"Forget The Funnel": Considering Customer-Led Growth, a Conversation with Georgiana Laudi

If you’ve ever wondered if the traditional marketing funnel still makes sense, you’re on the same wavelength as Georgiana (Gia) Laudi, co-author of “Forget the Funnel.”

Gia would rather talk about Customer Led Growth, an alternate approach - applied particularly to SaaS marketing and recurring revenue models - focused on a deeper understanding of the experience of the “best customers.”

On this episode of The Marketing Mix, Gia highlights the shortcomings of some standard marketing strategies including MQL/SQLs and Pirate (AARRR) metrics; and explains how a Customer Led Growth process can provide much deeper insights.

We talk about the challenges of developing the right messaging in Founder-led start-ups, as the product evolves and the customer base expands. And how the “Voice of the Customer” process has changed with the use of platforms like G2 and Capterra, but still requires in depth customer interviews. 

Gia walks through part of the Customer Led Growth process they have developed at Forget the Funnel, including how they select the customers, and the focus on “Jobs to be Done.” She also shares some of her favorite customer questions and insights.

If you’re intrigued by the conversation, you should check out Gia’s book “Forget the Funnel”. 

Transcript

Forget the Funnel; a conversation with Georgiana Laudi

The Marketing Mix Podcast. Episode 4

Steve:

Today I'm joined by Georgiana Laudi, who is co-founder of Forget the Funnel and a proponent of customer-led growth, which is the art of turning customer value into revenue generating outcomes. She's been a marketing executive and a product growth advisor since 2010, working with a whole bunch of B2B SaaS companies, names that you'll recognize, companies like Unbounce, Sprout Social, Bit.ly, and Spark Toro. And last week, Georgiana published her first book, which along with her co-founder Claire which is also titled Forget the Funnel. And today we are going to talk about customer-led growth and particularly how it can be used to guide and improve messaging for tech companies. 

Gia, welcome to the Marketing Mix. 

Gia Laudi:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Steve:

I was really intrigued by the title, Forget the Funnel. I have had a love-hate relationship with the funnel for years.

Gia Laudi:

Haven't we all? Yeah.

Steve:

Exactly. A lot of conversations. And actually, a previous episode of the podcast, I was talking with Charlie Karpiuk about, does the funnel still make sense? And if you're going to use it, how do you use it for good and not for evil?

I'm curious, how did you come up with this phrase, “forget the funnel”? And what does it mean to you?

Gia Laudi:

In truth, most of the motivation to focus on dispelling of this idea as marketing - and sales for that matter - being a matter of a funnel comes from this idea of sort of recurring revenue businesses. So because we work with primarily SaaS companies and recurring revenue businesses of all kinds. The concept of a funnel is problematic for a number of reasons. One of which is it's an inaccurate depiction of your relationship with your customers, especially if that relationship is meant to be ongoing and recurring and high LTV, high value sort of relationships. To think about your marketing as a funnel. doesn't do service to that sort of larger recurring revenue business model. Also, it's just kind of gross, like it's a one-size-fits-all way of thinking about your relationship with your customers. And it's generic. It doesn't take into account the nuance of what your customers need at a given stage in their relationship with you or... the nuances of maybe different segments that you may serve of customers. 

It just sort of disappears all of the intricacies of customer relationships and understanding them and being able to operationalize them in a meaningful way. It's also not very motivating for a team. I often think about the people responsible for helping customers get go through this funnel and for them it- doesn't feel great either, because it's sort of devoid of a lot of that meaning. And so it can feel gross for a marketing team to think about customers in terms of a funnel as if it is like a liquid or something. Just it's just yuck. 

And also, like, it's 2023. So what are we talking about people as going through funnels for? We’ve evolved past this now.

Steve:

You paint quite a picture. I hadn't thought of it in quite those terms.

One of my objections has always been it's a bit of a blunt instrument. I have found it useful in discussions with sales teams. In the early stage when you're trying to set up a process and what have you. But I think it loses its utility once you've established those basic concepts, and I think for recurring revenue, you're right, it's even tougher.

You talk about motivation for the team. I hadn't thought of it from that perspective before. Is that associated with this idea of nobody really wants to be responsible for cramming somebody down this ugly process?

Gia Laudi:

It brings the work to its most transactional level, its most superficial level. And people care about feeling like their work matters. They care about delivering value. They care about other humans. 

Think about people in marketing roles or customer success roles or product roles. We're obsessed with providing good experiences, delivering value. We think a lot about that the relationship, and so to make somebody who is in that customer facing role that has all this empathy and deep understanding of our customers sort of squash that and flatten that into - I love “a blunt object” - that is such a great description of it. I may steal that. It just really brings down the work to its most superficial, like I said, transactional sort of level. We like to think about it more at the experiential level versus transactional. 

So when we talk about like KPIs, for example, not to jump ahead, but you know, credit card entered, that doesn't tell us that any value was actually delivered to that customer. That KPI or that metric in and of itself is kind of meaningless. Just as signing up on a website, there might be an indication of interest, but that doesn't tell us that we've actually delivered any value or solved any sort of problem for that customer. So that's where the funnel sort of runs into trouble. 

But that said, I pick on the funnel, but I also pick on pirate metrics for slightly different reasons. Pirate metrics was a great evolution of the funnel, but it's still pretty generic at the end of the day. It still puts every customer and every product in these buckets, as all sort of being the same, doesn't take the nuances into account of your customers or your product offerings. Similar to the MQL, SQL. I love picking on those two because what does that even mean, marketing qualified lead or sales qualified lead? And generally, even if we in marketing or sales have a solid understanding of what an MQL or an SQL, nobody else does. So it doesn't really do any favors for any of the other sort of adjacent teams. 

Steve:

It sounds like we could have another interesting conversation about MQLs, SQLs.

I am more of a fan of those, but I think there is a difference.

Gia Laudi:

But they have to mean something, right?

Steve:

It does. You have to have come to agreement with the sales team as to what those criteria are. So there is a whole process around that. The other thing I think there is a big difference between SaaS products and recurring revenue versus, let's say, hardware purchases. They are recurring revenue, but it may be once every two years somebody buys it. So there's a different process there. 

And I think the other advantage SaaS has is truly developed customer success teams. It is part of the SaaS go-to motion, if you like, to have customer success people that are involved throughout the process and much better. understanding of the customer as well.

Gia Laudi:

For sure, especially in a product-led environment where customer success and marketing is responsible for programmatic communication with large groups of customers, those one to many communication with customers. If you are doing that in a generic way, you're losing a huge, huge opportunity. And if you can build programmatic comms with a deeper understanding of where customers are getting value, that opens up all kinds of opportunities for more effective trial to pay conversion, high retention, expansion opportunities, all based in sort of delivering value. So yeah, I would agree with you. 

Having those milestones defined for the CS team, the marketing team, the product team, so that everybody's moving in the same direction and in a more meaningful direction around customers getting value, that tends to be the milestones that we would like try to encourage companies to focus on is identify those milestones. Call it MQL, call it whatever you want, right? And as long as there's actual value being delivered to customers and the team is empowered to actually action and those KPIs are actionable for them, then call it whatever you want. As long as it is rooted in actual value delivery and is actually actionable and is a leading indicator of success versus a lagging indicator, which can be that difference for teams.

Steve:

I'm going to have to restrain myself here because I could spend the next hour talking to you about this stuff, but that's not what we're here for. So we'll dive on in. 

Particularly with startups or fast growth companies, there is nothing more important than messaging, right? We could spend all our time talking to people, telling them how great we are, but unless you've really buttoned down what that message is, how you tell somebody very quickly, how you're going to make their life easier, because most of these fast growth companies don't have the brand recognition, right? So it really is, “We're in front of you for 10 seconds. How do we get it across?” I really don't think there's anything more important than messaging when, when you first kick off. So based on this customer led growth process how do you approach messaging for, for a growth company?

Gia Laudi:

Yeah, you're 100% right. Messaging tends to be a guess most of the time, or based on, especially if the company is early stage or earlier stage, a lot of times the founders themselves had the problem that their solution solves. So they believe that they've been understand implicitly their customers and they know the language to use and they understand the messaging and positioning.

And a lot of the times that's actually true in the very early stages, but it quickly becomes less true. So there's a couple of problems there. The product evolves and customers evolve. So things change. I mean, if you think about just three years ago or a year ago, the way you position your product probably changed or needed to change. But there's also the situation too, where the founders are a little bit more technical or more focused on the product experience, less experience on the marketing side. And so while they may understand the problem and they may have had the problem that their solution solves, they're not as well versed in like, how do I actually build messaging around this and kind of like put a marketers hat on for the  first time.

Sometimes it works out well. Some founders have a natural gift of marketing and they can do a pretty good job. But where I would say that typically breaks down is it does a pretty good job in the early stage, but then they add people to their team. And so there's all of a sudden other people responsible for creating some of that message and some of that collateral. Or their customer evolves, or the market changes, the product evolves. And so all those things sort of happening, even if you did a decent job of it in the early stages, and that's a big if, but if you did, chances are within pretty short order, as soon as you start to get more and more customers, what your best guess was when you were launching doesn't typically stand the test of time, especially as the world changes and the market changes, like I mentioned. 

And then the other scenario is a little bit even more. difficult where the founders like, well, this is what we do and this is our value. And then they bring in like an outside copywriter or something. And then there's a disconnect there and that can sort of go right as well. But at the end of the day, what thankfully we can look to is our customers, because the answer to the question about how we should position and message our product. generally, and even how we market our product, generally the answers to those questions live inside the heads of our best customers. And so that is our MO,  why would you guess, right? You don't have to guess. 

There’s a couple of different situations. If you have a happily paying customers already using your product today, then that's where you go. And there's a very specific way that you can run customer research and sort of tap into what's in their heads and like what was going on in the world that led them to seek out a solution. And there's a whole sort of evolutionary way to run that that research. If, on the other hand, you're in a situation where you don't have customers yet, then there's still ways to tap into, you know, what you would refer to as voice of customer. I know you are familiar with this, but for the founders who are listening that are like, what is voice of customer? There may be product reviews on review sites, maybe product reviews from your competitors. Or you go to G2 or Capterra or whatever of these review sites and start looking at what do real people say about having the problem that my product solves. You can also do social listening. you know, participate and listen in forums and things like that. But I would say that's all like we would call that like audience research or even customer development, depending on what stage you're at. 

But if you are in the situation where you have happily paying customers, the process is actually more straightforward and pretty buttoned up. And we rely on the Jobs To Be Done theory for guiding the way that we do research, which is basically this. idea that people are hiring your product to solve a problem for them. They want to fire a solution in order to hire a new solution. And if you can intimately understand what was going on in your customer's world that led them to say, hell no, can't do this anymore, need a better way. You can understand what that day looked like, what was going on in their head and the solution that they're wanting to fire in order to hire a new solution. That can tell you, that can give you a world of insight into how to articulate the problem that you solve, who you're talking to, what language to use, pulling that voice of customer. Obviously it spans way beyond that. 

To cap this off, really, if you have happily paying customers, the answers to your questions about how should we be describing our product, how should we be marketing our product. And the answers to those questions absolutely lives inside the heads of your best customers, which is an important qualification there. And if you can pull it out, then you can grab that voice of customer and you can basically apply it to your marketing, your website and even how you market your product in the market.

Steve:

I love that you bring up the idea of voice of customer because When I started doing this many years ago, voice of customer was four or five us getting on a plane and flying to go meet with our customers. And we had this whole script of questions we would go through and it was this whole process. And now, as you say, it's well, just log on to G2 and see what everybody's telling you.

Gia Laudi:

It's a thing of beauty. 

Steve:

Yeah, it is. Your process is how you then get the depth that we used to get from the old voice of customer. I think it’s a great starting place. 

You made an interesting comment right at the end there about, well, of course, talking to your best customers. So how do you decide which of the customers to pay attention to? Because you may have early adopters, you may have people who are just using it because their boss told them to use it. So how do you identify which of the folks you're going to go and dig into those details with.

Gia Laudi:

The answer is it depends. One of the things that it depends on is how many customers do you have?

How many customers would you say that you have that are genuinely happy with the product as it is today? That's the place to start.  This is not exit interviews. You know, we're not learning. We're not doing win loss analysis here.

We want to learn from our best customers and why they chose us, so that we can pull that out and use it in our messaging. So have to be happily paying customers. Customers implies that they're paying as well. The other thing that we look for as well is recency. The environment in which they made a decision, a purchase decision about your product. should be recently enough that they remember what life was like before, and that they made that decision within the current sort of reality of their purchase decision. If  it was pre-COVID, it might've been a completely different scenario. If it was pre-recession, again, maybe a different scenario. So recency is important for, we want them to remember what life was like before. We don't want them to fill their memory gaps with things they want you to hear either. So that's also an advantage to talking to more recent customers. 

So ideally, newer than about six months, but I say that recognizing that for some folks who maybe serve into enterprise, six months is your sales cycle. So you have to go a little bit longer than that, which is fair. So obviously push it out a little bit further than that, but try not to go to those customers that came to you on day one that to your point, were very likely early adopters. 

I guess the other thing too, that you mentioned, like my boss told me to use this thing. The other thing too that would be important is make sure you're talking to the person who championed the adoption of your product internally, whether or not that was an economic buyer or the actual functional sort of user that uses your product day in and day out, the person who championed that buying decision, that's the other important thing to take into account. So there's figuring out who are the customers available to me that fall into all of these buckets. 

And then running interviews, most likely it's going to be interviews. Because even if you're in a scenario where you've got a few thousand customers, chances are after you've narrowed this down, like, okay, they're happy, they're paying, they're the champion, and they made a decision in the last six months, you might get to a bucket of about a hundred customers. I'm completely making a number up here. But if you get to about a hundred customers, you're not running a survey, right? You're going straight into interviews. 

One story in particular of a company that we worked with where based on surveys that took us two weeks to run. we were able to update messaging on their website and increase signups by 90% on their website by just updating three pages on their website. But the most interesting part of that story is actually that their trial to pay conversion rate also increased 40%. We didn't do anything other than update messaging on three pages on their website. That was based on a survey that took us two weeks to run. 

Steve:

It’s great that you got more people signing up. Obviously even better that more of those people who signed up then converted to pay customers. So how do you set the KPIs up for that? In that case, was the KPI to get more people signing up or had you already set goals for improved conversion rates too?

Gia Laudi:

Yeah, good question. Actually, in that scenario - and I will say that this is typical - in that scenario, basically the company came to us because growth had stalled and they didn't really know why basically growth was flat. They weren't they knew overall that they were getting a decent amount of traffic and a decent amount of signups. A decent amount of them were activating and a decent amount of them were sticking around, but everything was just kind of decent and relatively sort of flat.

 It was also around in a recession situation where more customers were canceling, even though there were happy customers, but more were canceling. So their growth was basically flat, still bringing people through the front door, losing a little bit more on the other end, basically. And they knew that something was off and this was sort of diagnostic a little bit more in nature. And what we ended up learning, and why I say this is pretty typical, we ended up learning was that this company had been doing a lot of marketing. And a lot of very popular marketing. They were doing lots of blogging. They were doing lots of thought leadership. They were running webinars. They had a really robust SEO strategy. A ton of top of funnel communication tool, top of funnel type of marketing. And what we realized after we ran these surveys was that out of these happy customers, what we learned was there was a very loud majority of their customers loved their marketing, happy with the product. They were saying things like, oh, their customer support team is amazing. Uh-oh. Like, what does that mean? Right? And then there was a quieter group of folks who didn't reach out to see us as much, activated in the product very quickly. They were a little bit more of a sophisticated customer base. 

And what we figured out was, not only was their messaging on their website trying to attract both of these customers, but all of the top of funnel marketing that they had been investing in and doing a really great job of bringing traffic - traffic, talk about problematic KPIs - they were very focused on traffic. They're bringing in the wrong people to the front door. 

So this uptick in signups, there's two meaningful groups of customers that have come out of this research. There's those customers who are trying -this was in the Martech space - customers trying to build their audience. And then you have other customers that were trying to, they had already validated these channels and they were trying to automate more of their processes. And all of your marketing and your website is trying to attract both of these customers. And if we can focus in on one, that more, that better, higher caliber, higher LTV, lower cost to acquire type of customer, we wager not only can we bring up signups, but also LTV overall. And so that was the messaging that we changed. They had just been focused on traffic and signups as their barometer for success when ultimately we ended up learning that you've been bringing the wrong folks to the front door. 

And that is not rare, at all. In fact, many of the companies that we talk to that come to us and say, something's off. We know we're not putting our best foot forward on our website. We know we could be doing a better job. Something's amiss, often what we figure out is they've been bringing in a less than ideal customer and they're paying for the privilege to bring in that less than ideal customer. So that was the situation there, but like I said, that's very common.

Steve:

I can imagine. I mean, particularly for startups or early stage businesses. Traffic or number of early signups, It's a great metric, right? Because that that's how you start the flywheel moving, but it's then reminding people that, Hey, at some point you've got to work out how do we turn that into revenue? How do we stop spending money on people that are not going to turn it to revenue? Because you made the comment, ‘oh, we love talking to your customers, support people’. Well, that that's costing me money, particularly if it's a free customer. Or a free subscription. So yeah, I, I would imagine that that happens a lot of companies.

There's a there's a phrase in your book that I that I really liked. And it says, “In a sense, your customer research is a documentary about how the customer fell in love with your product”. which I think is just a really nice way to describe this whole customer experience mapping process that you go through. How did that idea come to you that, hey, this is we're really just creating a company documentary?

Gia Laudi:

100%. So it really does come down to the sort of anti funnel, right? Intimately understanding what that documentary of that customer's experience really is. And your messaging gets leveraged and laced throughout that experience. So it's all these are very related topics. But what I will say is like, so the research that you run, the either the surveys or the interviews that you run, basically through the series of questions that you ask, you can figure out what that documentary of their life was. Because remember, these are successful customers. They are the customers that, I think that the other expression that we, we tried not to be too crude about it, but the customers you'd have to pry your product out of their cold dead hands, right? Those are the customers that we want to create more of. 

So if we're learning from those folks, then we can ask them to go back in time and say the day that you decided that you wanted to fire this old solution. Tell me about that old solution. What were you struggling with? And then once you made that decision that you wanted to find a new way, talk me through that process. Where did you go? Who did you talk to? You know, what were your sources of influence? How did you discover this product? Once you discovered this product, all right, you can imagine like, that's all table stakes for marketing, right? Out in the world.. Where did you go? And then once you discovered our product, what was it about it that convinced you to give it a try? So you can imagine that that's somebody on product review sites, on your home page and your product pages, making a decision about whether or not they want to give this thing a go, how big of a lift or barrier to entry there is, right? And then once you tried our product or our solution, what was it about our solution that convinced you that this might solve your problem? 

Imagine if you have the answer to that. That's probably my favorite question. The ‘what was going on in your world’ is maybe number two, but the ‘what was it about our solution that convinced you to basically keep going’? We might be able to solve this problem for you. The answer to that question is like gold. There's almost nothing I can think of that is more important than having an understanding of that because not only can you leverage that insight for your messaging on your website and sort of dangling like, this is what we can do for you. But also think about your customer onboarding experience, how much more effective you can be in your customer onboarding if you could serve up what those answers and the patterns in those answers in a more efficient way and sort of figure out what's that hierarchy of, not only again, hierarchy of messaging on our website, but hierarchy of how we introduce our solution to our new customers. 

There's a nutty stat that's basically, I think it's 70% of people who sign up for a product never come back. Once, they'll log in once and never come back, 70%. But I cannot tell you the amount of companies that we talk to that don't do anything. They don't do anything with those people. They don't email them and say, hey, what didn't you love? Or hey, can we help? There's no, we call them win back campaigns or re-engagement campaigns. I'm generally meaning the same thing. But if somebody signs up for your product, don't expect they're going to hit value.

We think about what are the touch points in our relationships there? Like what are our customers doing? How are they feeling? Which can then give us insight as well into what are they thinking? What is motivating them? What are some of their potential objections or anxieties they may be experiencing? We can really optimize. each of those. So all to say, this style of research and the questions that you ask can sort of uncover that higher level customer experience and identify what those major sort of milestones are in our relationship with our customer. 

Then we can start optimizing at each of those milestones, whether or not it's bringing more people to the front door or helping more people on our website understand that we solve their problem. or a very popular one that we tend to help companies with is a lot of companies realize, hey, no point in bringing more people through the front door if we're not actually activating as many of them as possible inside of the product. So a lot of times when we work with companies, we realize actually there's a huge opportunity after somebody signs up to getting to product activation. So we tend to focus there a lot. And then once we fix that, then we go back to, okay, how can we bring more people through the front door? So. Product onboarding and website messaging tends to be like the two milestones that we focus on a lot once we've done this style of research for companies. 

But that all said, you can also, if you've got a churn problem, this style of research can absolutely help there too. Deters bad people from signing up, brings a more highly qualified or product qualified person through the front door, but also potentially identifies some of the missed opportunities in product activation and things like that. So there's all kinds of you know, problems, I'll call them, that you might be experiencing, whether or not it's your marketing isn't doing its job or you think your messaging might be off or your trial to pay conversion rate isn't quite where it should be. This style of research can help you have that high-level understanding, but also drill in and really optimize at some of those more critical sort of milestones or leaps of faith. I tend to talk about them as leaps of faith. Anyway, did that answer your question about the documentary.

Steve:

Absolutely. I think it's a really interesting process that you put together. I think there's a ton of directions that it can go into. And I'm sure, one of the challenges you run into is working out which problem the client needs to solve first, right?

Gia Laudi:

That’s exactly right.

Steve:

The other thing I was kind of chucking to myself as you were talking about the you're bringing people in the door and not converting them. If you're not dealing with a recurring model or even an online product, to me, it's the same thing as when you go to a trade show. I have worked with companies where their big thing is, ‘oh, we give out these great t-shirts at our trade show’. And what happens at the trade show is for the first day, nobody can get near your booth because everybody's there for a t-shirt and all the salespeople are doing is negotiating with somebody, whether they need a medium or a large or an extra large. But the metric is great because you had all these people come to the booth.

Now you and I know none of them are qualified. They're the wrong people for it.

Gia Laudi:

Empty calories,

Steve:

Empty calories. That's a great way of putting it. Yep. It is. I mean, it's the old version of traffic, right? It's bringing people to the booth. And then you never follow up on that stuff anyway. So it's the modern equivalent of an age old marketing problem.

So anyway, there's tons of good stuff in the book. I suspect you and I could talk for hours more on it. This podcast is primarily for founders and for marketers at growth companies. Why should Forget the Funnel be on their reading list.

Gia Laudi:

Truthfully, we wrote the book not to be theoretical. It is a very it is meant to be very practical and very useful. That's write useful books. Rob Fitzpatrick's book was hugely influential. Again, we wanted to make sure that the book felt very practical. So we wrote it through the lens of like, if you're a founder and you read this book. I would definitely encourage you to go front to back. It's short, very purposefully short. Infamously, actually, April Dunford, who we were talking about before we hit recording, April Dunford, who wrote, Obviously Awesome. I recommend that book all over the place. She's got the same target market for her book, and she famously mentioned, she's like, “I needed to write half a book. It had to be a book that a founder could read on a flight.” Like, it's got to be very accessible. And I was like, hell yes, that makes a ton of sense. 

So we wrote a deliberately very short and very practical book. I would say for founders, read it front to back and then pass it on. Because generally what is the biggest sort of barrier to entry is the founder. That founder has got to be on board and believe that yes, we have happily paying customers. We don't need to be guessing at what our scalable marketing strategy should be. We don't need to be guessing at what our most advantageous messaging and positioning should be. There's no point in looking at what my competitors are doing or what my team members did at their previous companies that may have nothing to do with what we're doing. You do not need to be guessing. Your team does not need to be guessing. 

You can run through this book from beginning to end basically. I think you will discover that this process can actually be very, very practical. And it's not a make work project at all. It's really meant to help the team figure out, get intimately familiar with your customers, but also operationalize that customer insight. A lot of people say, talk to your customers, but that's terrible advice if you cannot apply it. And so the goal, the whole point of customer led growth, is customer research is great, but it's only great if it actually turns into implementation and execution from teams. 

So I would say pass it on. Read the book beginning to end. It's not long. It's a breezy read. And then pass it on to the folks on your team that are actually responsible for executing on this stuff. Or send them our way. We'll be doing training programs. We have a membership to help practitioners as well. 

That's the big takeaway. That mindset shift has got to happen. at the top, so to speak. That's definitely our biggest barrier to entry is getting that CEO, that founder on board with the process. Once that happens, implementing it is very step-by-step. And we've got a workbook that also accompanies the book with lots of templates and checklists and like, you name it, there's a lot in there. It's almost as long as the book, the workbook itself. 

Steve:

I think that's great. And I mean, let's face it, founders are doers, right? You only get to be a founder of a company if you want to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in. 

I would thank you for two things in your role as an author. One is making the book short because it's a pet peeve of mine that so many of these business books have one idea. They're done in the first 50 pages, but then their publisher, said, “oh, it's going to be 250 pages”. So they just kind of rehash it. So thank you for that. And then this idea of the tips and tricks, the summaries at the end of chapters, the workbooks, I think that's fabulous. Thanks for putting that together.

Steve:

Thanks very much for sharing your expertise with us. I really appreciate it. And hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again soon.

Gia Laudi:

Yes, absolutely. It was super fun, Steve. Thanks for having me.

Steve:

Thank you.