Host Dallas Burnett thanks listeners as The Last 10% nears 100 episodes and then announces major behind-the-scenes projects. He shares the rollout of Perforam and plans to combine it with the 1on1's Coaching System into a performance management suite focused on team growth. Dallas also reveals that his team acquired a failing publishing company on July 1, 2025, and has spent 11.5 months rebuilding it, tackling antiquated systems, excessive costs, fragmented accounting, overstaffing, poor collections (including $6.4M in bad debt), and a defeated remote culture. He introduces authorservices.com as the new home for revamped imprints, outlines a story shift toward quality, ethical AI use, and stronger marketing, and describes building a custom ERP, new products, a hybrid publishing partnership launching in the fall, and upcoming tools, including an author publishing app, event app, and marketing education for authors.

If you have been interested in publishing a book or marketing a book you've published, check out www.AuthorServices.com!

Hey, everybody.

The Last Ten Percent has been growing in its listenership lately, so I wanted

to take a minute as we are rolling through, oh, man, we're closing in on

100 episodes, which is so exciting.

And so as we get close to that huge milestone for us, 100 episode mile marker,

we just want to say thank you so much for all our listeners who tune in to The

Last Ten Percent every other Tuesday.

And also, if you have just a minute and wanna say thank you, because

we love making this content, and we love releasing it for no cost.

We're not charging.

We don't have any pay walls.

You don't have to log on to any other site to listen to The Last Ten Percent.

We wanna make this information free, for everyone so that you

can live well and finish strong.

If you don't mind, one way that you could say thank you back to

The Last Ten Percent, and to all the amazing guests that we have,

is like and review the podcast.

That is huge for us.

As you like and review, it just increases others' opportunity to

hear the episode, and it puts us out there, and so we just wanna ask that.

As we start this episode, just wanna say that.

Now, on with the show.

We have made an announcement several months ago, if you're a regular listener

to The Last Ten Percent, that we had some big news coming, and guess what?

Today's the day, so you don't want to miss this incredible conversation

Welcome to The Last 10%.

Your host, Dallas Burnett, dives into incredible conversations that will inspire

you to finish well and finish strong.

Listen as guests share their journeys and valuable advice on living in the last 10%.

If you are a leader, a coach, a business owner, or someone looking to

level up, you are in the right place.

Remember, you can give 90% effort and make it a long way, but it's finding

out how to unlock the last 10% that makes all the difference in your life,

your relationships, and your work.

Now, here's Dallas.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I am Dallas Burnett sitting in my 1905 Koch Brothers barber

chair in Thrive Studios.

But more importantly today, we have some great things to talk about.

I mean, it has been a whirlwind.

I cannot express to you how many things that we have been into over

the last 11 months, actually 11 and a half, almost a year to the day, that

we have been in- working on secret behind the scenes projects that we

have not made public until today.

So for our listeners of The Last 10%, we are just totally

pulling the curtains back.

We're letting everybody know what we've been working on.

So you know that we have been designing, you know, I've been in the IT space and

software development space for a long time, even before Think Move Thrive.

And so we had been, launching the one-on-one coaching system, which

was great and kind of filled a need, and that's been going really well.

And then we had one of our clients say, this was several years ago, "Hey,

you've been helping consulting-wise with helping us build a performance

management system around different aspects of employee development."

So we had the one-on-one coaching system, but we needed things like, you

know, well, how do we do these annual reviews well, 'cause most people don't.

And how do we give raises with clarity and walk people through

setting goals and all that stuff.

So we created what's called ProForum, and that software product rolled out in

the spring, and it's going really well.

And, we finished beta testing, and then we finished rollouts and our first client

with that, and now we're gonna this fall probably roll that out together.

But the only reason we haven't done so yet is because we're combining

the one-on-one coaching system with ProForum, so it's this kind of whole…

entire performance management, suit that is not just about payroll,

because there's a lot of companies out there that can run your payroll.

there's a lot of companies out there that can store documents,

onboard your employees.

Those are, you know, definitely HR management, and it comes from that

kind of administrative needs from your HR staff that they need, and

they're absolutely fundamental.

You have to have that.

in the zone that we love to play in is how can we take your team and set

systems in place that continually make your team better, continue to

make your team grow and develop?

Is it possible for a business and organization to systematize

growth and development of their teams, and how does that work with

a performance management system?

And we love it.

We love ProForum, and we love what we've created, and so do our clients.

And so, it's been cool to see that project.

So that was going on.

At the same time that was going on, we had an opportunity that

was presented to us last July.

Actually, it was last, last spring, but it took shape in July.

And that is a publishing company.

As you guys know, as listeners to The Last Ten Percent, I've written

three books, and- You know, never saw myself as a writer, but always

enjoyed the creative process.

So whether I was writing songs or whether I was writing books, or whether

I'm creating, content or even software, it's just always this creative process.

And so after you've gone through the process of doing this several

times, though, you kind of feel more familiar with the, idea and the kind

of the business side of publishing.

And so we were presented with an opportunity.

There was a company that was failing, and it was actually failing pretty severely.

it was losing seven figures every year, and it was owned by a publicly traded

company who was trying to, let's just be honest, it was trying to get rid of it.

It was trying to cut its losses.

It was trying to sell this underperforming asset.

And so one thing led to another and here I am.

I get approached by, this company and we get into negotiations, and we ended up

buying this publishing company last July.

And so immediately our team starts growing because they had a lot of employees

and so, I wanna start this by just saying, first of all, I wanna unpack

some ideas tonight because if you're leading a team or you're taking over a

team, we always talk about the last 10%.

We always talk about how to live well and finish strong, and you can

do that in spite of the fact that you may be in an environment, and

I think this is the message today.

You may be in an environment and everything around you may not be

operating in the last 10%, right?

It may not be operating, the environment, the systems, the processes, the teams,

the people, service, the capabilities.

All of these things may not be operating in that because when you're living in

the last 10%, you take on challenges, you're not afraid to move into a little

bit of chaos, especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a leader.

Sometimes we're called to step into these zones and these areas of chaos

where we don't really have clarity, or we have clarity, but we're put into

an environment that is not ideal, and that's what leadership is all about.

It's about how do we bring this order to chaos?

How do we bring clarity to confusion?

These are the things that we're doing as leaders.

We're constantly doing it with our teams.

We're constantly doing it in our businesses and our work.

Sometimes, though, it's just a little extra crazy, and that is the

story of this publishing company.

We took this publishing company over on July 1st, 2025, and Oh,

man, it was… What a crazy ride.

I've been flying to Florida, every week.

for three months, I flew every week to Florida.

and my home base is not in Florida, been down there now, and now I'm

flying down about every other week while we're just getting everything

in place and everything set up.

Just to go through, like what does it look like?

If you've ever wondered about buying a company or, you know, I related to

somebody, somebody said, you bought a company, but it wasn't doing well." I

said, yeah, it's kind of like if you were to buy a house that was on fire.

Obviously, you can get a very good deal because who buys a house, a lot of

people won't even buy a house if it's not completely furnished and finished and

ready to go walk in, turnkey, ready to go.

some people have the stomach to go, as I have in the past, go and buy fixer-uppers,

and you're gonna flip the house.

You're gonna go in, you're gonna make the repairs, you're gonna do it, and

then you're gonna flip the house and you make money on it because you are

the one that takes it from really ugly, house to dollhouse, and then all of

a sudden everybody wants to buy it.

there's that seeing that value, the raw value, the bones.

Like, where is the value in what I've just purchased?

And then being able to capitalize that on and just open that up so everybody

else can see the value But then there's times where it would be like if you

were gonna buy a house and it literally was on fire, there's not a lot of

people that's yeah, that's my kinda, that's my kinda deal right there."

The whole kitchen is just completely burning out right now.

I can call the fire department and let's go on this thing, right?

And that's the, that's the situation that we walked into on this organization.

So we definitely inherited a mess.

It was, I would say 70% of the mess was known.

there's always a percentage that's unknown.

when you see these remodeling shows and they rip the wall off and they're like,

"We're gonna replace this." And they rip the wall off and go, "Oh, my goodness.

I didn't know there was this pipe here and it was running right through

the middle of the living room that we're opening up," and, "Oh, my

gosh," and it's this bam, bam, bam.

This whole thing during the television show where you're like, "I don't know

if we're gonna make the remodel," right?

we've definitely had our moments in that over the last year.

But I'm gonna tell you some of the things, like if you walk into a system like this,

I'm gonna share some details because feel like you've been with me for a long time.

Almost 100 episodes.

Several years if you've been listening the last 10%.

So we're just gonna let you in on some things that we,

wouldn't normally talk about.

This is the, uh, reverse resume.

You know, I was listening to a Navy SEAL one time, and he was

speaking at one of our conferences.

And, amazing stories.

Oh, my goodness.

If you ever have a chance to corner a Navy SEAL and there's no cameras,

and it's not being recorded, you know you're in for some amazing stories.

And so he was telling some stories.

One of the things, though, he had started a business and he talked about

how he asked anybody that was applying for the company to, for their resume.

And he would take the resume and look at it, and it's all this, all the good stuff.

"I was here, and I went up there, and I saved this much money. I made this

much money, and da, da, da, da. I got promoted here." And then he'd just

push it back, and then he'd hand them his, what he called reverse resume.

Thought that was a fascinating idea.

He's like- All that stuff you put on your resume just

sounds good, but it's not real.

I wanna know all the things that went sideways, that didn't go right,

that, that went wrong, the job that you lost or the project that didn't

work or that failed, or the promotion you didn't get, all these things.

And he would literally pass his reverse, his own personal reverse resume across

the table, and then ask them to go back and rewrite their resume or speak to

their resume and make a reverse resume.

And that's what he would do 'cause he wanted to know

, essentially their battle scars.

Who am I going into the foxhole with?

What's their battle scars and experience?

Not just the highlight reel.

I wanna know the lowlight reel.

I wanna know what nobody else knows and what nobody else sees.

I thought that was fascinating.

So today we're doing a little reverse resume because I'm gonna share some

dirty laundry with you from this publishing company that we picked up.

Now we now have created a new entity called authorservices.com because we

purchased this publishing company, and it's essentially becoming something that

it's not, it's, it wasn't this… Author Services did not exist before, so that's

not the name of the company we purchased.

But we purchased, the authorservices.com because Author Services is gonna

be the new home of some of these imprints and the services that we're

offering because it's so different.

We just are creating something so different than what I'm

about to share with you.

We couldn't even say the same thing because it's literally, we've gone

kind of dark for the last 11 months to recreate this company virtually

from scratch, and I'll tell you why.

first of all, when I walked in, noticed very quickly we had an antiquated systems.

the phone system was antiquated.

The office furniture, heck, was just old and just needed replacing.

Most of the chairs had holes in them and stuff.

And then the computer system was probably, while it functioned, it was something

that you couldn't integrate with.

It wasn't, user friendly.

It was very difficult.

It was very, t- labor intensive, hard to get data out of, and,

It was just very difficult.

So it was taking a lot of time and effort and energy just to keep it going, They

had tried to replace it two or three times, failed doing so, and when I say

failed, they failed pretty spectacularly.

the public company bought this company, I believe, in 2008 from the founder,

who founded it actually in 2000.

And, and so they just had not invested in technology.

They had not invested in a lot of things.

So it was just antiquated.

Everything was old.

we had complexity like you just don't even understand.

So because the computer system that housed all this data, when you think

about it, we have over 20,000 authors that this company has published

that are active authors right now.

20,000, that's a lot of authors, but when you think about all the design

files, the multiple iterations of book covers and editing files and thousands

and thousands and millions of pages of words, the size of the data is massive.

We're talking terabytes, tens, more than 20 terabytes of data.

And if you know data, you know that's a lot of data.

So managing this data in a system that was antiquated was creating a lot of problems.

Then they kind of exacerbated their problems.

For example And they wouldn't clean up things.

So, like, When I went in, I said, "Okay, we gotta figure out these landing

pages. Where are our leads coming from?" And different things like that.

So we opened it up and opened up the hood of the car and said,

"Okay, what do we got here?"

And we opened up the landing page managing system that they used.

There was 5,900 landing pages.

That means, like, when you have a landing page, you say, "Okay, we're gonna give

a free guide away" or, "We're gonna have a spring sale," or, "We're gonna…"

They would just do a landing page and then if it was spring of 2017 and they

needed a new landing page in the fall of 2017, they would just leave the

spring one there and start another one.

And so how do you manage and keep up 5,900 landing pages?

We didn't even know, we couldn't even find the landing pages

that leads were coming through.

in all of that mess, we couldn't even tell which pages actually had people coming in

and saying, "Hey, we wanna get a book."

So this this is a very big mess They were overpaying for a lot of technology.

They had technology layered on technology.

So they had this older antiquated system that was their project management,

production management system, data house.

And then they had a CRM system, and I won't name any names, but

it's a very large company that you would all know in CRM land.

If you have a sales management system, I promise you would know this one.

It's one of the most known CRM systems out there.

They had 14 salespeople, and they were spending over $100,000 a year

on subscribing to this CRM system.

Oh my goodness.

That is a ridiculous amount of money, for a CRM system that was

out of the box, not customized.

So there was just money going out there as well.

we had too many team members.

They had over-hired through COVID because there was a lot of people… I

don't know if you know this or not, but a lot of books exploded during COVID

because everybody's staying at home.

And so everybody started writing books, and so then they over-hired during

that season where their production went up, and then they never kind of

right-sized their business post-COVID, and that was a large part of why

they were suffering financially.

they had multiple different accounting systems, like they had

QuickBooks Desktop, and they had some of it on QuickBooks Online,

and they had some of it in neither.

Some of it in the a- antiquated, computer production system.

So they're having to go to all these different systems every month just

to kinda keep the plates spinning, and it was extremely hard to get

an accurate financial picture of what was going on because data

was in so many different places.

Now, this is a good one, and for those of you that are in IT, we had

over 20 servers at the same time for a business that, when I took over

on July 1st, had about 40 employees.

So we had almost a server for every two employees.

A server, not a computer.

We had almost- A server for every two employees.

In case you don't know, that is overkill.

We do not need that many servers.

We're already down, I think we're down to, four to six servers.

We've been consolidating data, and the goal is to get it down to one or none.

But we will have it down soon.

It's just so much data and all over the place.

It's taking us a little while to consolidate those.

But we've dropped those down.

Now, they're paying… A lot of those were not, they didn't own them.

They didn't have, a room full of servers.

These were servers they were renting and paying for their space.

So again, just tremendous cost every single month.

did really not great job at collecting, money that authors owed.

In fact, as of March, this particular company, was owed, and I didn't

find this out until after this year.

because of the systems and antiquatedness of it, they

didn't have good record keeping.

So as we're putting all this stuff together and cleaning everything

up, it's like every week you'd find something else and be like, "Oh, my gosh.

What did that… Just happened." Like, "Oh, what is this?" And so I felt like

every time I would go in there, I'm like, "What are we gonna find today?

What are we gonna find today?

What are we gonna turn over?

What rock are we gonna turn over today?" And so one rock we turned over

about, probably three months ago, four months ago, was that, we had six point

four million dollars in uncollected just bad debt, and this was people

that had not paid us for f- 10 years.

Some of them are not even alive anymore, and they just never followed up with them.

the company that had owned this company, if somebody stopped paying, their annual

renewal subscription 'cause, their books, it has a little fee every year because

there's a cost associated with maintaining this book and keeping it published.

It's not a exorbitant cost, just a small cost, and so they have

this small annual renewal fee.

And some of them had not even finished paying for the book,

meaning they had a book published, never finished paying for it, and

then they somehow got it published.

And then they never, they just stopped paying, and their book was still out.

So unbelievable.

Can you imagine that?

I told the team, I said, "Do you realize that Netflix, that there's

probably people that, that owe this company more money than Netflix."

Because Netflix will turn your account off if you don't pay, and we don't.

We just keep on going.

And so amazing.

It's hard to run a business like that because that money is going to

pay people's salaries, and so then, you don't have customer service

because you don't have enough because you're not getting paid, and you

don't know why you don't have enough and you're feeling overwhelmed.

it's because you're not doing a good job managing, your revenue.

And so, we just had, a lot of problems like that.

And the other thing is that was caused by some really horrible yeah,

I guess what I would say is systems that was put into place, and I think

they were put into place because they wanted to do the right thing or I

guess you'd say do the right thing.

They wanted to… It was, it seemed like more of a sales-driven organization.

So they really wanted to close deals, and they were thinking, how

could we close more book deals?

How could we compete and close more deals?" And what they came up with

was a system where essentially they just kept lowering the price of the

publishing package lower and lower and lower to get people to start, and then

they would put it on a payment plan.

But they're not a bank, and so they would say, "Okay, we'll just do, we

won't do interest 'cause we're trying to get people to start." So ultimately,

they got it down to where they were offering publishing packages for

$150 This is on a $5,000 publishing package at that time And there's

different ranges in published packages.

I just picked $5,000 'cause it, it goes up and down.

It may be, it may have been 2,500, it could've been 9,000, but, between that,

let's say average is, 4 or $5,000.

So if it was a 4 or $5,000 publishing package, you could get that publishing

package for $150, and then you'd have a 23-month, I think, payment

plan, interest-free, no credit check.

now you can imagine what happens when you do that.

You have many, many authors who have, a lot of expectations on how their book

is gonna perform and, you know, maybe it doesn't, but there's a lot of authors

that got to the finish line on that and said, "Okay, we've launched our book."

Maybe it was three months later, and they've turned in their manuscript,

they've paid for the package, they've launched their book three months later.

It's gone through the editing and the graphic design, the

typesetting, all that stuff.

It comes out three to six months later, and it doesn't

do like what they want it to.

It may have sold a lot, may have sold a little bit.

It doesn't meet their expectations, and they go, "You know what? I, I'm

not gonna do this anymore," and they just stop paying on their payment plan.

now they've only paid $150 down.

They may be paying a couple hundred, two or $300 a month on

a $5,000 payment package, which, by the way, the salesperson got

compensated for right up front.

you had to pay the graphic designers and all the editors and all those

things a- all while they're doing it over that three-month period of time.

So over the period of three months, they had collected probably $500,

maybe $600 on a $5,000 book deal.

The company, the way I figured it up when I took over, was losing

at least $1,000 per book that they sold, and they sold over 1,000 books.

It was way over 1,000.

1,000, over 1,000 books a year in book deals, and they were losing

$1,000 a book that they sold because of all these bad systems.

So, lastly, I would say this is something that I was just, have had to also look

at and figure out how we can change and change and improve is that there was a,

I would say, dissociated, maybe a little bit apathetic, and defeated culture.

and when I say that, I'm not saying that to say that the team

members- were bad team members.

In fact, there's amazing team members, but the environment that they were forced

into in this kind of corporate malaise, you would have these things that, that

after COVID, it was all remote work.

And so the c- team chemistry that they had, and the parties and the fun and

the, the game dress-up days or the picnics and stuff, it just evaporated.

It never came back.

And, also what never came back was this ability that you could con-

you had some say in what's going on.

So if this computer system wasn't working, then it just wasn't working.

and the likelihood was that it probably would never work, and there was nothing

you could do, no matter how much you complained or troubleshot the issues

or came up with a solution yourself.

It really didn't matter.

They were just not listened to, and there was just nothing.

It was just kinda "Just go back into your, little, you know, uh, fiefdom

and do your job, and thank you very much." And, now, the, it wasn't

like, that it was a negative culture.

I will say, a really positive.

The leadership was always trying to send out positive messages.

But that's a real difficult thing when you're trying to send out

positive messages, but it's not aligning with the changes that

are necessary in the organization.

So then it can come across as either, nobody can focus on work because it's

like, "Let's just talk about something else. How you, how you doing in your

home life and your personal life?" and we got, you know, leaders that was coaching

people in their personal lives because this is a, it's a whole lot easier to

talk about that mess than it is about…

'cause we can change something there.

We might not can change anything here.

and so it's just really strange.

It was a strange, dynamic, culturally.

And, and so this is what we inherited.

And you say, "Why in the world would you do this, Dallas?" And that's

exactly what I went to Ingram.

There was a, it's one of the largest book printers in, they distribute

and print books all over the world.

It probably I heard one number, I don't know if it's true, but they said

it was 70% of all books printed and distributed in the world are printed

and distributed through Ingram.

And they, have one of their manufacturing plants in Nashville, Tennessee.

So I drove up since they print our and distribute our books as well.

I drove up to Nashville to meet with them.

And the lady, I was just, the marketing lady looked at me and said, "You're

an entrepreneur." I'm like, yeah."

"You're in technology." yeah." She's "Why in the world would you pick to buy

this publishing company?" And I was like, "Man, that's a… You're in the business.

What are you doing?

You should be an advocate for this." I was just dumbfounded that she asked me that

question, but I told her, I said, "This is a really interesting intersection."

And I'll say this to this team.

difficulties are not always, a problem in the sense that they're, they are a

problem, but it's not a, it's not a bad problem because I find it invigorating

when you can go in and solve problems that are in areas that are changing.

And the publishing industry, if you think about it, from the publishing

press, has been pretty consistent.

I would actually consider the publishing industry to be kinda sleepy.

a sleepy industry, There's not a lot of changes in the last

bit, but man, it's changing now because of something called AI.

Artificial intelligence is changing a lot of things, and I'll tell you some

facts about the publishing industry That make it interesting to me and

as an entrepreneur and bringing this.

And also you guys know as The Last Ten Percent we love turning culture around.

That's what we do.

And so if I'm gonna create a performance management system and a coaching

system, I better believe that we can turn cultures around and we can grow

and develop people or, I mean, hey, I'm not, I'm just not drinking the Kool-Aid.

So I thought it was an awesome opportunity 'cause the team was great.

I thought the people were great.

They were hungry for change.

They were wanting something new and, that's what we did.

So one of the interesting things, before I get to the changing of the story, one

of the interesting things that struck me was the need for technology in the

publishing industry for the industry, not just, on the front side like websites that

are pretty designed to help you sign up for, getting a book package or whatever.

That's all necessary.

but real technology on the backside to make the actual process more simple.

So that's what I told Ingram.

I said, "Look, man." I said, "I see an opportunity here because there's…" the

publishing industry's very complicated.

If you've never published a book before, you can't really

fathom the number of decisions.

It's almost if you were gonna, build a house.

If you've ever built a house and, the architect or the builder's

coming to you and he's "No, where do you want this outlet?

Okay, what kind of cover do you want?" "Okay, what, where

do you want the light placed?

how many of those?

What kind of light?

What are the…" And it's just like a million details that you really don't

even think about until you start having to do it, and you're like, "Oh, my-,"

if I gotta answer another question.

That's kinda like publishing a book.

There's all kind of different decisions that you have to make as

you go through the publishing process.

And so those decisions gets translated b- on the backside in

the publishing industry, it's very difficult because there's other

things like royalty management and all these things that make it actually

fairly complicated, and there's not a lot of people that do it well.

there's a ton of people who do it poorly.

And so I see that as an opportunity and so as an entrepreneur that's why

I was interested in this particular, business and this particular industry.

And so it's not necessarily about publishing.

It's more, for me, it's about publishing and helping this particular company,

but also using that information that we gain from the publishing company

to leverage that for technology, and I'll tell you about that in a minute.

But one of the things that we found out was that we needed to change the story.

if you're listening to The Last Ten Percent, we talk a lot and we hear a lot

from leaders and their stories, and we want to pull those stories from people

that have done amazing things, people that are living in the last 10%, in that top

10%, living well and finishing strong.

Because if we can glean something from their story that matches reality and

describes it better than our current story, the hope is that we can shift

and change our story and operate better in reality to get better results.

And I know as leaders that's what you're doing for your teams, is that

you're trying to shape their stories.

We always talk about with our coaches in the one-on-one system, we're talking

about having a battle for belief.

We always want to battle for belief and that sounds weird.

What are you talking about, battle for belief?

It's that I'm battling with the people that I manage, with the people that

I'm coaching, I am battling for their belief to help them shape or reshape

or craft a belief that aligns really well with reality and helps them

function successfully in this reality.

Because the stories we tell ourselves don't necessarily

have to be true all the time.

And then when we tell ourselves stories that's not true,

we tend to get in trouble.

For example, a story this company was telling itself before last July was,

"You have to give books away really cheap with no-interest loans for 24

months to get people to buy." I could talk somebody in off the street that

didn't even write a book on that, and that's what they were doing.

"Hey, you wanna write a book?

It may be a bestseller.

You never know.

For $150, you can find out." Hey, that's not a hard sell, right?

That's a much, that's a much easier sell than finding somebody who has a

manuscript done that has been working on it for six months and wants to, wants to

take the, t-take it to the next level.

the other thing is that they said AI is bad.

a year ago, barely a year ago, they were telling their employees

for the year before that this new thing of AI is, it's, you just don't

need to, don't need to focus on it.

It's just, this is not for us.

it's evil, Now, I'm not saying that there's not some things that

we're going to find, and we haven't already, as we move through the,

age of artificial intelligence, that is going to be negative.

It's like when Google came out and the internet came out and all of a sudden

you had just access to information all over the globe instantly.

There were some pluses and minuses that came with that too.

So trust me, I'm not just rosy colored glasses on AI.

totally see there, there's a lot of different ways this could go sideways

that could really hurt humanity.

On the other side- It is here.

It is not, it doesn't seem like it's slowing down.

It seems like it's picking up.

it's going faster, and if we're going to engage with it, I'd rather at least

understand it so if the wheels come off the rails, I at least understand

more of how that's happening, when it's happening, than just saying,

"I don't wanna know about it.

I don't wanna know about it.

Mm, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba." You know?

And then, and then all of a sudden it comes off and I'm caught off guard.

So what we've done is change that story.

Number one, we said, "Hey look, we have a quality product. We have

excellent service. We want to pair that with great authors." And we have

great authors, but we were creating systems that made other authors,

maybe come in that, were not ready.

And so not bad people, just not ready to be authors.

And so we've corrected those systems.

The other story that we changed is, "Hey look, we don't need to ignore AI.

We need to embrace AI, but the industry is struggling right now because of

AI." So we need to come up with a, way that we can do this ethically?

Because, I was reading an article the other day, from a national news agency

that said there was a publishing company, I think it was in Korea, There was a

publishing company in South Korea that published like 9,000 books in one year.

Just went from nothing to 9,000 books.

And I don't even think it was with other authors.

I think it was just they did it.

They published 9,000 books.

And they were saying it brought up a lot of ethical issues because they

just think they ran AI, just p- just churned out copy after copy after

copy, and flooded those books in the hopes that one of the titles might hit.

one of the things that they did might hit, and it just sell.

They don't care that it's quality or get bad reviews.

They don't care.

They're just pumping out content.

and that is not At all how I would suggest that we engage and

use AI in the publishing process.

And so that is another reason that interests me, is that we can change our

story and say, "How do we use AI in the publishing industry to offer exponentially

better service to our clients, but at the same time not take out the human

element of creativity and experience?"

That just, you cannot capture that in AI, and AI is not as good

of as a creative as humans are.

When you ask it to write, you can say, "Hey, AI, write me a

book on this," and it'll do it.

And, you can tell it whatever you want, but the problem is

it comes out as pretty vanilla.

it comes out as pretty…

Actually, it's pretty rough.

it's not a… you kinda get bored of reading it after about, a page

and a half 'cause you're like, "Okay, there's no life here," right?

So we can't replace the human element in that process, but AI is a super

tool that we can use and integrate.

So that is all the things that we're unpacking, and we've been unpacking

those questions for the last year So how do we change this business?

if I stepped into this with this team a year ago, what have we done in the last

11 and a half months to make it better?

And what are we currently doing?

And then what's the next six months look like?

'Cause we're just now getting almost to the start line.

first of all, if you step into an environment, and this is what I

would say for the teams out there, if you're stepping into an environment

and you are promoted into a mess.

You know, I was talking to a person one time, he was working for a

restaurant company, I won't name it, it's a national chain, you would all

know about it, and he said, "Hey, they're putting me in this restaurant

because the last owner just wrecked it.

it was just a, it was a hot, hot mess,

And they were dropping me in this environment." And so when he goes in on

day one, he better have some kind of a plan or structure, some type of a model

that he's gonna use, to start shifting.

Now, in an episode back, I can't even remember, I think it was in, back in the

fall, I talked about four things that we were doing, eliminating unnecessary

complexity, eliminating unnecessary cost.

those are two of the four.

You can go back and listen to a former episode, like past

episode, to see the other two.

But those were four, the model that we were taking.

during this process, I was applying those four things to this company.

But I would say that there are some other things that I would like to say

t- today that we were doing and we've done over the last 11 and a half months

that we're trying to create and get to.

And this is what I would say these four things are.

Number one, we have to change our story.

If you're in a failing operation, you've got to start changing the story,

meaning changing how people see things, changing how people think about things.

At our company now, we're changing the way that people see work, and

we're bringing people back together.

So it's yeah, I know you've been working at home, but like, I

want to experience your energy.

I want to, I want you to experience my energy.

I want us to get together and have some synergy together and collaborate

at the company office because there's so many good things that come out of

the room when you're in it together.

And so pulling people back together so we can have this energy, this empathy

for each other, this kind of passion and share this passion, and also see each

other share gifts that we didn't know.

That, somebody's planning a party, somebody has an idea, somebody has a

new, thought for a product or service.

Those things were not happening because everybody was disassociated,

just off on their own.

The second thing is we're finding and creating wins.

So we started building a brand-new custom-made ERP system that takes

everything from the CRM through production, through accounting, through

an author portal, so our authors are gonna have this portal that they can see all

their royalties and all this other stuff.

It's incredible.

It's incredible.

And we're finally in the kinda final stages of testing.

We've got about a month and a half more to go before we roll

out the fl- last pieces of it.

We've already got the CRM going, the production going, working

on the accounting, and finishing up the author portal right now.

So we're really excited about that.

That's a win, and when the sales team finally gets to experience and see

this new CRM system that's custom-made, that does exactly what they wanna do,

man, that's exciting, and that's a win We've got a lot of new products.

we've got new products that we've currently put out, new services,

and we've got some that's in the pipeline that's coming later this

year that we're really excited about.

Those are wins.

We're redesigning the websites.

We've got the new author services website, that's authorservices.com.

And then we're redesigning all the imprint websites.

So Morning Star Press is one of the imprints and, we've got other

imprints that, that have websites and messages and things like that.

And even over the course of the summer, we're going to be,

redesigning and re-messaging all those websites to the new way.

So those are wins.

And, and finding new revenue streams.

So we, are expanding our ability to generate revenue from just, $150 down,

and then half those people don't end up paying, to other opportunities

to, to serve authors and serve the community and generate revenue.

So very, very big, but you need to find those wins because this culture

had been so accustomed of not winning.

It's almost like this self… you just keep on going through this malaise.

There's no energy there.

So we need wins, and so we start winning, and you start seeing

the culture come together around that rally, around those wins.

I would say thirdly, we're not afraid of technology, and we're embracing,

like I said, custom-built ERPs, but we're also integrating artificial

intelligence in business systems and processes right now to help our workflow.

we've reduced, all kind of… I mean, there's, there's so many metrics

I can't go into on this podcast.

But we've sped up so many different things.

We've cut out so much red tape, and we're moving projects through

so much cleaner now and so much faster, just using artificial

intelligence in a lot of cool ways.

we're also using technology to capture conversations so that when clients call

in and the salesperson says something, and s- gives them this deal, it is

capturing that so that the production person knows and it's not like the

salesperson forgot to type it in.

We can do that and capture that information and make sure that

information's passed on to production so that there's no gaps in our service

we can also do a better job utilizing technology, and this is one of the cool

things that we're gonna be rolling out later this year when the author portal

is finished, completely, is that we're gonna be rolling out more education.

So we created a lot of educational material first half of this year, and

we're gonna putting that into videos and things like that in the author portal.

So when you log on to your author portal, one of the most frustrating

things for new authors is they log in, and they're excited because they

just signed this publishing deal, and they're like, "Man, I'm ready to get in."

But they have no idea of the journey that's, in front of them,

and so then it just starts hitting them like a brick in the face.

bam, and it's all this stuff, and it's usually surprises.

And so what we wanna do is we wanna give these valuable insights

with at least less surprises.

If they don't read them, then it'll be a surprise.

But we wanna make sure that all the information's there for our authors so

that on that author portal, they can have these insights and go through and

understand and feel like they really got a good feel and knowledge of the publishing

process, not only how we do it, but in general And, and then partnerships.

This is another thing.

we reached out to, a friend of mine, and he has been in the, publishing

business for a long, long time, and we're starting a hybrid publishing company.

These imprints under author services are mainly self-publishing imprints,

meaning you can, get publishing services and you own 100% of the

royalties of the book that you publish.

Hybrid publishing is a little different.

There's, it's, it's I would say more of a white glove publishing.

You have a lot of authors like CEOs or, large church pastors or heads of state.

these are people that They may not have this massive following that would go with

the traditional route, but they want their book to look like it's on, it or could be

actually, 'cause distribution would put it on the shelf in like a Barnes & Noble.

and so it's more expensive, but it's something that's, very good, high quality.

And so we're actually partnering with him to open up our own hybrid

publishing company in the fall as well.

So third and fourth quarter's gonna be really busy with that.

And so, man, those are all the things that

We've been fixing this company.

We've been doing the last 10%.

We've been working on the new performance management platform

and rolling that out with clients.

So the team has been cooking.

We have been busy.

And so we're just so excited because things are coming together.

And what I love about it is this company that we purchased was

supporting over 20,000 authors globally, and those books were going to get

essentially unpublished if we did not do something and help this company.

And so for me, it's just a really cool opportunity to be able to step in and,

just be able to hopefully, continue to add some needed change to this organization,

changing the story, increasing technology and how this company utilizes it.

Because we're going from a company that was not functioning well to a

company that's known for excellence.

And so I wanna talk to you a little bit about that, 'cause if you've

ever thought about reading, writing a book, I wanna tell you some

statistics and some things I've learned because I have learned, and this is

another reason I bought the company.

I was like, "Hey, look, I've published three books." And some, you know, my first

book sold, oh my gosh, next to nothing.

and my second book did a lot better.

And so you learn from the first, you go to the second.

And third book did great too.

I wanted to see who's the best, so I wanted to see what are the authors?

Now wouldn't you like to look under the hood and say, "Hey, Random House,"

or, "Hey, Zondervan," or, "Hey, what's Penguin, could you tell me how many books

your most, your best authors are selling?

And by the way, what are they doing?" hey, I got a list of 20,000 authors, and now I

get to see what's working and what's not.

I get to see who's selling and who's not.

And so for me, it's just enlightening.

And so here's some things that you may not know about the publishing

industry that I'm telling you right now, and this is just me to you

Number one, in the last year, the publishing industry went gangbuster.

There was more books.

There was over four million books published last year.

That was a like a 32 or 36% increase in the number of books published

in t- the last calendar year.

Now, that is way bigger gains than anybody pred- projected two years before.

Way bigger gains in book publishing.

we're talking about, there should've been, like, a 5% increase maybe.

And you might have seen things like e-books or audiobooks are growing at

a higher rate or certain categories.

like, I don't know, but anyway, at the end of the day, massive increase.

So you g- so you have to wonder, and you sit back and say, "Why?

if you don't know, I'm gonna tell you, and that is AI.

Again, just like that publishing company in South Korea was like,

"I'm gonna publish 9,000 books." They pumped out, 9,000 books in one year.

AI has, it's influencing people and creating less friction to get

from nothing to, a book, right?

And you still gotta go and typeset it, and you gotta, you should have

it edited because AI's great at grammar, but it's it's still not

human, and it's still vanilla.

That's my opinion.

But, but if you go through that process, and you get the, everything

done, then what you end up having, is a lot more books being put out there.

But here is the problem, and this is what I wanna tell you as an author.

If you're thinking about writing a book, which hey, I've written three.

I'm working on my fourth, and it'll be out, hopefully later this year, maybe

next year, maybe first quarter next year 'cause there's a lot going on right now.

But, if you're writing a book, what you need to know is this.

Last year, there was more books published, but there was not many more readers.

So the actual numbers of books per title sold less.

That means this.

Let's say that the average book only sells 200 copies a title, 2,000 copies a title.

Whatever you wanna put the number on.

Let's say that number is the average per book.

if it sold 200 copies in 2023 per title, of all the books that were

sold, if you averaged out how many books sold per title, if it was

200, in last year, it was 150.

It dropped because there was so many more books published And if you think about

your old economics lessons, supply and demand, when your, your supply goes up

and the demand doesn't change, right?

So at the end of the day, what we're seeing is this one of the effects of AI

on the entire publishing industry is that content is just flooding the marketplace.

And so what do you do as an author if you're thinking about writing a book?

we've got to start shifting the way that we think about things, and this is

where it gets a little bit interesting, and this is why Author Services

is Author Services and then these publishing imprints are what it serves.

Because Author Services is set up to serve authors, and it might be

to serve an author to connect that author to an imprint, to connect

them to an imprint that matches.

If you're a faith-based author, we have Morning Star Press.

If you're an author that writes a self-help or a guide or a recipe

book or anything like that, if you're gardening or whatever, this

kind of lifestyle education, Mill City Press is gonna be for you.

If you're a FBI agent or a cop or a former military, then Liberty Hill Publishing is

gonna be a perfect fit for you because, those are gonna be the kind of where

the imprints are moving in the future.

Over actually, they're already there, and we're just changing the language

on the websites over the summer.

so we can point you in that direction, but the biggest thing for an author

is going to be moving forward.

As we move into this new AI age, one of the biggest things is gonna be marketing.

I'm just gonna tell you right now that you might have spent 80% of your time

working on the book and 20% of your time marketing If that was the case five

years ago, it's completely the opposite.

You need to be spending 80% of the time marketing, and It's still a process,

and great books are they're brutal.

And I'm not saying that you can even spend less time writing the book.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm saying you gotta spend more time marketing the book.

So whatever time you think that is to write the book, you're going to

need to set the expectations that you have, even greater in this

new age on marketing the book.

So what does that mean?

It means Author Services is gonna be partnering with you in the

future to help that, and we're gonna be rolling some things out.

Actually, on The Last 10%, Author Services may become, a very big sponsor of The

Last 10%, along with some of the other technology that I'll be talking to you

about that we have coming out this fall.

Because part of this acquisition included some, development teams

and development expertise that we just did not have before, and

so we're developing a lot more.

We're developing our ERP system, and, we're finishing up Perform,

the integration with the 101s.

one of the things that we're doing with Author Services to help is a

publishing app for, for authors.

It's gonna help you with the process of that.

We're really excited about that.

It is a sick tool.

Wait till you see that.

That'll be out later this year.

And, and then also because I've been in Think Move Thrive, we've been doing

leadership summits for many years now, I've just been just not happy with,

the clunkiness, I don't know, the lack of I don't know, cool feel, and

user-friendliness of conference apps, like event management conference apps.

I just, I haven't enjoyed using them, and they're expensive, and, I don't know.

It's just, it's not been good.

So we have also, for the last few months, been working on that.

If for no one else but me, we're doing it for me.

So our new leadership summit will be running off this new conference app,

this year, but we're gonna be able to roll that out to other people.

So we have got so many things coming out over the next six to eight months.

We've got technology coming out.

We're rolling out all these revamps, imprints off of author services.

We're gonna have a complete marketing package with a marketing mastermind

class specifically for authors that want to do a really good job of selling

their book after they get it published.

Most authors, it's kinda like, you know, think about this like your wedding.

You know when you get married, everybody's plans the first day of wedding.

I had a guy tell me one time, he goes, "Man, I don't understand why so many

people put, spend so much time planning the first day of their marriage, but

they gotta be married for like 50 years, 60 years, 70 years after that, and they

spend no time planning the rest of it."

And he's like, "You would think they would spend more time planning

the rest of it." And that's kinda what it is for book publishing.

If you wanna publish a book, you gonna spend a ton of time getting to the actual

finished copy, and there's nothing better, I can tell you, I've done it three times,

than opening up that book the first time and pulling your book out of the package,

the wrapping, the box, whatever it is it comes in, and seeing that book in print

for the first time, it's a cool feeling.

However, if that's the only thing that you plan for and that's the only point in

time that you're working for, then you're probably not gonna get the results that

you wanna get when you are selling your book to others so that they can experience

your wonderful masterpiece and your work.

So there has to be a lot of time put into marketing that book, and that

is what we're gonna be all about, helping authors do at Author Services.

we're gonna be taking a lot of the tools that we see working with other authors

that are already doing a really great job, and we're gonna be taking some really

cool tools that we're designing right now, some diagnostic tools to really

help authors on their marketing journey and give them a roadmap to success.

So that is what we've been working on.

Thank you again for supporting Think Move Thrive, Thank you for listening

to The Last 10% and thank you for just sharing all the encouragement, and we're

just so thankful to have you on board.

and just keep us in mind check out authorservices.com, and just know

that when you get there, we're still working on stuff, so don't, don't,

uh, don't judge it too harshly.

We're gonna be changing a lot of stuff as we go through the rest of the

summer, and then you'll start seeing a lot of new things come out this fall.

And you know I always tell you, I tell The Last 10% first, so you guys are hearing

it first thanks again, and thanks for being a listener of The Last Ten Percent