If you've ever commissioned a website or a rebrand and felt like something was off - that it didn't quite land with the right people - this episode gets into why. Julie Diver has been running her creative and growth agency, 39 Steps, since 2003. What she's learned in that time is something most business owners never hear from their designers or web developers: the output is rarely the problem.

This episode matters to you because whether you're a consultant, a founder, or a senior leader building authority, your brand is either working for you or against you. And if you haven't done the deeper work first, no amount of beautiful design will fix that.

Three things we got into:

✳️ Clarity on who you're actually for has to come before any creative work begins - commissioning design without it is putting money into the wrong place, every time.

✳️ Julie's Market Street methodology - a three-part framework covering discovery, definition, and recommendations - helps leadership teams understand where they really are before deciding what to change.

✳️ Internal buy-in matters as much as external identity - when your team understands and believes in the brand, they become your most credible advocates in the marketplace.

Julie's Amplifiers - three things to do straight away:

✳️ Read StoryBrand by Donald Miller alongside They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan - Julie's two go-to books for anyone serious about messaging and marketing.

✳️ Look at the Brick - a physical device that lets you schedule when you can access apps on your phone. A simple tool for recovering attention and cutting procrastination.

✳️ Pick up The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna - a beautifully made book about the gap between what we feel we ought to do and what we're actually called to do. Worth it at any stage of business or life.

If this episode gave you something to think about, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. There's a new conversation every week, and you won't want to miss one.

About Julie : https://39steps.co.uk/

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 00:38 - Welcome and episode overview
• 02:26 - Introducing Julie Diver and 39 Steps
• 04:05 - Why identity has to come before growth
• 04:56 - How the Market Street methodology was born
• 08:19 - The real problem behind "we need a new website"
• 11:25 - Common mistakes clients and agencies both make
• 16:20 - Getting really clear on your target persona
• 17:22 - Why frameworks foster freedom
• 18:33 - Inside the Market Street process - discovery, definition, recommendations
• 24:41 - Discovering a brand rather than creating one
• 28:59 - How internal culture and external brand are connected
• 32:54 - How Julie has sustained and grown a business for over 20 years
• 34:43 - The origin of networking - and why it still works
• 38:21 - Referrals, content, outreach - what actually drives growth
• 42:31 - Why discomfort is worth leaning into
• 43:16 - Julie's three amplifiers
• 50:20 - Where to find Julie and 39 Steps
• 52:35 - Closing thoughts

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Welcome to Building Your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Julie Diver. When it comes to doing the real promotional types of things or the things that are going to provide you with credibility and help the right types of people to be attracted to your business and give you cash, it needs to say the right things and you need to be really, really clear who that is. So I would say that the biggest thing I see often is that people are not clear on who it is they actually want to be targeting.

Hi there and welcome back to Building Your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new, take a moment and do me a huge favour. Hit the subscribe or the follow button, whether you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or one of the other more niche players, they've all got a way of making sure that you don't miss this every time I publish something. If you are here, you will almost certainly love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's over 50 pages of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. I have just spent a whole day renewing and refreshing this, um, for reasons I won't go into, but I was going through it with a potential client and I was so embarrassed by the design that I ended up putting it away and I didn't get the client. And I don't tell people this very often, but I've literally just told everybody. So that's why I've done it. And it's awesome, completely up to date.

All the things I keep apologising for missing are now in there. So you can go and get that and you will love that. So today I am very excited to be speaking with somebody who I've been paying attention to for freaking years. Julie and I have been in very similar businesses. Probably if you'd thrown a knife into a room, put Julie and I in, close the lights off, only one person would have come out alive because we were ferocious competitors. I'm making light of this. We weren't really— we never really competed against each other, but we were competing in the same space, just different geographies. And Julie, welcome to the show.

Hello, Bob. Thanks for having me on.

So you run a digital agency, creative agency, branding agency. There's a lot of ways of putting this. Back in the day, they were quite different businesses. Today, I think if you are a creative agency, you are a digital agency, and you are a branding agency. If you're not doing all three of those, you're really just the help. I really honestly don't know how to introduce you other than there are lots of businesses who do what you do for money, but they don't get it right. And one of the things I love about your business is you do get it right, and that's why you seem to thrive. Have I got that right?

Yes, thank you. Uh, thanks for that introduction. I would say, I'd say, yeah, I'd like to think that we do have that right. So we set up in 2003, so it's a long time ago, and we've seen the gamut of how marketing and design and what development and all that has changed over those years. So we're now more in that kind of growth agency phase, I, I guess. So our kind of idea is to help businesses that have grown and they've changed, but they haven't quite caught up with themselves yet. So, and that could be then manifest itself into looking at brand refresh and marketing campaigns and all that kind of stuff. But actually, it's all the bit before you get to that point that we're more geared towards helping now as well. So yeah, it, it is growing organically into that space.

So you and I had a chat the other day, which was great fun, and one of the things that really stood out for me is what you're trying to grow is really important. And if you don't have a clear sense of your own identity, when you then start to try and grow it, it could be really problematic because a lot of the time you're trying to grow in somebody else's shoes. How do you work? I think particularly where you've got a company where you've maybe got a leadership team of half a dozen people and they've all been working probably in our organisation for a long time, and they probably all have completely different perspectives of what this company actually is, and a lot of them are probably quite fixed. How do you help them come to this sort of unified vision before you start working on any kind of visual identity?

Uh, yeah, great question. So we created a methodology that started about 10 years ago, and it was born out of the fact that actually I was having conversations with prospects and clients And it was, it's quite consultative, but it, but those conversations I'd originally been having with them was actually very much more commercially minded and business focused. The point of those conversations was then in order for them to trust me to provide them with an estimate and a quote or whatever to do like a brand refresh or a web development project. And actually it occurred to me that there was a huge amount of value in just simply having that first conversations around that was actually, actually commercial and consultative. So instead of just focusing on what the output side of things are, which many agencies do do, about 10 years ago we evolved this framework, and that's now a methodology called Market Street. And that's very much around the wider business picture. And where it becomes really interesting when you speak to different leadership teams are are the amount of, amount of similarity there is between businesses. Every business is special in its own way, absolutely.

And actually, part of our thing is to help them to rediscover what makes them special again. But every business also has a lot of the same challenges as another business, regardless of sector. So having done this particular piece of work and have it evolve over these past 10 years, we see the patterns emerging time and time again. And it's reassuring when I go into a leadership team scenario to be able to say, actually, you know, we've seen this before, we understand where you're coming from. And I can understand it when somebody's name is above the door and they're vested in their particular, their particular business for whatever reason. It might be people who've been there 20, 30, 40 years, even in some cases. And are on the cusp of retiring, but they've, you know, they have skin in the game. You might be looking at an employee-owned business. So we've seen a lot like family-owned businesses and everything. So it's all about the people dynamic, and I find that really fascinating. But there's always a common thread between that we can help them to find so that they can be aligned on where it is they need to go, even if at the beginning of that conversation, they didn't see it.

My job is to help them find that.

Yeah, I can imagine it's very tempting to shortcut that, because when you work with businesses over and over and over again, you see these repeating patterns, you kind of know where you're likely to go, and it's tempting to just leapfrog the process. And in many respects, I think the clients sometimes would love you to do that. Because it's probably cheaper. They just want— they just want the logo, they just want the website. What kind of reaction do you get when you pull out or you recommend this kind of process, which to them possibly just feels like more admin and process, when they know somebody else, they'll just come and wave the magic marketing dust and make it happen?

Yeah, well, okay, so a very typical inquiry into us both will be, oh, our website needs redone, the case studies are dead out of date, so-and-so has left, we've got nobody managing it, all that stuff. So I'll have that conversation, that very initial conversation. But what, 99 times out of 100, what actually is the problem is not the site at all. And this, the site is a manifestation of, um, a lot of unclear messaging, it's very confused and all that kind of stuff. All of that is completely fixable. But what I tend to find, having a frank conversation with a fellow business owner, is actually the underlying reasons as to why that's kind of ended up there. And when you speak to people, you find out a lot more about their business. So I'm— that For 39 Steps, while originally we were about the output side of things, for the majority of the past decade, the output has been a nice cherry on top for us to be involved in. That consultancy piece at the beginning is what gets me out of bed in the morning. And if it means that one of the recommendations that we're giving after they go through our process is, yeah, actually, you know, your website does need an overhaul, but do you know what?

We're not the people to do it, but we do know people who are, then I am happy, very happy to recommend kind of key partners that we work with for different aspects of brand marketing and other parts of business and pass that on. Because actually we know that the value that we're giving is very much in that beginning piece. And if a client then wants to kind of carry on with the recommendations, should they be RefreshWeb or whatever with us, then great, but it's totally okay for that not to be the case. You know, we've often had a situation whereby if it's come to the site's needing— I'm saying site because that's the initial inquiry that many people come with. Yeah, we can then, we can say, right, okay, I tell you what, we're going to write that, the brief for your web people, but we're doing that based on the insights and everything that we've learned to date about your business. Including what your clients think of you, what your team thinks of you, and your— the marketplace, where you are, the new brand position we've given you, a whole load of other stuff, which then makes a web project far easier for either us or another team.

But crucially, it makes it a much, much better outcome for the client in the first place. So yeah, we're not— it's not geared towards giving us more work to do. That does happen naturally, but it— but that's not the be-all and end-all by any stretch.

And yeah, that's towards getting the right work done.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's what gets me out of bed in the morning, making sure that you're recommending the right things to the client. Yeah.

So one of the things I love about spending time with people who've been doing what they do for a very, very long time and thrived is that they have a shorthand to being able to spot problems very, very quickly. And there's two sides to this. Side number one is people who do what you do, but they're fairly new to it, they can be very cocky.

Yeah.

And one of the things that I'm pretty sure you see is the same mistakes again and again, and I'm also then looking at the client side where the clients make the same mistakes again and again and again. Let's play with both of those because there will be people sitting there with their hands in their pockets about to commission web projects or branding projects, possibly working with inexperienced people who are, let's face it, possibly cheap, possibly way overpriced. Who knows? What should they expect to be doing in terms of mistakes?

Well, I had one really recently, actually. Um, so I was— somebody had been referred to me just to give them a bit of advice, really. So they're about to commission— they've got a logo, great— and they're about to commission a site being done. But, and I said, okay, great, so, um, so who's your target market, for example? And I got reeled off a very, very woolly explanation of who the target market was. And it was apparent to me that the people that they'd got to, that they were about to appoint, or had, you know, partly done that, hadn't asked some quite key questions. One of them is basic is that. And so I just, I pleaded with the person and just said, look, you need to stop this now because you're going to put money in the wrong places, that whatever you want to invest. Um, until you get clarity around who it is you actually want to be doing your service, you know, creating your service for, and having that really, really clear in your mind, nobody should be touching anything to do with design and build and all that. You have to have that really, really clear.

And so that work— so two things there: the, the business owner wasn't clear, and the people that were about to take his money hadn't asked them the question. And this is extremely common. And I understand it because when people want to set up a business, it's exciting. They're so enthusiastic. And actually, they want to see the tangible things that prove that they're in business, which is things like having social media accounts and a business card and a website and whatnot. And I get it. And there's nothing wrong with having something that has an initial kind of an interim holding kind of place so that people can at least start to get in touch with you if you're in a position to be able to do that. But when it comes to doing the real promotional types of things or the things that are going to provide you with credibility, and help the right types of people to be attracted to your business and give you cash, it needs to say the right things, and you need to be really, really clear who that is. So I would say that the biggest thing I see often is that people are not clear on who it is they actually want to be targeting.

And the freelancers— there's many fantastic freelancers out there, but there's many, as you rightly point out, Bob, there's inexperienced people who are not asking the right questions of business owners, and therefore business owners are spending money in the wrong place initially.

Yeah, I think that's something that used to trouble me, is an ability to create really nice graphics does not translate to an ability to really understand a business, its priorities, and how to communicate with the right people. So one of the things I pay attention to is assumptions. We all make assumptions about people very quickly. There are statistics around first impressions that say that when we meet somebody, we will decide their income, their trustworthiness, their competence, their professionalism in under half a second. And once that has been established, confirmation bias kicks in. It's very hard to shift. If that's applied to a company, that can be huge because it's exactly the same process. Under half a second, I will have decided, eh, or yeah. And if you get that wrong, goodness me, it will cost you because you can't shift that. You can, but it takes a very long time.

Yeah.

And if you shape an impression for the wrong person, it won't land.

Yeah, you're too right. So, um, yeah, the, the getting your target market, your ideal— we call them personas. There's lots of different ways people might call them, avatars, or, you know, yeah, just ideal customer, whatever. But having a really, really clear idea on who that is, what makes them tick, what emotions are you tapping into, what are you— how are you serving them, how are you helping those people, where do they work, where do they live, where do they play, you know.

What matters to them.

Yeah, so that anything that they're reading and seeing about you and your service, they're going, oh yes, this person, this business gets me. And you know, they're much happier. And also works for getting the wrong inquiries as well. But yes, my concern is, is that, um, people are not being asked the right questions by inexperienced Marketeers, designers, web developers, consultants. Yeah.

So one of the things I like about the way you approach things is the Market Street methodology, the framework that you have there. I don't know it in detail, but I know frameworks and I know processes. And there's a guy I pay attention to called Mike. Mike, what's he called? Mike Vardy. The Productivityist, and he coined this phrase, frameworks foster freedom. And okay, it's much bigger than you would think. It's a small phrase but with a very big impact, because I know when I lead with a framework, I can see the person that I'm trying to explain perhaps quite a complicated process relax into it because they can visualise the journey. And I know that it would be very easy to sell what you do based on bullet lists and case studies and features and benefits. What difference do you see when you walk a potential client or an existing client through the process of working with you at the hand of something like that process?

A lot of clarity about where their business is actually at. So our Market Street is split into— currently split into 3 kind of key distinct parts. So you've got Step 1, Step 2, Step 3. Step 1 is the discovery part, and this is the most important part, I would say. And this is the kind of the diagnostics and where we figure out where a business is right now. And often they kind of think they know, but they're willing to have a third party like us come in and just either give them confirmation that, yeah, you're right, or tell them where the gaps are in their understanding. So part of that is where we find out their whole background, the history of that business, how it's come to be, how the founders have started it. What their storey is. And then we do two really, really key things. And one is, is that we interview the client— our clients' people, and we find out why it is they even work there, what makes them stay. We have an amnesty exercise where we go, right, well, you know, what's the problem? And that yields obviously some really interesting thoughts.

And people are more likely to tell us as a third party and in the knowledge that nothing verbatim is going to be applied to a single person and passed on. But that's really useful. The second thing we do there is speak to our, our clients' clients. What we do is we get them to give us a handful of names of people that they value the opinion of. So not necessarily clients and customers that are going to sing their praises, But it might be clients and customers that they really value the honest opinion of. They might have even had a challenge or a problem or whatever, and it's how they've, you know, they've maybe overcome that. That's really useful. So to combine knowing what the people within the business and the people that, you know, are clients of that business think of the business and the experience yields us fantastic insights. And we're really well then Well placed then, and coupled with the research that we do within that marketplace and the sector, looking at industry insights, you know, economic factors and all manner of things, to be able to go back to that leadership team and go, right, people, here's where you're at, and almost like give them a temperature gauge.

So that's the first part of our framework. And even if they do nothing else beyond that, that is going to give them really, really useful insights. Because within that also, we're not just providing a report and going, there you go, and then walking away. We're giving them useful distilled information that they can actually work with. Oftentimes, it could be things that might mean that they have to look at there's, there's potentially an HR thing, which, um, has happened in the past. But we've had people get pay rises because they've not realized— a leadership team's maybe not realised they've got an absolute gem in their camp that clients absolutely love. So it can lead into different parts of the business, insights that nod on to different parts of the business that are not within our remit to go ahead and fix. But having gone through the process is really useful to have leadership team to have. Then within Market Street Moment, our second part, step 2, is then defining things. So it's defining where, what their message should be, what their brand position is within their marketplace, and helping them to get very, very clear on who their target personas are now, maybe versus they were 5, 10 years ago, whenever.

So they get a lot of clarity then. They know where they are, they know what they need to maybe look at and fix, and they also know what they're doing well. And then step 2 is where we help them to— we're defining who it is they're going for and what their brand message is. And then the third part of that is all around, okay, what are the recommendations now that we would make? So we would, at that point, audit what they have. So in terms of marketing at the moment, you know, brand, web, their campaigns, their messaging, their tone of voice, all that kind of stuff. Because it makes sense to do it then, knowing full well where they want to be, and who they can be, and what's authentic to them. And then we can give them recommendations. So then it's out of that we can then go, do you know what, you know, you came to us thinking that your messaging was terrible, and rightly so. Here's your new messaging. But actually your website's fine, it's just it needs the words changed, you know. Yeah, give them kind of key recommendations there. Or it could be that they had thought that their brand identity and their tone of voice and everything was a bit, you vanilla, and we can then give them real insights.

Okay, these are things to change, these are things to keep, you know. So they're actually changing with real substance and fact, as opposed to somebody going, do you know what, I just don't like our logo anymore, more, I want to change from blue to red, you know. Yeah, that's not a good enough reason. So we help give them— help them make strategic decisions based on evidence. And it's not, it's not just aesthetics. It's not just subjective. It's not just based on one person around that leadership team having a big loud voice and drowning out other people. Us coming in and helping them to see what actually really matters and where to put any investment and put it in the right place. They find really valuable.

What I really like about that is it's a process of discovering a brand rather than creating one. And I think it's too, it's too easy to come in and say, oh, what kind of animal are you? What's your favourite pasta? And then you ask enough people that, you'll get a picture of personality. Yeah, you'll establish a very superficial personality. Yeah, this is about really getting down into the guts of an organisation.

Yeah.

Down into the sort of the visceral roots. And then from that, you can track back, okay, now I get it. Now I understand who these people are, what they actually care about. And what emerges from that is, I mean, the word authentic is, it's a bit rubbish, but it's, you establish the actual significance of this organisation.

Yeah.

What used to really bug me was you can ask two companies that do exactly the same thing, why do you do what you do? They'll give you completely different answers, but you would never know this from the way they communicated with the world. They're very, very different, and they should rightfully attract very different people. But they were— because they were both kind of doing the same thing, nobody was happy. And it's very similar with a personal brand that you can come up with some very superficial reasons about why you do what you do and and create an artificial personal brand, it won't connect with anybody. It won't connect you with the people that you want to attract.

No.

But if you get down into who am I, what do I do, why do I care about it?

Yeah.

For me, a lot of the time the work begins with a personal manifesto. Because if you don't know why you get up in the morning, you don't know what to communicate or who to. So I really enjoy that.

Yeah. We do workshops and things with the teams, the team, you know, and some of those, some of the workshops includes the leadership teams, but there's definitely at least one that doesn't include the leadership team at all. And it's the people within that business and being able to tease out, you know, why they go to work in the morning. And it's so, it's lovely to be able to be part of that process and just see people blossom when they're talking about what it is that they do. And you might be talking about someone who's really pretty junior within that organisation, or then maybe somebody who's maybe not— he's not on the leadership team, but it's been there some time. And just often they've never actually had a space to do that as a gang. And so being in the position where you're facilitating that, that discussion, I feel it's quite a privilege really, when you sort of see these people kind of engaging in that way, you know, like, why are you, you know, what, go to fucking lunch? And that's lovely. And to be able to then report back to our leadership team and kind of go, you know, just so you know, and we're looking for patterns here.

If there's any anomalies in what people are saying, whatever, we park that. That's not something that we're reporting back on because everyone has a bad day. We're all human. What we're looking for is patterns of phrases and what people are saying. And so to be able to go back to a leadership team and say, by the way, do you know, actually, this is something that your team are really valuing about where they work, um, and have that team go, oh, I didn't, I didn't know that was like really that they noticed that, or do you know, whatever it is. And it bleeds into the whole culture of our business. And, you know, we kick the tyres of what their value, the business values are and everything, and shaping those with a an employed team, I think, is really good for a leadership team to do, rather than it be dictated by a leadership team and then, you know, being told down the way. Nothing wrong with the person at the top having started, or the founder kind of going, right, these are the things I want my business to stand for, and our job is really then to stress test that and go, is that actually what's happening here?

Is that the experience your people have? Is that you experience the external expression of those values? Is that what your clients and associates are experiencing? Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's the people side of it all and how they actually express the culture that they are creating, I think, is a fascinating space to be in.

What's really interesting listening to you—

this is— there's a—

not at all. I think For me, this is really important because branding is too easy in a lot of ways. And if you said the word culture there, the clothes that we wear have a big impact on how we feel. And the culture of an organisation has a huge impact on how we feel about showing up. If we feel aligned with the culture of an organisation, we'll do things we wouldn't have done otherwise.

Yeah.

And the outward-facing identity is really what shapes a lot of the time about how we feel. It's the kind of— becomes the default setting.

Yeah.

And if that's correct, the alignment internally becomes much easier. A lot of people think about branding as an external-facing thing.

Yeah.

But it has a huge impact on shaping the energy that's contained inside of an organisation too.

Totally. Yeah. So we, like, we've got, um, programmes whereby when— if we've been involved in the actual creation of visual identity as well, you know, as well as tone of voice, whatever. You know, we can help in the business launch that externally, but crucially, it's how you get the buy-in from everybody internally, which is much more likely to happen if you bring them on the journey in the first place. And yeah, it helps with all sorts. So, you know, your people are your ambassadors out there. Marketplace, talk about getting BDMs and all kinds of stuff. But the actual people who are in working, doing the thing every day, they're your immediate sales team, really. You know, if they're shouting about the business down at the pub or whatever they do out with work, and also for attracting new people in, you know, new talent. Lots of, you know, there's certain sectors that we work in here struggling to recruit. And, you know, the people that they have already are the ideal people to help recruit their buddies from uni or whatever who are doing the same course as them, have the same kind of attitude.

And, you know, so yeah, I think it's something that oftentimes business owners forget just how valuable it is. And when they, when they kind of come on board and I, you know, and undertake the Our Market Street methodology, I feel like it's quite a brave thing for them to do because we are— I mean, we're not yes people. We will tell them what they need to hear in a nice way, but we will tell them, you know. Yeah.

What's interesting is that I work a lot with people who operate in the leadership space, and there's an awful lot of crossover between the kind of work they do with things like 360 feedback And so, honestly, I'm not even going to pretend to really know what goes on there. But I know that superficially, there's an awful lot of crossover and commonality there. And it is a real point of difference. And it is one of the advantages of being mature in the industry that you couldn't just rock up and do this. There's a level of empathy and clarity and almost virtuosity. You need to be able to play your instruments before you can really perform with this. That is a real competitive advantage. But what I'd like to maybe handbrake turn into is, in your industry, longevity is actually quite a rare thing. People pop in and out of your industry like mayflies. And I was very well aware of you when I was sort of operating in what we call MC agency land. Being in Scotland. But to be able to sustain that and to continue to thrive, you have to be doing something different.

And I'm curious, and I think anybody that is peripherally adjacent to the creative industries, or actually anybody in any industry, they're going to want to know, how did you make this work? And I think the question that really leads up to this is the gate through which clients arrive is one that often sits dormant. People don't have people rapping on their doors wanting to become clients. Most people don't. It's a lot of work. How have you approached that work of actually attracting clients and continuing to do that?

Great question, Bob. So, well, I could go kind of— I think I chase it back to my— a bit of an origin storey, really, if if I think about it. So we set up in 2003, so that's almost 23 years ago, which is half of my actual life, not even half my working life. So half of my actual life I have been running 39 Steps. Now, you know, that whole thing about if you knew what you knew now, would you do it again? Yeah, there's enough. But when I first started, it was with a— I had a business partner at the time, it was just the two of us, and we designed magazines and things. And I remember a chappie coming in with a CD, because I am that old, a CD with images, and it was to go alongside one of our articles that we were designing. And, um, I mean, I'm an illustrator and a designer by trade, if you like, right? So I'd done that at college. I hadn't done any like business stuff, but I'd always decided I wanted to work for myself by the time I was 25. So I thought I might be like a freelance illustrator or something.

So the opportunity arose sooner than that. Anyway, so point being, I was pretty green and this chappy comes in with a CD and he says, oh, you should get yourself along to these breakfasts. Now I'm a woman who loves her food, right? And if I'm combining breakfast and having a chat with people, I am there, right? So I thought, this sounds like a bit of me. So I went along to one of these breakfasts. Turns out it's called a networking breakfast, and that in a room of 20 people, whatever, the only person doing design and all that was me. And then you had an accountant and a lawyer and all whatnot, right? So I didn't know that I probably should be intimidated, but I wasn't because I didn't know to be. And I just loved it. I thought, this is great. So in a room like that, I was learning loads from these other people. And also I was getting asked intelligent questions that I thought, gee, I can answer this because in this room I am the expert on design or whatever it was. And so I find that fascinating. And so totally caught the bug.

And then from then on in, we go to the opening of an envelope. But point being is that I realised very quickly the whole people buy from people thing. And then I just, I just thought, right, I can make these connections. So I go along to another event, meet somebody, go, are you you need to speak to my pal Bob who does this, whatever. So it was constantly doing that, and even then eventually even set up a network myself and things. So I found the whole, the whole people buying from people thing really good, and I think that has been a thread throughout our business experience, just having that always as part of our very simple marketing strategy always been networking and cultivating relationships with people. It's hugely important. Not just, you know, you don't go on networking and just hand out schedules of business cards, or if you're going to do that, make sure the business cards have been created by us. But, you know, they have to be— it's just about listening and understanding people. And I was— I didn't realise that I was actually being useful by passing them on to other and other people that I've met as well.

So yeah, I'd say that's been a big thing.

A lot of people resent the fact that referrals are so important. I was— I don't know if I told you this on Monday when we chatted, but I was 80% of the way through writing a book about social selling because I'm really good at it. But I had to get really good at it for much the same reason as you, I started my business a similar time. I had to kill what I eat all the time. And that— I think you, you have employees. I had employees. That's an awful lot of sales for, for an agency. And but when you don't have referrals, you kind of have to build it up. You have to build it up. And even then, you still have to have your eye over the horizon and being proactive from time to time. So I had processes. And a client, a lot of the time when people come to me, it's because they're in a state of, there's some urgency, I need to fix something. And outreach, being proactive, is the only thing you can control. So I emphasised that. But I was about 80% of the way through this book and I thought, oh God, I don't do this.

I don't have to do this. Why don't I do this? Am I lazy? Am I broken? And I looked at the data from McKinsey and EY and HubSpot and people like that and spoke to people, and it seemed universally healthy in an expert business like yours and mine is 65-70% of opportunity comes through referral, something like 20% through content and content marketing, 15% through outreach, and a tiny little sliver of advertising on the end. The marketing industry wants us to invest in inverse proportion to that. Yeah, it makes no sense. So the book will happen, but it's going to reflect that. And I think the thing a lot of people miss is if the opportunity that comes to you is shaped by the people around you, that's entirely in your control. And it's not something that you can shape quickly, but it's something you can take action on immediately. Outreach is important. But if that's the only game you're playing, you're missing all the opportunity. For me, I look at the outreach and I think that should be the holy crap section of the work, that if I'm going to do that, it better scare me.

But you've got a garden. Look after your garden. Plant the seeds, nurture the seeds, water the seeds, keep the pests off, and they will grow. And most people just go to a networking event. If they don't come away with a deal, oh, what a waste of time.

Yeah, that really annoys me when you hear people going, oh, it doesn't work for me. I'm like, well, yeah, tell me what you're doing, tell me what your tactics, what were you doing? And like, no, no. And actually, I think for a lot of younger workforce, it's harder. I'm seeing that that's quite a thing, is they're not necessarily, you know, very much shying away. And people don't like the word networking either, which I subsequently learned. They hate the idea of networking. Like, well, if you would, you go to a party on a Saturday night. Yeah, right. Well, do you know what that is? It's just that, just with coffee. You know, it's just—

I think the way I would sum up what you described there is friends help friends.

Yeah.

And what I noticed about referrals in particular is you could strip away all the transactional stuff, all the reasons why you're a good person to do this piece of work, but if you don't matter to me, it's not going to happen.

No.

And that makes things very, very simple. Your job is simply to matter to people, and finding ways to matter to people is very easy. And you keep chipping away at that, you will thrive. And if you can matter to people who know people who really matter. That sounds really cruel, but fancy friends give fancy help.

Yeah, but also that from a person who's getting the referral, it cuts out a lot of, uh, kind of confusion for them. Because if somebody they trust— it's all, it's all about trust— somebody they trust is referring such and such a person on because they trust them to do the thing that you're needing, then, you know, you're much more likely to to, to accommodate that, aren't you? And have the conversation. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's huge.

We have a lot more control than we think.

Yeah, we do, we do. That has been a longevity thread, I'd say, as well as the fact when we have retainers and things like that. But we hit the ground running when we first started with 3 magazine contracts, so that helped us.

Nice.

Great.

And having some retained income is always The key thing, I think you mentioned young people being a bit sort of intimidated by networking, and I think you don't get to the level of business that you're at without having consistently lent into the things that you're quite insecure about. You, you have to get over those, and I think anybody listening would probably do well to take away Fear is your friend. That the things that make you uncomfortable are the things you should move towards rather than away from.

Yeah.

Because if you're comfortable, then you're just in the same boat as everybody else that's going to struggle. If you're uncomfortable, especially with things like imposter syndrome or intimidation, nobody else will go there either. So if you make the effort, you'll find there's very little competition.

Yeah, that's true.

And I think this is true of very experienced business owners as well. They have a nasty habit of getting to the point where everything's become easy. If they would lean into discomfort again, oh my God, the opportunities are extraordinary.

Wade in that kind of comfort bubble, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So we need to get into the 3 things, Julie's amplifiers.

All right.

These are 3 things listeners can go and Do, read, eat, I don't care.

I've got absolutely tonnes, so it was quite hard to just pick 3.

It's absolutely fine.

Right. So the first one is more around the marketing thing, and many of your listeners have probably heard of these 2, but if they've not, then, or if they're looking at lots of different things. So there's 2 kind of key books that I think are the only 2 that you really need if you're looking at messaging and marketing, really. And they are StoryBrand by Donald Miller. You'll know it, Bob.

I have actually read it, but it's mentioned more times than I can count.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

Everyone should read it if you want to communicate.

Yes, yeah, definitely. And it's got a very neat little methodology around how storeys are actually created in it, effectively the formula behind it, right? So StoryBrand by Donald Miller, that in conjunction with whatever the latest version or incarnation is of They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Those two are the only things you need. Others are fabulous, I'm sure. But in terms of ease of read, for a start, I mean, we're all really busy. Ease of read, having a methodology you can actually just action pretty much right away. And just snippets of things to try out and do. I would say those two in combination are just gold. So that's one of my marketing amplifiers.

They Ask, You Answer is like 100% probably the most important book on content marketing that a business owner can read. And I'm hoping Marcus is going to come on the show soon. He has a great—

that would be fantastic. Right. Okay.

So things that intimidate you.

Yeah. Amplifier number 2. Yeah. So amplifier number 2 for me would be I am a bit of a procrastinator, a bit of a shiny magpie type. I have an unhealthy vintage habit. And so last October, I bought myself a brick. So one of these kind of I don't know if you know of them, but effectively it's a physical brick. It's the most unassuming little thing, but it fits in the palm of your hand. But you then stick it on something like a fridge or whatever. The idea behind it is that you can then brick your phone so you can schedule when you're able to look at apps or not look at apps and all sorts of stuff. And I found it invaluable. It's helped me to get time back. It creates a healthy friction between the choice to procrastinate and that kind of thing. And it's just because you physically have to then go and move yourself in order to unbrick your phone rather than bypass screen times and all that sort of stuff. It's been marvellous. So it's a tiny little hack, but I find it's given me so much back because I didn't have the self-discipline enough to do it myself.

So I think that's a great idea. I've heard of the brick. I've never really looked at it though. Yeah, I know that for most people, attention is probably the most valuable thing they've got, isn't it?

Yeah. And I have so many projects I'm involved in that are nothing to do with the business. And I do want to try and get a lot done. And then you suddenly go, well, actually, I've just spent a life in a black hole and looking at fucking shoes on Vintage is ridiculous. Or Instagram, whatever it is. So it's nice to be able to give myself permission to do that because I've, you know, switched things off and made it, made it work for me. So that's been great.

I love it.

Yeah.

Amplifier number 3.

Amplifier number 3. This is a very recent one that I was just thinking of because it's quite pertinent to me as somebody who's kind of evolving personally and professionally at the moment. And it's a book called The Crossroads Between Should and Must, and it's by an American artist actually called Ellie Luna. And she's in it. It's very visually beautiful, so that appeals to someone like me. But it's written very much about this from the point of view is we all have these shoulds that are put on us from very early on, you should do this, you should do that. This is a— you go through school, social settings, all this sort of stuff, all the things that are actually shoulds. And the strife internally often comes when you are going towards shoulds, but your must is calling you from way over here. So I find this a really fascinating concept, and it is something that has I didn't realise I had been wrestling with. And the bizarre thing was, is this book came across— I came across this book about 10 years ago, or the idea around it, and I didn't do anything about it then.

And it was only very recently it came back to forward. I don't know, you know, one of these serendipitous posts you read and go, actually, I remember about that. So yeah, well, bought it and read it, and I I think it is great. So things are meant to arrive at the time that you're meant to be able to consume it, I guess.

So yeah, I really like that. I think I will read that book. One of the things that I've learned after so many of these conversations is that the most successful people I've met have never achieved it through complexity and adding things. They've always achieved it by eliminating things. And giving themselves permission to be not singular or bloody-minded, but to just focus on the things that make them happy. And just because lots of people tell you you should do things doesn't mean you should do them. And I think my industry is terrible for this, is telling people there's all these strategies and things like this. The marketing industrial complex is terrible for coming up with new ways to do things. But a lot of the time, it's actually very simple. And I think what you described with the Market Street methodology framework, however you approach it, that's actually the most important thing, is the why. And if you can understand why from a broader perspective, what you ultimately create makes perfect sense to everybody, and it has the desired effect. And it doesn't matter whether that's in your cash flow or in your brand, understanding why will normally help you find the right direction.

For me, my why is very much joy, and that directs a lot of my decisions now rather than the should.

Because yeah, that's good, that's good. Yeah.

So If people want to get into Julie Diver's World 39 Steps, how should they do that? What's your favourite way for people to connect?

Probably through LinkedIn, to be fair. So yeah, LinkedIn. I also have a Linktree. Do you guys— do you ever use that?

Not on LinkedIn, but I have one on Instagram.

Yeah. So I have a Linktree because I'm involved in various stuff. Different things from a charity perspective and also my illustrated book and things. So there's various things that I'd be happy to talk to people about or share some learnings on. Just the idea about you could be creative in so many different ways. It's not just about drawing pretty pictures or whatever. I always think a day is wasted if I've not created something, like if I've not written something, drawn something, I don't know, manifested something new, whatever, even cooked something for my sons that they've never eaten before and they probably will never eat again. But never mind, creating something that wasn't there before. But Linktree is probably a good one. Or LinkedIn. Julie Dever on LinkedIn. Find me there.

So tips are cheap. Everybody's got tips. You've got some really good tips, I think, for anything, anybody thinking around branding, rebranding, marketing, positioning, things like that. You have something on your website, makes it very simple. It's very well worth getting for the small cost of an email address. What is your website address?

It's 39steps.co.uk. So 39 as in the digits, 39steps.co.uk.

Available in all good browsers.

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, you could just sign up and get our wee, like, 5 top tips and yes, and get our very irregular newsletter. Yeah, something we're also working on, Bob. We used to be really good at it, but everything's always a work in progress, isn't it?

Well, absolutely. I mean, the perfect machine doesn't exist. There's always something falling apart, otherwise you wouldn't be trying.

Absolutely.

So for you at home listening, thank you very much for your time. That does bring us to the end of another episode. If you have enjoyed the show, I would invite you to leave a 5-star review. I said 5, like the fingers on your hand. Count them if you're in any doubt. Whether that's Apple Podcasts or Spotify, reviews are also pretty amazing. And again, if you did enjoy this, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap, 50 pages of everything you need. On you to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Visit the link in the show notes or amplifyme.agency/roadmap. Thanks again, everyone, for listening. And Julie, you have been awesome.

Thank you, Bob. Thanks for having me.