, but that's just kind of the stereotype where the idea of the humanistic is that because they see the bigger picture, they want to make sure that everyone around them is taken care of first. So that's the competitive versus the humanistic, NT, intuitive feeler, intuitive, some intuitive feeling type. If you're a sensing type, the dichotomy on how you process the information is based on judgment or perception, judging or perceiving and judging doesn't mean that you are judgmental necessarily. What it means is that you look at the world and process it in terms of things being black and white, on or off, systems and process-based. It's all about the system and the process that's being followed. So you've gathered the tactile senses and now you're organizing it into processes and systems that are black and white. We call the sensing, judging type, the methodical because they look at the world methodically.

I'm grateful that we have methodicals. They represent about 40% of the population. They're the biggest of the four types and they're why we have roads and buildings and the internet and all of the infrastructure that we have because they're the ones that are making sure that things are being laid out appropriately. There's a reason why newer cities are usually built on grid systems versus older cities. Older cities, like say Boston, Massachusetts, as an example, it was built, the roads in Boston are old cow paths, meaning they were the paths that were worn in by cows that were finding the easiest way to walk to get from one point to the next and not necessarily the most logical, most direct way to get from point A to point B. But most modern cities today are built on a grid system because having that grid system makes it easy to get from the center of an area and figure out where you are and get to anywhere in that city that you would want to go. So that would be the methodical. The sensing, perceiving type, they gather the data through tactile senses, but the perceiving type views the world in terms of shades of gray and possibility and opportunity. To a perceiving type, there is no empirical right or wrong. So we call this sensing, perceiving type the spontaneous. The stereotype that we like to use there is a rock and roller. It's about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, baby, because sex and drugs and rock and roll are all tactile senses, and there's no absolute right or wrong. They're a perceiving type. So what's wrong with sex, or what's wrong with drugs, or what's wrong with rock and roll? Those are all fun things, so let's go have sex, drugs, and rock and roll and be rockers. That's kind of the stereotype of the spontaneous.

Then they actually represent the second largest group at 30% of the population. So 70% of the population are sensing type, and 30% are the intuitive types. So those are the four quadrants. And for most of us, if we're in business, we're serving people from a business standpoint, we're going to have all four of those quadrants available. There are some industries that that's not the case. As an example, we know that the majority of salespeople are sensing-perceiving types, spontaneous. These people chase energy. They go from one sale to the next sale to the next sale, and as a salesperson, you want them to do that. The spontaneous is always looking for that next hit, if you will, and that next of energy that's from closing a sale. You'll certainly have NT competitive types that are there, and they'll be probably the best salespeople, but their drive and their reason for it is usually bigger than just an individual sale. So they won't usually stay satisfied being a salesperson for very long because they want to accomplish bigger things than an individual sale. So when we then look at promoting a book, a product, or a service, or an online event or a live event, we want to consider who is most likely to attend. So one of the things I mentioned at the beginning of this part of the conversation is that introverts are more likely to do online events. Extroverts are more likely to do live events. If you look at each of the time, considering the attending of a live event in any capacity, online or live, you have to ask why would they be doing that? So to the NT competitive, who's about goal and the way to the goal, they view events as a fact-finding mission.

So unless they're young and they don't have a lot of experience and they don't have a lot of money, the currency that they have to spend is time over money and so young competitors might go to a live event, but anybody with any level of experience and any level of success as a competitive isn't going to go to the live event because that's not the fastest way to their outcome or goal. They don't need you to teach them that your model or system, they just need you to know that you can do it. So their touch points for consideration of hiring your agency is different than needing to go through a course or have you demonstrate to them that you have a system. They need to know that you've done this work for other people. So they're more likely to call an agency on the phone and say, hey, I see that you're an expert in X. What does it cost to engage you to do X? The things that they're looking at then is, cool, it's great that you've got training. It's great that people talk about that training and they've gone through that they've got success. But what they're looking for more specifically is, have you worked for someone like me in my industry or my field? What success have you had based on that? I sent you a couple of documents before we got on with my bio and track record. Those are documents that we've created for different temperament types, especially for the competitive, who want to know what I've done and for whom and what outcomes I've created. Even the stats that you gave introducing me are really aimed at that competitive type. Whereas the humanistic wants to know the human impact that my clients have made on the world. The spontaneous wants to know, have I worked with any celebrities? Have I done anything that's really cool?

Have I won any fun awards? Like I've got a Guinness Book of World Records for most book signings on the same day at the same time. Just fun things like that. The methodical wants to know that I've got a proven modeling system that is repeatable, that can be followed for them that will create the same predictable outcome. So the competitive is more likely to call me on the phone than to go to my book writing retreat in Guatemala. I'm not that we don't have competitors there, but really for the most part, an event is in the right place for the competitor. Now, and I'll say this personally, I am a competitive. So I don't go to events and you've seen this from me before. I don't go to a live event unless I'm speaking at it. If I'm speaking at it, then I'll attend and I'll go. I'll sit. I'll go through the event. But I'm going because I have an outcome. I'm speaking at the event and I'm looking to get clients out of the event. I want to build relationships usually with the other speakers. So I watch the other speakers so that I understand who they are so that I can relate to them. Because usually the audience members can't hire me. It's the speakers, the other speakers of the event that are the ones that could be my clients. Now I know that from my business and that may not apply to everybody who's watching this but that's based on my knowledge of the event. Now I have both held and attended masterminds. I do that because what I'm looking for is the quality of the relationship of the people and their knowledge base, the relationships that they have. If it's the right kind of mastermind they probably should be, by the rule set of the mastermind they should fit within the range of the type of business owner that could be a client of mine. So the competitive event is great for a mastermind but not great for a live event.

Conversely, the humanistic, what do they care most about? They care about making sure other people are taken care of first before taking care of themselves. So before they spend the time and money to work with your agency, your company at a deeper level they wanna see that you respect people and that you could deliver what you promise to other people. So what they do is they go to a live event and they look at how you engage with other people. They may not pay that much attention to your actual content. What they're interested in is how other people are responding to you and to your content and if they're having a good or a bad experience. They're going to pay attention to how you talk to your staff. They're gonna pay attention to how you talk to your volunteers. They're gonna pay attention to how you talk to waiters and waitresses at restaurants and to managers because they wanna know that if they're taking time away from their family, their children, their friends, their loved ones, that they're putting it in someone's hands who respects that and respects people. So they're grading you at that live event based on how you act and treat others and how others are responding to you. So they need that because that's the major value set that they have in determining if they wanna deepen their business relationship with you. Does that make sense?

Yes, absolutely. We're always being graded.

Well, it depends how and by whom. If I go to a live event, I'm not actually, if I actually attend a live event, I'm partially grading you based on how other people respond. I partially am grading you based on the content that you're presenting and I'm mainly grading you on the quality of the people that are in that room because that, for me, if I were to be at an event, which doesn't happen very often, the quality of the people in the event is what matters to me. That tells me about what you've built for your agency and whether or not that works for me. The humanistic is looking at the, again, not the content, they're looking at how you respect other people and will you respect them and the people that they're trying to take care of. The spontaneous, the assistive receiving type, are people that I love getting to live events because now they are what is commonly referred to as the seminar junkie, the spontaneous. Remember that they're the rock and roll. They're the ones that go from one trend to the next. They're looking, and in fact, if you know somebody spontaneous, they probably know what the latest trends are. They probably know the best restaurants in your area to eat. They probably know the new advancements in technology because what they're looking at is being out in front of the trends and fads. Like, they're probably the best dressed people that you know or the craziest dressed people that you know because they're trying to stay out in front of those trends. At a live event, they're there to get a high. They're getting an energetic, emotional high from being in the room at the new latest fangled event by the newest, latest, greatest celebrity speaker or person. And so they're there to have that experience. Now, the spontaneuses are easiest to get to a live event.

They're the easiest to get to buy at an event. They have the highest return rates at an event. And they're the least difficult, or the most difficult, rather, to get to come back to a future event or engage with you moving forward. The reason for that is that it's all trend-based. What's new, faddish right now. I actually had an employee, and we were going through a process of creating personas for a client, and the employee's mom happened to be at the new location. She's a very strong spontaneous. We said, well, what would it take for us to get you to come back to this client's next event? And she said, eh, probably nothing. You probably couldn't get me to come back because I want to go on to the next person, the next new thing. She didn't even understand why I was asking the question. She didn't understand personas or any of those things, but she was a really good indicator of what that spontaneous person's like. Now, the spontaneous person will also be your biggest promoter immediately after the event. They'll talk about their experience to everybody if you give them a good experience. So they'll be your best short-term promoter for an event. They're also the least likely to come back. If they buy, and they're the highest rate to buy, you're also going to see the highest return rate from those people. Now, in terms of their biggest value to me is that the people that are going to stay around are the humanistics and the methodical types. Well, the humanistics are looking at the response of other people. A large portion of the rest of your audience are spontaneous, and you've designed the experience for the spontaneous to have an amazing experience. So the humanistic see the response of all the spontaneous. Obviously, they're not thinking about it in terms of, oh, they're spontaneous. They're just, they're grading you based on the response of other people.

So if you're engaging and energizing the spontaneous, that's going to convey to the humanistic that they can trust you. They're the ones that they have a lower conversion rate to sell and the lowest rate of returns because of their value of human beings. With a book, another humanistic employee actually once said to me, I don't like to start reading a book because if I start reading a book and I don't finish it, I'll feel like I'm offending the author. The author has no ability to know that you started and didn't finish the book. But the feeling of making sure everyone around them is taken care of is so innate to that humanistic that they'll feel bad to the author for not finishing their book. So it's the same thing here at the live event. If they feel confident enough to buy, they would feel like they let you down by not fulfilling on that agreement to take whatever the next step is that they purchased at that live event. But they are, again, more motivated by the spontaneous person if you do it right. As long as you're not offending their basic value set, then the spontaneous will then get a certain percentage of the humanistic to convert into sale. They will probably represent 50% to 60% of your buyers that don't return. So they'll actually end up being the bit…

What's that again? The ones that don't return?

The humanistic will be less likely to return.

Less likely to return?

Less than the spontaneous.

Okay.

So because of that, when you then filter out all return sales, they will end up being a greater percentage of the buyers. Even the greatest percentage to start off with is probably gonna be spontaneous. The majority of your returns are gonna come from the spontaneous people as well. A vast majority of the returns. So the spontaneous, for most folks that run events, the humanistic is a major part of the strategy as is the spontaneous type. The methodical type, you look like you have a question for me.

Yes, I think this is a big, big, big point here to emphasize. So the spontaneous type are the ones that come to events. They're your biggest promoters just after event and you give them a good experience and also gotta be aware that they're very quick to move on to the next trend, the next shiny thing. So it's like, you gotta know that. Then the competitive is someone who's not prone to go to events unless they have more time than resources. But they're the person that's just gonna call you up and ask about the results you produce and whether or not you can do it for them. Then it sounds like the intuitive humanistic person is more, they'll come to the event, but they're not likely to come back. Did I understand that correctly?

Spontaneous is not likely to come back. Humanistic, if you do your job right, will. You'll either, with the humanistic, you'll either totally excite them or totally turn them off. They don't, because they're considering taking care of other people, there's not really a, well, I might go back or I might not. It's like, you either do your job or you don't. But if you do your job, and it's usually with a spontaneous, then they're gonna get, they're gonna build that trust with you so that if they do buy, they're least likely to return the product and most likely to come back. Well, let me say, they're gonna be the second most likely to come back, but they're gonna be a much bigger buyer than the most likely to come back, which is the methodical. So the methodical buys for, and their buy model is entirely different than the other three types. They, a competitive wants to be right, a methodical doesn't want to be wrong. There's a big distinction between being right and not being wrong. So because they value processes and systems, they're going to be the most likely to consume all of your content. They're gonna be the most likely to, if you rinse them in short form content media that they can trust you, they're gonna consume longer form content and longer form content and longer form content, as long as you're building that trust at each level, as long as you're down to the I's, crossing the T's and continue to establish value, they're going to continue to progress down. The methodical is most skeptical and they're the hardest to get in. But when you get a methodical as a customer, they're going to, and as long as you don't violate their values, they're gonna be a fan and a client for life.

They're the hardest to get in, they're the ones that are gonna stay around the longest, they're the ones that are gonna spend the most, they're gonna know your content most. If you have a spelling error on your website, they're the ones that are gonna find it. They're gonna pay attention to those details most, but if they're at a live event, it's because you've built trust with them at all of the previous steps of that relationship building process. The next logical thing is going to be that they attend the event because they then want to see your presentation. They might have questions that they couldn't answer in non-intimate communication that they can ask at the live event. So they're going to look at it from a methodical step-by-step process. The next right thing is to attend the event. So again, that event has to deliver the value to them based on that iterative approach of adding new information and being able to give them more tools that they can apply. But it is just part of that iterative process. One of the things to note for a methodical, at an event, they want to have an itinerary. They wanna know when things start and when things end. They want to have you tell them what you're going to tell them before you tell them. And then once you're done telling them, they want you to reiterate it so that they are clear that they understood what you taught them. They need the processes and the systems. They're going to follow it methodically.

Awesome. Yeah, so ultimately methodicals are the ones that if you can earn the trust with them, they get them to the event and if they stick around, then they're likely going to be your best customers long-term.

Long-term. Now, here's a caveat on the competitive that ties in with the methodical. If you're, like for me, if your service that you offer is a very expensive service on the very high end, like when I run New York Times campaigns, we're at half a million to $2 million in investment by the author. So it's a big investment and even for billionaires, they wanna make sure that they can be confident in working with me. Usually the executive assistant or the chief of staff for someone at that level that's competitive, that will be a methodical. Because their objective is to protect the rules and systems created by their competitive boss to make sure that they're being strictly adhered to. They're the defender of the rules and the systems. So what can happen is that if you, especially if you offer services that are very expensive on the high end, the methodical assistant might go to your live event on behalf of the competitive business owner because the methodical is using that event as one of their research clients to gather trust. Because what they have to do, the methodical's job then is to take back a report to the CEO and say, yes, I trust this person or no, I don't trust this person because they've done all of the research. The competitive doesn't want, they just trust their executive assistant. They're saying, cool, based on that, we're gonna do it or we're not gonna do it. So in that capacity, a competitive might send a methodical on their behalf to an event. As a competitive, I wanna know that all of that methodical detail is there. I just don't wanna read it myself.

Yes, I've definitely seen that pattern for sure. Michael, this has been freaking amazing, a deep dive into the Meyer, the great personalities. It's my own quick piece on it and connecting it to events and customer journeys has been, this right here is a little masterclass, honestly. I think this is gonna be worth going back, re-listening to it, reading the transcript, looking at the show notes. Like we're gonna create some great content from this. I remember when I was first introduced to Myers-Briggs, the 16 different possible permutations by about 10 years ago. I remember how that just, when it went down that rabbit hole, how it just opened up my whole world. So if you're listening to this as a person on this, listening to the podcast, and if you haven't gotten the Myers-Briggs before, I highly recommend going down the rabbit hole. It is powerful, powerful stuff to know yourself, to know other people. I know my personality was labeled as an ENTJ, which was a commander, per se, archetype and that helped me get so much self-understanding.

I'm an artist, I'm very similar and I'm a strategist, if that makes any difference.

Yes, so for our listeners here, like go do that. Like that is an absolute must, learn this. If you have, especially if you've never done it before, take the test yourself, learn a little bit about it. It is one of the best and actually, scientifically backed, it's one of the most scientifically backed personality assessments that exists.

It is the oldest, it is the oldest. It was Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's assistants were Myers and Briggs. Is This Bill Myers? I forget if it's Briggs. That's where it comes from, I didn't know that. Yep, so it's been around. It's a Jungian-based thing. It is the most researched. Again, for me as a business owner, as a marketer, interestingly enough, what it actually does is it gives me the empathetic and the power that a humanistic has. Really, really quick analogy for the audience. The four main types, I kind of refer back to making cookies. The competitive, the spontaneous, and the methodical are cookie cutters. They are the shape that they are. They're not overly malleable. You can move them a little bit, but they're that shape. So as a competitive, other than having a system like Myers-Briggs, I don't empathetically understand what it's like to be spontaneous or to be methodical or humanistic. But the humanistic type is not a cookie cutter. They're the cookie dough. They can fit whatever mold is needed in the moment. It's a natural empathetic ability that they have and when we look back at history, the most successful people, the people that have changed the world, not from a murder standpoint or a military standpoint, but have changed the world in any considerable way, they were all humanistics. They were able to get beyond the, I need to take care of everybody else around me, and say, no, what I actually need to do is I have a bigger altruistic objective that's beyond what's right here and right now, and I'm gonna live into that bigger opportunity. So what Myers-Briggs does for everybody else is it gives the clarity to understand how all of the other types think and why they act the way that they do so that, as Roy Williams would say, you can speak in the language of the customer about what's important to the customer.

Or another way of saying it would be, Roy would say, you need to speak to the meat at the heart of the dog, in the Pavlovian sense that we're all dogs, that we have meat that we're salivating for. Is it a ribeye that we want? Is it pork loin or is it chicken? We all have a meat that we hanker for, so understanding what that is is important. So for those that are not humanistic, it allows us to have that insight to be able to empathize better with others and to translate what we do intimately into that non-intimate environment, because it gives us the mapping system to be able to say, cool, this is how people are, let's apply this in a non-intimate environment. For the humanistic types, it actually allows them to be even more accurate and precise and more powerful when they apply this process because they're being intentional about it versus it being simply an intuitive process that they're following.

Awesome, man. This stuff is so dense and so deep, but honestly, I'm gonna go back and listen to this. This is so, so good, man. Hey, we're coming up towards the end of our show here, but before we start to wrap up, I definitely wanna make sure our audience gets to learn a little bit more about you and what you do. Can you just share with us a little bit about some of the services you provide? I know I got the opportunity to come to one of your events in Guatemala several years ago. If you can share a little bit about that and how the audience can learn more about how they might work with you, I think that'd be really cool.

Yes, so as you mentioned at the beginning, what I'm most well-known for is promoting 131 books to The New York Times, Washington, and USA Today, and success bestseller list. But in reality, what we actually do is we grow platforms. You mentioned that we've helped our clients generate an additional $3.85 billion in new revenue, and that's because we understand how to use a book and the promotion of a book in the context of the growth of the business. I'm a former book publisher, and as a book publisher, well, the second publisher I worked for was Ray Bard of Bard Press. The first day on the job, Ray said to me, Michael, we publish business authors. What our authors want more than anything else in the world is to be a New York Times bestseller. I was 19 at the time, and I said, sure, I'll go figure out how the bestseller list works, which is what I did. I was a publisher for 70 years and put 19 books onto The New York Times, Washington Journal, USA Today, and Business Week bestseller lists in that timeframe. What I learned in working in the publishing industry as a publisher was the rule set, the machination of how publishing works, how the bestseller lists work, and what levers and buttons need to be pushed and pulled to be successful in that space. When I left and started my own marketing agency, what occurred was I did seven New York Times campaigns the first year out, and three of my clients were unhappy with me. Now, they weren't happy that I didn't deliver. I delivered New York Times bestsellers for every single one of them. I delivered precisely what I promised that I would give them. What I didn't understand coming from being a publisher to owning a marketing company was that the expectation of those authors was that the book and being a New York Times bestseller would impact their businesses in very specific ways.

When that New York Times status didn't do that, they were unhappy that the outcome that I delivered for them, which is what I promised, didn't deliver the expectation of what they wanted from a business standpoint. As a publisher, I didn't have to worry about it. There was no expectation for me as a publisher to understand platform. It was just helping them accomplish their objectives with the book itself. As a marketing company, I had to learn about platforms, and I became a student and an expert in understanding how platforms are built. So when we do our most expensive services, which is The New York Times bestseller, what we're doing is we're using the book in the capacity to build and grow the platform. So it's not done in isolation. We're not selling a book. We're using the book to be able to give the author credibility. We're using the book to be able to start conversations with new people and to deepen relationships with existing clients and audience members and in doing that, in leveraging that conversational mindset of starting new conversations, which is, by the way, what all PR and advertising is, it's being seen in an environment that you don't own or control, being on radio or TV or a podcast. This is not my platform. This is your platform, right? So your audience is seeing me in your platform, and therefore they're not likely already my customers, and so I have to build trust with them. So going from here, from this podcast to saying, hey, go hire me to be in New York Times bestseller, for most people, short of the biggest competitors, that's not the right thing. It's better to say, cool, let's keep having conversation. Let's take this 30-minute conversation and turn it into an hour conversation, turn that to a two-hour conversation, and then get into the four, six, or eight-hour conversation.

By the way, that's what a book is. A book is a four, six, or eight-hour conversation. So with new audience members, you have to go from them not knowing you to, hello, how are you, to, will you spend four, six, or eight hours with me? So noting who the customer is, the personas, knowing their customer journey as their customer arc, and mapping out the beginning of the conversation from knowing who they are to them seeing us, seeing me on a podcast, or hearing me on a radio show, or seeing a Google result, from that all the way over to, yeah, I'll spend four, six, or eight hours reading and buying your book, requires mapping out the totality of that customer journey. So then when I work with a client, what we're doing is we're leveraging what a book can do, which is it gives us credibility, it opens doors to media, it opens up doors to conversations that they wouldn't be able to have with any other product or service, and we make sure that we use that as a traffic source that we drive into an engagement model. In influencer and thought leadership businesses, it's about traffic, engagement, and conversion. Ryan Dice, a friend of mine, has his traffic conversion conference, which this last year was the last time, and in recent years, he would quote me from the stage talking about my 12 steps of intimacy model, saying, hey, we really forget about the engagement part. So you've got traffic, engagement, which is that customer journey, and then the conversion into the deepening of that relationship. So what we really do is we use books at the highest level in the capacity of building the customer journey and building the platform. So with that, we mentioned to you Harv Eckert earlier. After we had run the campaign for Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, a couple of years later, Harv and I had met, and we were chatting, and he was very grateful for the work that we had done in Growing Peak Potential and putting the book number one on The New York Times.

And he said, Mike, you do really great work for folks like me who already have a big platform, already have a big business, and you help us really scale that. And what he said was, there's a lot of folks that are much smaller than me. I was at 8 million when we started, but there are a lot of folks that are in the $500,000 to $5 million range that can't do what we could do at $8 million or bigger. Those people are trying to change the world. He said, if you really want to make a difference, then you'll find a way to work with a larger number of people who may not be able to run these bigger campaigns, but who can leverage the same information and be able to put their content out in a way that allows them to build their platform and maybe at some point on a future title, they'll be able to run a New York Times campaign. But even if they're not, they're out there making a difference and a change in the world. I took that to heart and began developing a process that I have now for book outlining, which is based on my own learning disabilities. I suffer from 26 learning disabilities, speech impediment, two different kinds of dyslexia. So reading and writing is actually more difficult for me than it is for most. I'm in publishing and so I developed a model for outlining content based on my disabilities. What I found with that is that it allows anybody, whether they have a disability or not, to be able to easily and readily be able to extract the information from their mind, from the firewall of their mind and get it out into paper. Over the last two decades, I've done this again for 27 years, over the last two decades, we've refined our outlining process into the month-long book retreat that we now run in Guatemala. The idea of that model is that we use my outline process. We spend the first week creating a very detailed outline of the book, so detailed that all of the logicing, the thinking has been done.

For most of us, myself included, most of my clients are not writers. I have a few natural writers, but most of them are not writers. But what we are, what we all are, are storytellers. We all have those experiences that we have, and we've been given those experiences to share those experiences with others through the stories that we tell. So the outlining process does all of the logicing to get all of the ideas out and down to paper in a controlled fashion, so that when I get into week two, three, and four, what's left is bite-sized writing. A quick story that I'll tell that kind of illustrates this point. When I was 11 and 12, I used to deliver a paper to BYU students, Brigham Young University students. I met a gentleman who was a student at BYU. He was a track star at BYU. His name was Soa Marley. He was a prince from a tribe in Ghana, and we became friends and he invited me over in 1991 to watch a BYU football, American football bowl game against Texas A&M. He invited me over to watch it, and I came over and watched the game with him and when I got there, he had this big, giant, metal bowl of popcorn. He said to me, Michael, how long do you think it's gonna take you to finish this whole bowl of popcorn? I'm like, there's no way I could finish this whole bowl of popcorn. It's too much. So we watched the game, and at the end of the game, lo and behold, I'd eaten the entire bowl of popcorn and he said to me, how'd you do that? I'm like, I don't know and he said, I'll tell you exactly how you did it. You did it one kernel at a time. So what that taught me back at that age that I've deployed in all that I do, and that we deploy our writing process, is to be able to chunk things down into individual kernels of information.

It's very easy to create one kernel. It doesn't overwhelm anybody, regardless of if they've got learning disabilities or not. So if we've created what those kernels are, then it's really easy to flesh out over the course of the next three weeks what those kernels are. Then what we do at the end of the retreat, and this goes back to something that Hemingway said. He said, there's no such thing as a good writer, only a good editor. So folks that attend the retreats are good storytellers. They don't have to be good writers. They just have to make sure they're good storytellers based on our model. What we do then is we take the raw manuscript, turn it over to professional writers and editors on my staff, who this is what their talent skill is and we then edit the book into, edit those ideas and thoughts into a really cohesive, solid book. Then as part of that, we have a couple of publishers that are lined up to publish the book for the folks that attend the retreat as well. When they finish the book and we've edited and designed it, then we have a publisher that will publish that book as well. So we run those retreats once or twice a year in Guatemala, depending on what's going on. Our next retreat is in September of 2025 down at Lake Atitlan, which is just a beautiful location, as you know, because you've attended. So we have opened this up as much as a service to be able to help the world as anything else. It really is an act of love on my part. We don't really make money on it, but we get a lot of people going through it and we get to see the impact that they're making in their industry and in the broader world.

Yes, Lake Atitlan is gorgeous. It was great to be on that retreat with you a few years ago and highly recommend anyone who's looking to write a book and just get it done to definitely reach out to Michael Drew and do one of his book writing retreats. Because it's one thing to have a great idea, another thing to actually get it done. I personally know several people that got their books done as a result of Michael Drew and became bestsellers as well. Awesome, Michael. Hey, it's been a pleasure being with you today, man. Thank you so much for all the golden nuggets today. For our audience, again, friendly reminder, check out Michael Drew. You can go to his website, Bookretreat.com. It'll be here near the show notes. Also, if you have a book and you want to learn how you might be able to promote your book even more, promotedbook.com as well. Again, we'll include all these links here near the episode. Thank you again, Michael. It's been an honor having you today.

Thanks, Rudy. It's been a pleasure.