THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Rich Brooks: The more you reinforce what you’re excellent at, there’s less competition, and you get known for being the expert or the finest artist in that category.
Speaker 2: It’s The Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the The Inspiration Place podcast, an Art World insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Today’s guest is a founder and president of Flyte New Media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine that’s been in business for over 28 years because he’s almost as old as I am. Maybe. He’s a nationally recognized speaker on entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and social media. He founded the Agents of Change, an annual conference and weekly podcast that focuses on search social and mobile marketing. I almost read the word ampersand, by the way. Our guest is the author of The Lede Machine The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing, a popular and well-received book that’s helped entrepreneurs and marketers reach more of their ideal customers online. He appears regularly as the tech guru on the evening news show, which airs on the NBC affiliates in Maine, and he’s also appeared in Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post, Fast Company, CNN, Social Media Examiner, and now The Inspiration Place. Please welcome to the The Inspiration Place Rich Brooks. Well hey there, welcome to the show.
Rich Brooks: Thank you so much for having me. This is fun. Looking forward to our conversation today.
Miriam Schulman: I’m so glad to finally get to talk to you as well. I’ve already had like a sneak peek of what you’re going to share, but Okay. So you’re in Maine. How cold is it there right now?
Rich Brooks: Uh, today’s pretty mild, actually. I think it’s like in the 40s, so I guess it’s all relative. Okay. It’s pretty mild. I’m also right by the coast. Like, literally. You can see the ocean right outside this window, so. Oh. But I’m hoping that it doesn’t get too warm because I’m supposed to go skiing snowboarding next week.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. I’m trying not to, like, get jealous now. I’m, like, stuck in my. Stuck in my. Well, I’m not jealous. I’m stuck in my New York City apartment today. It’s like when it’s raining outside. So rich you were. And I had a chat recently, and we were talking about something that you called the Remarkability formula. And I thought that was something that the artists in my community really needed to hear more about. So can you just tell me how you came to develop that?
Rich Brooks: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as you mentioned, I’ve been working in this industry for a long time. We’ve worked with hundreds, if not thousands of businesses and artists throughout the years. And one of the biggest problems is people just don’t know how to explain what makes them unique or what makes them remarkable. And as I’ve been working with all these clients, really trying to uncover this because we’re a marketing agency, we try and help them, you know, promote what makes them remarkable to their audience. Uh, I ended up coming up with this, this framework because marketers love frameworks, right? And so the idea here was, it’s not that remarkability is a new idea. You know, there’s been unique value propositions, and there’s been the Purple Cow and the Blue Ocean strategy. But what I wanted to do was help entrepreneurs and artists really figure out what makes them different. So what is the process of getting them there? And the way that I basically built this up is there are four lenses that you can turn on yourself or your brand that really help differentiate you and also communicate that to your ideal customer, client, or collector.
Miriam Schulman: I love that we’re having this conversation because my artists really struggle with this.
Rich Brooks: They’re not alone.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. I mean, you know, they tend to focus too much on why they like to create the art and they really struggle with, you know, if they’re not abject pain or what makes them different from other abstract painters or a landscape painter, what makes them different from other painters? So I have frameworks that I help them with, but I’m really interested to learn your unique perspective on this.
Rich Brooks: Yeah. And I don’t think that what they’re talking about is necessarily wrong and it could be part of their remarkability. But I think like if we talk through it, they’ll see what they can add to that to really stand out. And so the four lenses, I’ll say them and then I’ll give you an example. And then we can kind of get into each one. So it’s find focus forge and frame. So find is the idea that there’s already something remarkable in your business or in your artwork that makes you stand out, and it’s really just about identifying what that is and giving it a name. Focus is all about that idea of niching down, like really just kind of either shedding certain things about the way that you do things so that you basically can shed the competition through forge, and this one’s a little bit trickier. This is the one that people sometimes have trouble wrapping their mind around, is the idea of creating something that is outside of your core offerings, but that’s in alignment with your mission and values. And the fourth one is frame. And frame is really just about positioning what you already do in some new, powerful way that better communicates that to your ideal customer. So it’s find, focus, forge and frame and happy to go into each one of these individually, or give examples of some of the ones that I’ve seen out in the wild, so people can kind of anchor it in their own minds to understand how they might move forward with this process.
Miriam Schulman: So the F word?
Rich Brooks: Yes, the F word. It’s a truth bomb. So the f bomb. Yeah, exactly.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. All right. Of these four, which do you think create a struggle with the most? I, I have a guess.
Rich Brooks: Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, based on what you said, it’s like a lot of the artists are coming from inside out. So they’re thinking about, like, what the art means to me or what to them to to how they express themselves. And so, which is a critical piece. You couldn’t do art without that. But at the same time, if we’re looking to move art to be crass about it and sell art, then I think we also have to be taking in the other side of the coin, which is the collector or the buyer of this art. So, I mean, I think one of the things that might be tough for a lot of artists would be the idea of forge. And I’ve never really thought about forge in terms of an artist. So that might be one that would be interesting to look at. But I usually suggest to people start with find because It’s the least amount of work. You may already be doing something remarkable. And so it’s just a matter of identifying what that is.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, there’s two things I want to jump in and say before we go any further. And the first one is a lot of artists, they don’t like to think of themselves as making art for the money. And you’re not making art for the money, but you are selling your art for the money and buy art. We’re not just talking about fine art. We’re not just talking about paintings. Your art is whatever it is that you are bringing forth in the world. So if you’re listening to this podcast and you are a coach or an author or something else, you can just replace art in what we’re talking about.
Rich Brooks: Whatever your creative output.
Miriam Schulman: Whatever it is. Exactly. Are you making your art the star or is your message holding it back? Listen, if you want collectors, fans, and the media to get what makes your art special, you need words that do your work justice. That’s exactly what we do inside the Artpreneur messaging vault. I’ll help you lock in your signature messaging and create a vault of words that you can use on your website, email, social posts, you name it. No more staring at a blank screen. No more cringing when somebody asks, all right, so what do you do? What kind of art do you make? Head on over to SchulmanArt.com and we’ll unlock your message together. The other thing Rich, that a lot of artists do struggle with. And I’m just curious, I think this is true of a lot of business people. Is is the curse of too many ideas? Yeah. Okay. You’re laughing. So like a lot of times I do have artists that they, they paint in watercolor and oil painting or they do sculpture and on these ands can be very problematic when you go in the marketplace and you want to stand out.
Rich Brooks: Yes. So that’s a great lead in. So obviously in that case we should start talking about focus. And focus is just the idea of niching down. And so when I talk to businesses or professionals about like, you know, the Remarkability formula and specifically about focus, the goal here is not to stop necessarily doing the Ands and the ampersands do what you need to do. But when it comes to how do you promote yourself and how do you define yourself in your industry or in the art world? I think you really want to hone it down to the least amount of things that you do. And there’s a couple of different ways that you might approach this. You might be, you know, using the idea of an artist. It might be that, okay, you do oil and you also do sculpture, but most of your stuff is oil. That’s what you’re famous for. So you are you know, we’re going to talk about the oil paintings. There may be a section on your website that also talks about sculpture, but this is what you should be known for. So it could be about the type of art you do. It also could be about the topics I know a woman, a friend, a wife’s friend, a friend of a wife, know my friend’s wife is an artist and she knows she’s very famous.
Miriam Schulman: Did you get married last night?
Rich Brooks: But she is famous for her stylistic paintings of horses. That’s 95% of what she does. She also does some frogs in the same style. And I think there’s a couple of other random things. But she’s known for horses and she sells her stuff at horse shows, and so that’s really her niche. It doesn’t mean that she can’t do anything else, but it’s that idea that her focus is in one thing. And the other interesting thing is that when we niche down, we become much better at that task because we’re just getting more hours in the lab. So that also can help. And also, I don’t know if this necessarily translate perfectly to artwork, but the other thing is when we as consumers need something and it’s important to us, important to our health, important to our finances, whatever it may be. We’re willing to pay more for that. If it’s a specialist. So, for example, when I was doing my research on this whole idea of remarkability, I discovered that it was 2017. The average American primary physician made a very healthy $247,000 a year. But in that same year, the average specialist made $399,000, basically $150,000 more for arguably knowing less and being able to help fewer people. But if you’ve torn your ACL, you don’t want to go to a generalist. You want to go to somebody who has done nothing but ACLs for the last ten years. Now, obviously, that’s a little bit of a stretch in the art world. But if you decide that what is your milieu or oil painting is or whatever, you’re going to get a so much better at that. And when somebody has in mind that they want something done in that style, you’re going to be the one that stands out. You’re going to be the one that can command a higher price.
Miriam Schulman: Totally relates because mostly I was known for doing watercolor portraits. So if you know somebody comes on the website and they want a watercolor portrait and they open the website and now they see an abstract, they’re like, oh, I must have the wrong Miriam Schulman. So it is something that really can interfere with as artists. I’m not telling you not to experiment and not to try things and people who aren’t artists. You can experiment and try businesses and try different things out too. However, once you get known and good for something, if somebody comes back to you and they’re not going to and they’re not finding what it is they thought would be there, you’re going to lose money.
Rich Brooks: Right? And it may be like somebody might come to my agency and say, hey, listen, I need some print ads. Done. Do we do print ads? Yes. Are you going to find that on our website? No, because that’s not what we’re known for. That’s not what our focus is. We’re going to focus on digital. We’re going to help people with digital. So I think that’s the other thing is you, the more you reinforce what you’re excellent at, there’s less competition. And you get known for being the expert or the finest artist in that category.
Miriam Schulman: Perfect. Okay. So let’s move on then. I like pulled you a little bit away from.
Rich Brooks: We’re all good.
Miriam Schulman: We’re all focus. Do we need to go further on the focus, or are we ready to move forward with one of the other apps?
Rich Brooks: I think we can talk about one of the other ones. Okay. Dealer’s choice. What do you want to tackle next?
Miriam Schulman: Well, you said forge would be a cool one to apply to.
Rich Brooks: The forge is cool. It’ll be a challenging one. So here’s how forge works. Yeah, here’s how forge works. Forge is about offering something that is not part of your core, offering something you charge money for, but that’s in alignment with your mission and values. And this works in a few different levels, because very often, like somebody will choose to go pass a Home Depot to go to Lowe’s or vice versa, or they purposely choose buying organic lettuce even though it’s so much more expensive? Like a lot of times, the things that we buy are basically reflections on how we see ourselves. And so that’s a big thing. But the other part of it is you can create some really interesting ways of kind of promoting yourself. So one of the things that I think is really interesting is, Miriam, have you ever overcooked pasta in your life?
Miriam Schulman: Not me. Yes, of course I have. Right.
Rich Brooks: For us mere mortals, it happens all the time. But. So Barilla, the pasta company, came up with this really interesting idea that they would create Spotify playlists that were exactly the length of all of their different pastas. Stop it. So when you started boiling the water and you dropped the pasta in, you would hit like the Spaghetti Mixtape or The Fusilli Unleashed or whatever the name of the different ones are, and they’re set for 9 minutes or 11 minutes or whatever it is. But not only that, when you look at the artwork, the artwork for the playlist have been designed by Italian artists, and most of the music, if not all, the music, are done by Italian artists as well, and this reinforces the idea that Barilla believes that cooking is art.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, this this is like such genius marketing, I know.
Rich Brooks: I love it when I saw.
Miriam Schulman: That they did that and I’m like, I’m ready to cue up my playlist just because.
Rich Brooks: Exactly right.
Miriam Schulman: Mostly because I’m so like, I’m going to go in the next room and forget that there’s something on the stove and not hear my timer go off.
Rich Brooks: So, right. And the thing here is like, it’s not that you need to use that. You can talk to your smart speaker, which whose name I will. Sometimes I call it Lexi when I don’t want it to turn on. But you know what I’m talking about. You can turn on a timer. You can say something to Siri. It all works. But by reinforce. And obviously if I’ve got a different brand of pasta, assuming it takes the same amount of time to cook. But the idea is that Barilla is establishing itself, that cooking is art. We take it seriously. We’re an Italian company, which is the birthplace of pasta. Unless the Chinese got it first. But who knows? I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole. Bottom line is, this is a reinforcement. So if you are creating art or whatever your creative output is, if there’s something that you can offer that’s not necessarily required to use your product but shows your mission and values, that’s really important. And for us, like one of the things that we do is you mentioned in the intro, we have this annual conference that we put on, and it’s all about digital marketing, which is what my agency is about.
Rich Brooks: And it wasn’t the point of Agents of change the conference to make sales for flight. But what happened is over the years when people said, you know, Rich, I’d like to talk to you about a website or whatever, I’d say, great, how’d you hear of us? And they would be like, oh, I’ve been going to your conference for years. I’m finally ready to have a new website or to do SEO or whatever the case is. So it reinforced that my company, Flyte New Media, wanted everybody to become better at digital marketing. And when they see me on stage wearing both my AOC stuff and my flight new media stuff, and it’s sponsored by flight. It reinforces that we’re about helping people succeed in this area, but you don’t need to go to the conference to hire flight, nor do you have to hire flight to go to the conference. So it’s just a different offering that’s unrelated, but shows where our heart lies.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. I want to give an example that just came up yesterday, one of my artists inner circle members, and her name is Christine Minchin and she is a jeweler. And we were talking yesterday about different rituals we use to get into the mood to create art, because even as artists who are full time artists who like to do it sometimes have trouble getting started. Yeah, just nodding his head. Okay, so something must be resonating there. So I asked her and she said, well, actually, I’m also an herbalist and I, I have this I don’t know what you call it, like this ointment that I put together and it’s, you know, I rub it between my hands and I ask for creativity to happen. And I was like, wow, we have to talk about how you should be selling this. And she’s like, I don’t want to sell it. I was like, no, no, no, not selling the bottles for $15, but can you give it for free if they pay $100 to sponsor your podcast or if they join your jewelry VIP club, like, how can you make this add on be part of your brand? Because exactly what you said that her jewelry business. It’s all about this mindfulness and thoughtfulness and it’s infused throughout all of her jewelry. Right. Why? I actually been buying some of it. It’s infused with all of it. But like, this thing that kind of seems not related is related, right? I just wanted to give that.
Rich Brooks: And sometimes you can charge for it like we do with the Agents of Change conference. Or she could charge for her bottles if she wished to. Or other times you can just give it a give it away for free. It really just depends on the situation.
Miriam Schulman: Well, I was thinking giving it and away as a bonus for something else. Like it’s an exclusive because I don’t think for her it’s a good business model to start selling, you know, for 15 or $20 bottles of what are they called, essential oils, essential oils?
Rich Brooks: Essential oils. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: Hey there artists, I have a question for you. When someone lands on your website or rolls past your art on Instagram, does your message stop them in their tracks or does it blend in with all the other noise? If you’ve ever struggled to put into words what makes your art irresistible, or if you’ve been staring at a blinking cursor trying to write your about page for the millionth time? Or maybe, maybe you put it into ChatGPT. But what comes out is like this soulless crapola that sounds like Doctor Spock wrote it. That’s exactly why I created the Artpreneur Messaging Vault, where I’ll help you craft a complete messaging system rooted in your art, your Or values and your truth, you’ll walk away with a magnetic about page, a reusable message vault that you can plug your website, social posts, even pitches to the media and the clarity to talk about your art in a way that finally feels authentic and powerful. Previously, this was only available to Inner Circle clients, but they’ve told me that this was the clarity that they didn’t know they needed. And the one thing that has made all the difference. If you’re ready to finally feel proud of how you talk about your art, go to SchulmanArt.com and snag your spot.
Rich Brooks: Let’s go back to find right, and then we’ll finish with frame. So find again. It’s. Chances are there’s already something remarkable about your business or your artwork that resonate with people. Sometimes you don’t always know what that is, so I would recommend that if you have people who have bought art from you or bought creative output from you in the past is literally have conversations, call them up, get them on the phone, get them on a zoom call, use an AI recorder, and then have AI kind of sort through it for you. Whatever your whatever your methodology is. But find out, because the reason why they bought it may not be the reason you thought it was like, that’s a really important thing. And once you know why people choose you over other people or other businesses, that’s really insightful for the rest of your marketing. And I had this interesting experience when I bought my first house. We moved in. They had never painted the house. They had always done oil stain. It was so out of date. I needed to get something done as quickly as possible. A first time homeowner talked to some friends and like, oh, getting your home paint is like just such a bear. They come, they make a huge mess of the place for like days on end. They never seem to arrive on time. They always, you know, job searches out. But I find this guy and he says, I can get the whole job done in two days. I’m like, Hallelujah, let’s do it. And he shows up and there’s like six vans and about 20 guys come spilling out of the vans, throw up ladders, paint the house from top to bottom. I think they were singing Sea Chanties. The whole time, but maybe I’m just embellishing the story. I don’t remember now. Come back a day or two.
Miriam Schulman: Came exactly right.
Rich Brooks: Come back like a day or two later after the first coat had dried. Do the whole thing again and disappear. Obviously my neighbors took notice of this. This was remarkable. And this is another interesting thing about Remarkability. It’s better if it has a high barrier to entry. So especially in Maine, where the painting season is relatively short compared to like say, California or Florida, keeping 20 guys on payroll is very difficult. So that’s not something that necessarily other companies compete with. And he had this thing that was a pain point for his customers. If he interviewed a bunch of customers, they probably would all say the same thing. The fact that you got it done so quickly was really why I chose you. And then give that a name. The two day paint job, whatever it is, maybe something more clever than that. And then that’s kind of how you are able to go ahead and start selling more to other people who have the same pain points or the same desires that that first person did.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. And I want to give a ninja tip for all of my creatives who sell a physical product, but maybe don’t have enough sales yet to kind of get that kind of Intel. This is one of the reasons why live will make your business thrive. Going in person. It’s not just about making the sales. It’s not just about, as we’ve talked about in the past, gathering those email addresses. It’s the market research you get from talking to people and letting them tell you why or why not. They’re buying your art. Sometimes you will hear it by accident. I did in my early years. Oh, whoops. I guess they don’t like lemons, so.
Rich Brooks: Right.
Miriam Schulman: But it is like the best market research you can do is going in person.
Rich Brooks: Absolutely. I mean, talking to customers and non-customers should just be part of everybody’s business life anyways. And obviously there is a business side to art. So yes, you should be talking to past clients and like you said, maybe some people who didn’t buy it just to get a sense of what’s missing, perhaps, or what people are looking for in the art world. And again, this is for people who are creatives, who are looking to make a living at their creative output. You know, I also make hot sauces. I will never sell any of my hot sauces. I just enjoy making them. So it doesn’t matter to me if anybody else likes them. It’s just about me. But if you’re looking to sell your hot sauces or what have you, then you’re going to have to take some criticisms and do something for other people as well.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so I know we only did two out of the four.
Rich Brooks: We did three. We did find Focus and Forge. So the only thing we didn’t touch on was frame.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. But if you want all four. Rich has a workbook that goes along with this. That is, you can get actually for free, right? And he has a really beautiful URL.
Rich Brooks: Right. It’s take flight. Flight is the name of my company. It’s spelled f l y t e. So it’s take flight. Just for you, Mariam.
Miriam Schulman: Yes, it’s just for us. And if you’re not sure how he spelled flight, it is linked for you in the show notes. So, you know, star this episode or flag it, or whatever you need to do to make sure that you remember to come back and grab that workbook. Because I know you’re going to want to dig into all four of the F words.
Rich Brooks: Yeah. And and that’ll just walk you through the process so you can do it yourself or do it with your team if you have a team. And just kind of because the whole goal here is for you to really understand what makes you remarkable.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. All right. Rich, do you have any last words for our people before we call this thing complete?
Rich Brooks: Yeah. I mean, I guess in just keeping with this theme, you know, I recently have spent a lot of time with artificial intelligence, and I really do think it’s changing the world, both for good and bad, perhaps. But the more that I enters marketing and business and communications and everything else, the more important it becomes for us to differentiate ourselves from our competition and from the other possible solutions or outcomes out there. And so I really think that more than ever, figuring out what makes you remarkable in the eyes of your audience has become more important today than it was even just a few years ago when I first started this remarkability journal journey. So what I would say is really invest in yourself. Invest in your future, spend some time on this. I believe in you. I know that you’re out there doing remarkable work, and sometimes it’s just about honing that message so you can communicate it to the people you want to reach.
Miriam Schulman: Oh, that’s so beautiful. I agree with you 1,000%. Whether you use AI or not, you have to know what makes you stand out. Thank you so much for joining with me here today.
Rich Brooks: This has been great.
Miriam Schulman: Thank you. We are going to find out who’s older, by the way.
Rich Brooks: Oh, listen, if I’m younger than you, then you have aged perfectly because I look about ten years older than you. I’m looking at us right now.
Miriam Schulman: It’s like I use hair dye. Okay, so.
Rich Brooks: I obviously.
Miriam Schulman: Graduated. Graduated high school in 80, 86. Hands up. We graduated the same year. Excellent. Okay.
Rich Brooks: All right. Perfect. Let’s not get into birth dates. Then we’ll just say it’s a tie.
Miriam Schulman: It’s a tie, right? All right, my friend, thank you for being with me here today. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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