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The Dreamfuel Show is a research expedition to uncover and unpack the mindsets of impactful tech founders and executives. On this show, we’re going to get real and talk about what was actually going on in their hearts and minds during the harrowing journeys that forged them and their companies! We’ll also speak with performance experts who will share the latest tips, tools, and tricks that can help us realize our own dreams, too.
As we like to say at Dreamfuel, every quarter is a hero’s journey. So be sure to hit follow to join us along the way.
Mark Masters [00:00:00]:
I discovered I had a heart defect that I was born with. When they discovered it, it had torn open. I was at the height of my success in all different levels. I was in the tech industry, real estate, and media. I'm best known for media, but I fixed and built about 50 big companies, and I got dizzy one day, I couldn't really sit up anymore. Went to the doctor, and basically I was given them essentially a year to live, a year and a half. And so I shut down all my affairs. Then they gave me a benzodiazepine and all. All of my abilities, my great abilities, I'd had my whole life to innovate, solve things on the spot. All gone.
Kevin Bailey [00:00:33]:
I'm Kevin Bailey, CEO of Dreamfuel, and this show honors founders who are stepping through fire on their quests to realize their dreams. We dive into their failures and successes and the mental performance skills they're using to achieve their goals in less time and with less frustration. Enjoy The Dreamfuel Show.
Welcome to The Dreamfuel Show, everyone. I am very excited for this guest today. I actually met him doing interviews for the mental performance study we're doing for CEOs, and he is an amazing, amazing entrepreneur, founder, CEO, done so much. Mark Masters is on the show today. He was the CEO of Talk Radio network companies from 1998 to 2014, which successfully launched or rebuilt seven of the ten largest syndicated talk radio networks.
Kevin Bailey [00:01:21]:
According to Bear Stearns, TRN became the second-largest spoken word network in the United States. Mark has also built and sold multiple other large companies. He's worked alongside magnates like Roger Ayers, and currently he works with media personalities, celebrities, and high profile CEO's, helping them get their organizations to the next level. So he's kind of been there, done that, everything. So welcome to the show, Mark.
Mark Masters [00:01:44]:
Thank you for having me.
Kevin Bailey [00:01:45]:
I want to just dive right in, man. Obviously, you've done a ton of stuff. I do find it fascinating, you know, that you work with a lot of high-profile people, and you said something to me when we were talking last time. You said that media personalities, celebrities and CEO's are almost the same to you. Like, they have a lot in common. I was curious, why is that?
Mark Masters [00:02:03]:
It's a natural thing that when you get your identity from what you do, if you get your identity from success, there's a certain drive to achieve more, to feel like you're worth more. A lot of the celebrities I work with, actors or prominent personalities, they're probably looking for approval and love from the audience, whatever audience that is, the weakness in that approach is that if you are the sum total of what other people think of you, then you don't really ever know who you are because you're just always reflecting what everybody thinks and what everybody thinks. What if they're all wrong about you? Just because you can project a good image doesn't mean you're a whole person, right? Right. So the stoics always took a position of, you should rebuild from the outside in, right. Because if all you are is, if you get your identity from your company and your company goes away, what are you? If all you are is the sum total of that achievement, then you'll go jump off a bridge. But really good CEO's understand that the failures they have in life bring about humility. And the humility is a result of intraspectrin. Christians call it repentance.
Mark Masters [00:03:08]:
Whatever process brings you to being humble is also the same process that brings you to being more kind, which is also the process that allows you to start as a human being, start participating in deeper, more meaningful relationships before being humbled by life's consequences. A lot of CEOs, younger CEOs, and celebrities are very similar because they're out there trying to attach things to themselves to make themselves feel more. And the problem with filling more is no matter how successful you are, there's never enough to fill that empty hole inside your chest, right? That's where the introspection starts to come, and it starts to give you a life beyond a life of peacefulness, beyond the life of just achievement or adulation. I've actually dealt with quite a number of hosts who are very, very famous. People will sure go unnamed. They start becoming unstable when they become successful. And the reason why a lot of celebrities become unstable when they become successful is not what you think. The instability starts to occur as they start to realize, is this all there is? And the disappointment with their own success not giving them a greater sense of being starts to create an instability, and they start to resent their own audience.
Mark Masters [00:04:20]:
I've seen hosts that hate their own audiences, and they don't even understand why. And I sat down with one of them. I'm the guy that companies call in to tie up these realistic talks. And I, I said to one of them, I said, look, I said, you're avoiding doing your own show, yet you're addicted to it. You have a love-hate relationship with your audience. I said, can I tell you why that is what I think it is? Okay? Because nobody ever talks to these people in a direct manner. I said, I think you love them. Because they give you approval and adulation, and you hate them because you're trapped in the compensation.
Mark Masters [00:04:52]:
And the compensation is you sort of dance for your dinner, you perform well, and for 1 hour a day people love you, everyone loves you, and for 23 hours a day you're miserable because all you are is like a weightlifter who lifted weights with one arm and got a giant bicep muscle and the rest of you is a weakling, right?
Kevin Bailey [00:05:11]:
So, the economy of approval is what they're playing for.
Mark Masters [00:05:13]:
And if you only develop the muscles that are about approval or adulation or achievement, if that's the only muscles you ever develop, that's 5% of your muscles, right? It's an overcompensation.
Kevin Bailey [00:05:25]:
And you said most CEOs fall for this trap, too, right?
Mark Masters [00:05:27]:
Well, yeah. And that's where dismissiveness and impulsiveness comes in. Dismissiveness and impulsiveness are the two things that kill companies and destroy CEOs, literally destroy companies. Because if CEOs are into egoism, dismiss their competitors moves as being, oh, I don't need to worry about that. Or they'll make impulsive decisions without understanding the consequences. Dismissiveness and impulsiveness is a direct result of adolescent behavior in an adult executive. You cannot be dismissive because it's profoundly disrespectful to your own colleagues if they have thoughts and input and they say, what about this boss? What about that boss? You know, some of the most brilliant ideas come from the people that are furthest away from a CEO and closest to the customer. But CEOs think they know it all, right? They have a big ego, they sort of are immune from outside opinions.
Mark Masters [00:06:18]:
And that immunity is in the form of, it's an unhealthy immunity. It's called dismissiveness. Dismissiveness is a soul killer also because you absolutely rule out any self-improvement, because you're always dismissing, dismissing or justifying, dismissing unacceptable behavior in yourself, laziness in yourself. Dismissiveness is actually a really deep form of laziness. So when a person starts to take that inward journey away from what happens if somebody thinks of me or that's just adolescent stuff. When you start to take the deeper journey, you start to ask the right questions. You cannot get the right answer if you're not asking the right questions.
Kevin Bailey [00:06:55]:
You were saying that you studied under Deming, and that's what helped you build some of your successful companies, correct?
Mark Masters [00:07:01]:
Doctor Deming taught the Japanese how to build quality into the process and eliminate rework in industrial manufacturing. But his principle. It applies to any business, including a service business. And his whole premise was, have a ruthless pursuit of the truth, no matter where it leads you. And even if you're biased against it, don't dismiss it when it yells at you. Right. There is a pursuit of truth, even if it costs you your own ego that an executive has to follow in order to have any sustainable business. The truth is the only tool you can use.
Mark Masters [00:07:35]:
And comprehending truth, it's the only tool you can use to actually create responsive product development or services. You can't just go off a hunch or off of a false set of assumptions or justifications. Yeah, you can have a premise, but you have to support your premise, right? You always have to be flexible and be open to being wrong. Unless you're open to being wrong, how can you improve and learn? But ego doesn't like to be wrong. Ego does not like to be wrong. And in order to be a CEO, you have to be open to being wrong every minute, which is to live in a state of vulnerability that the ego doesn't like. Ego likes certainty. And I'm not saying that it's not good to be confident.
Mark Masters [00:08:12]:
No, it's good to be confident. But certainty, it might be the enemy of enough flexible openness that allows you to adjust, make micro adjustments on a daily or weekly basis to your company.
Kevin Bailey [00:08:23]:
And you're saying that over time, as these CEO's get more and more success and kind of build to that peak and get more media coverage and stuff like that, the ego continues to build as almost like an armor. And that's what causes the dismissiveness and impulsiveness. Describe to me that process of because they don't start with that much ego. It takes time.
Mark Masters [00:08:41]:
Think about it. The way companies form when they're really good companies is the CEO or the founder develop a way of engaging the customer in such a good way that their company starts to grow. But they ask the right questions in the beginning. And the right questions is, what do my customers need? What are my customers problems? What's my customer's workflow? What could I do to solve their problems, to make them a profit to whatever I do, they make more money on. And I'm a relief in their life. I am a net gain. I am a profit center in their life. What can I do? And by asking those questions, they start to answer those questions.
Mark Masters [00:09:17]:
And if you can answer those questions, you're in business. Whether it's with software, or an app, or a gadget, doesn't matter what it is. Every one of those things are an answer to an unasked question that the right entrepreneur asks at some point, right? But when the company becomes more successful and competitors start to come around, you know, some of your most vicious critics can educate you the best, your most jealous relatives can give you the most heavy-duty truth. And they might not mean well by you. They might want to hurt you. Doesn't matter. You have to be open. Because out of that constant vulnerability of being open to being wrong, there's a humility in it that makes you reachable, that makes you have the ability to survive in the long term and have a sustainable company.
Mark Masters [00:10:03]:
But if armor attaches to you ego so that nothing can penetrate, then you have dismissiveness killing your future. Dismissiveness is the thing that destroys your future. Impulsiveness is the evil twin brother of dismissiveness. Impulsiveness is the thing that makes you say, you know, I think I'm going to spend $5 million on marketing, even though I don't really understand what they're doing with it. I'm just going to have to take a leap of faith. No, you don't take a damn leap of faith. If you don't understand what they're going to do with every penny of your money, they're going to waste 95% of it because marketing firms, they don't care about you.
Kevin Bailey [00:10:40]:
You call this ego flu mark, which I think is a pretty clever phrase. How do you catch ego flu and how does it really get ahold of you, this armor? I want to know why it happens to so many CEO's who become successful.
Mark Masters [00:10:57]:
Well, it's a toxic thing. It has to happen. I hate to say it, it has to happen. The reason why I call it ego flu is not that it's a terrible thing. It's part of maturing. Right? Either ego flu is going to kill you, or you're going to get immune to it, and you're going to overcome it. So, what is the ego? Your worst enemy. That's what the ego is.
Mark Masters [00:11:18]:
You think it's you, smells like you, acts like you, but it's not really you. It's the machine you use to navigate this life. Yes, it's part of that machine. But who you are and who your ego is have to be two different things. Eckert totally talks about this. Some people say I can't live with myself. Well, it's you and you live with yourself. Maybe there's two of you.
Mark Masters [00:11:39]:
So I would say there's the ego, which is like the animal side of you. And there's who you are, who you were when you were a little kid, when you were innocent, when you loved your parents and you loved going to Disneyland. That's who the real you is, and that's who your kids love, and that's who your spouse loves, the real you. Your kids don't love you for your ego. Trust me, your wife didn't fall in love with your big fat ego. So your ego is your enemy, and everyone gets ego flu. It absolutely is not something some of us catch. It's something all of us catch and then catch it.
Mark Masters [00:12:10]:
Usually the first or second signs of success, where that success goes to reinforce that you have value, of course. You've always wanted to be valued. You've always wanted to be loved, of course. But there's something unhealthy when you puff up on it. And you've seen, and we've all puffed up on ego at some point or another, it's ugly. And either you catch a glimpse of how ugly it is and seek to not let it fill your life with misery, or you dismiss the ugliness, you deny it, and it gets uglier and uglier into. All you are is a lazy, dismissive person that cannot take new data in, is not capable of being wrong. And now, here's the other side of this.
Mark Masters [00:12:51]:
Now you start making impulsive decisions because you're lazy.
Kevin Bailey [00:12:55]:
You've experienced this. I've experienced this where you're a CEO, you have investors putting pressure on you, you have all of your team members putting pressure on you. All decisions roll up to you. So you are responsible for every mistake that's made in the company you hired. The person who hired somebody made a mistake. So you get all this pressure coming in, you're getting all this approval at the same time, you know, because it comes with success. You know, oh, I'm so great. I did these amazing things.
Kevin Bailey [00:13:22]:
My company's worth blank hundred million dollars, whatever, and it's feeding this approval tank. And that's how you're getting really your dopamine, which is the molecule of motivation. You're getting it from all of this approval. Recognition is a huge dopamine trigger.
Mark Masters [00:13:36]:
You're a drug addict, and the question.
Kevin Bailey [00:13:39]:
Is, you're a drug addict for the approval.
Mark Masters [00:13:40]:
And the question is, what role does truth play in the ego? And the answer is, truth really plays no role in the ego. Truth is the enemy of the ego. That's a strange thing. But truth is the only way you can fix your company. It's the only way you can understand your customer embracing truth and every piece.
Kevin Bailey [00:13:59]:
Of truth that comes at you from all of these people, the investors, the team members, the customers, when that isn't approval, when that's a negro or a hit on your ego. You put up this armor because you're fueled off of the approval. And what you're saying is that that is what causes dismissiveness and impulsiveness.
Mark Masters [00:14:21]:
That's ego fluid. So the answer to it is, you must never accept the adulation. You must never start to seek the approval, because once you do, you're addicted to it and a slave to it. And then you start to lie. And the second you start to lie, the virtuous path disappears. The Chinese have a term. Virtuous path is when you follow principle, you are on the virtuous path. When you serve principle, you have to be subject to it.
Mark Masters [00:14:50]:
And principles, as my wife likes to say, if you're going to give your word you're taking out the trash, you should take out the trash, right? My wife, she says, don't do it for me. Do it because it's a principle. And I'm like, oh, damn, you're right again. Either you have something called principle or you don't. And if you don't, you start to lie. And the reason you have to lie is because if you're addicted to approval, you have to constantly say things, enlarge things, embellish things, come up with things to get that hit. That is not healthy, and it's external. And it doesn't help you plan your future of your company.
Mark Masters [00:15:24]:
It doesn't help you have security to your employees. It doesn't help you innovate through a problem. You have to resist even any attempt, any thought of reaching for that. You reach outside of yourself, and you are a slave to the outside. You need to be master of the inside. And the master of the inside says, nope, I'm going to tell my board the truth. I'm going to set expectations low, not high. I'm going to set expectations lower so that my delivery is at least at the level of expectation.
Mark Masters [00:15:53]:
Never below, always above expectation. You know, it's simple. Something simple like that. Think about this. Imagine you want any business or service, and they did something faster than they said they'd do it, cheaper than they said they'd do it, and better than they said they'd do it. What would you say about that experience?
Kevin Bailey [00:16:11]:
That's fantastic. That's over-promised under-deliverer. That's a fantastic experience.
Mark Masters [00:16:14]:
All based on expectation setting, right. That's the strategy. And that strategy of under promise, over deliver creates word of mouth referral. It creates too many customers. When you have too many customers, you can raise your rate. That's how you call your customers. Through raising your rate, you create super premiums. All because you under promise, over deliver.
Mark Masters [00:16:34]:
What do people that function off of ego do always overpromise under-deliver? They have to, because what they're doing is they're borrowing from the future to subsidize the next ego hit of the day. So what I'm saying is, what do you learn from success? Nothing. That's the answer. All the great CEO's I've worked with, I worked with Roger Ailes, and go through the whole list of some of the greatest movie makers of the last 30 years, 40 years, none of them have ever learned anything from success. I haven't met one person that told me what they learned from success. Something good, other than they got consumed by their own giant ego and alienated their children and their spouse. That's the price of it.
Kevin Bailey [00:17:13]:
And it happens to so many of us. I know I had a period of that with my first startup, and it was incredibly painful and it led to a fall. And you said, you know, the ego, ego or pride leads to the fall. And then you said to me in our last conversation, humility is what leads to the next level of growth. I know that you had a really tough period of your life where you had some heart issues. I'd love to hear about that period of your life and what that taught you about this conversation we're having right now.
Mark Masters [00:17:38]:
I discovered I had a heart defect that I was born with. When they discovered it, it had torn open. I was at the height of my success in all different levels. I was in the tech industry, real estate, and media. I'm best known for media, but I fixed and built about 50 big companies in various ways. And I got dizzy one day, I couldn't really sit up anymore. Went to the doctor and they basically described I was born with a defect. And basically I was given essentially a year to live, year and a half.
Mark Masters [00:18:05]:
And so I shut down all my affairs. Then they gave me a benzodiazepine to sleep and for travel fatigue. But benzodiazepines is horrible. It's the most. It's going to be like opioids. It is the only medication that you can't go off of or you'll die. And you could become chemically dependent on it in as little as seven days, and then it takes a year to get off of it's what Jordan Peterson. They gave Jordan Peterson the same thing they gave me.
Mark Masters [00:18:29]:
And Jordan Peterson turned into a zombie. I thought I had a stroke, so I had this heart problem, and then I took benzodiazepines. I thought I had a stroke. And all of my abilities, my great abilities, I'd had my whole life to innovate, solve things on the spot. All gone. I was essentially a blob that was dizzy because my heart issues. And then these Benzo things, which are white labeled, are just evil medication. But anyway, the greatest thing that ever happened to me was when all that was stripped away from me.
Mark Masters [00:18:58]:
I started asking what sort of forces formed me. And the forces that formed me was I had a very loving. My parents were wonderful people, but my dad was a Jewish, English Jewish immigrant. He was a veteran of World War two. And he had a very extreme view that you had to be a successful entrepreneur because back then, if you were Jewish, you couldn't really get a job. You had to start your own business, because there was a lot of antisemitism before and after World War Two. So he sort of raised his five children in a way that said, if you don't become successful, essentially, and it wasn't implied, he didn't mean it this way. But there was an inference that the only thing that matters in life is success because he was viewing it through the eyes of an immigrant that came to this country with a dollar 100.
Mark Masters [00:19:43]:
But for his children, all my siblings, we went out and became these successful entrepreneurs. I think to get love from our parents, to get that approval, and I didn't really think of it that way, but I start realizing what a two-dimensional person I was. That to a certain extent, my origin story was one of being sort of two-dimensional, being rewarded for the smart brain I had, solving problems, instantly innovating, receiving that attention and that love, it gave me a form of security. But I wasn't a three-dimensional person. I was emotionally unavailable to my wife and to my children. To a certain degree, I wanted to do all the right things. I wanted to be loving. I just didn't know how.
Mark Masters [00:20:23]:
But it comes to a certain point in our lives where we have to become more than our origin story, more than the culture that raised us, where we start to ask ourselves, what am I? Is my ego my friend, or is my ego the thing that's driving my family away? And when you're looking at a wall and you're dying, you have to ask these questions. I thought I was going to be dead. In a matter of months. What was my life worth? What did I learn from all this success? And the answer is, nothing. What I learned was that when I got everything I wanted, ten times the success I could have ever imagined, there was nothing there. And I was lonely. And my wife and children, who I love dearly, were at a great distance from me, spiritually, and emotionally. And I thought in that moment, I thought, God, if I can just lose everything but have them, I'll trade that right now.
Mark Masters [00:21:13]:
And God didn't demand that of me. I do believe there's a God. But I believe that what happened in that process was that there was a sweet surrender to the knowledge that I had never known how to be vulnerable. I'd always hated the feeling of being vulnerable, but in fact, it took great strength to remain in a state of constant vulnerability. It takes great strength because if you're suggestible, everything can move you. How do you stop being suggestible? You realize you are suggestible. That's how you stop being suggestible. The humility of realizing you can be influenced is how you stop being influenced.
Mark Masters [00:21:47]:
And when you stop being influenced, truth can start to flow through that questions. The right questions start to form. And the right questions is, why don't I have a relationship with my kids? Or why is my wife dissatisfied? Is it me? Is it possibly me, the perfect one? And the answer has to be, yes, it has to be you. Everything wrong with your company is wrong with you first. And CEO's have certain pathologies.
Kevin Bailey [00:22:13]:
Hey, it's Kevin, and I hope you're enjoying the show. I know it's tough out there right now for tech leaders, and we appreciate you taking the time to focus on your mental performance and well being. Speaking of time, did you know that 76% of tech leaders lose 20 or more hours of productivity a week due to stress, fatigue, and feeling overwhelmed? To win these hours back, leaders need to learn the mental performance skills that keep you in the zone, where research shows that executives are five times more productive. And that's where we come in. Dreamfuel's octane cohort is our flagship mental performance program, built for tech leaders under pressure who want to achieve their most ambitious goals in less time and with less frustration. To learn more, go to dreamfuel.com octane or just click the link in the description to see if you qualify. All right, back to the show. So, you do believe that the company is a reflection of the CEO? In a lot of cases, has to be.
Kevin Bailey [00:23:05]:
The pathologies or vices of the CEO are reflected by the company.
Mark Masters [00:23:08]:
Has to be see part of my job, I'm not a consultant, I'm a consulting CEO. So I'll go and I'll look at a company on behalf of like family offices or BC firms and I'll fix them. Normally what's missing in companies is the way they engage their customer and the fact that they don't have any strategy for owning the airspace over their customers niche, right? I call it the mind share airspace because forget the word marketing and PR, remove those. Your marketing and pr department is actually your war department. That's what gets you market share. The words marketing and pr are not sufficient to describe what that means. And what that means is if this is war, your army has to go and own the mind share space over the niche and market share follows than mine space. Just like ground troops cannot control a territory unless your air force has provided air superiority.
Mark Masters [00:24:01]:
Mind share dominance over a space. The way you engage your customers in any form, earned media, paid marketing, direct mail message, whatever the heck it is, emails, doesn't matter. However, way you engage them with thought leadership, with an elegant way you engage them and understand them. That comes first. Market share comes second. So I want you to think about how Steve Jobs engaged the market first. He came out in the world, everything was IBM computers. I remember 1984, I was listening to a debate between a top Apple guy and an IBM guy.
Mark Masters [00:24:34]:
Bottom line was the IBM guy said, yeah, those visual icons that Apple uses, that's for stupid people. We have the business machines. And the Apple guy said, this was 1984. He said, you're right. But Steve looked at those visual icons like a piece of trash. If you want to throw away something, there's a trash can, you can touch it. He says, everybody can do that. So we want to make computers for stupid people because we don't think that's stupid.
Mark Masters [00:25:00]:
And what Steve Jobs would do is he looked at everything as an air superiority assault on the mind of the marketplace. And in 1984 when he released Apple, the visual interface that we take for granted today on our iPhones was something new and unique. And he created the 1984 commercial which cost him a lot of money. It was a big risk. So 1984 won't be 1984. And they had like big brother Steve Jobs understood that he would get 1000 times the marketing earned media marketing from every newspaper, every tv show in the country, repeating that ad, doing articles on that ad, talking about Steve Jobs philosophy as it relates to that ad. Because his visual icons were democratizing computer usage, right? But he owned that mind-share space. He owned it before Apple became big, he owned it and Apple filled the void left, just like ground troops follow about 5 miles behind the air superiority, right.
Mark Masters [00:26:03]:
That market share filled that space. Now, Elon Musk, I don't think Tesla has ever paid their advertising. Everything they've done has always been earned media because Elon looked at this and he thought, well, you know what? If I can use superior engineering to eliminate parts, eliminate cost, I can eliminate things that break down. I can also create a cleaner environment. So Elon Musk figured out a way of creating earned media opportunities off of everything Tesla is. Even the fact that they are the biggest owners of the biggest aluminum presses in the world. That makes the chassis for Teslas. He created earned media events over that.
Mark Masters [00:26:42]:
Earned media is the cash equivalent of news coverage. Now, here's another example similar to business. Look at the way the original matrix was marketed. If you think about the way the original matrix was marketed, the Wachowski brothers back then, now they're the sisters. But the Westchowski brothers back then didn't have a lot of marketing budget. So they took that 32nd sequence called bullet Time that we all know today as Bullet Time. It's like 180 cameras lined up and run a circle. And even though it was cool in the movie, they understand they needed to own the mind, share space over the niche.
Mark Masters [00:27:18]:
And what they did is they went out and they created a news story about the technology of bullet time and attached it to the movie. But they did it in a clever way that had nothing to do with theatrical representations, but more about technology news. And when the first Matrix came out, because some of you probably weren't born when the first Matrix came out, you saw specials about bullet time technology for a whole month before the movie, right? And then the second Matrix came out, and the one thing that they took out of that, the memorable moment they took out of it, but they created earned media with, was when they had the 100 agent Smiths attacking Keanu Reeves, right? And they show Keanu Reeves taking an agent Smith, and he's got one by the leg and he's beating off the others. And they took that. And in the second matrix, you saw that sequence for a whole month in the news. The Wachowski brothers were not paying for that marketing. That was earned media. And it probably created ten times the cash equivalent of the budget they had.
Kevin Bailey [00:28:19]:
I know Elon does that, and I hadn't heard the Matrix story. That's amazing. But it makes total sense now. I mean, you talk on earned media. I mean, you were the media like you had your hands in a lot of the large media players, Fox News, CNN, et cetera. Tell me a little bit about the secret sauce there of how they took market share. I'm assuming they, I mean, they took the warfare mindset you're talking about. But I'd like to hear, how do you build a media empire for a little bit?
Mark Masters [00:28:46]:
You find underserved audiences and serve them. Now, if you look at the older media companies like CNN, CNN is fighting with ten different niches for the coastal left audience. The coastal left audience is the intelligentsia, what I call the executive media cocktail party set for New York and La. CNN is programmed exclusively to the opinions of about 1500 people that go to cocktail parties that are part of larger parent corporations for each. Right. Fox is that now, too. But originally, the greatest success in media divisions, probably of the last 50 years, was the Fox News Channel. And whether you hate Roger Ailes or not doesn't really matter.
Mark Masters [00:29:25]:
Roger Ailes was very smart. He recognized that the television world acted as if half the country didn't exist as far as center-right, conservative, whatever traditional values, American audiences. And Roger Ells discovered this because he was friends with a guy named Rush Limbaugh, who was a friend of mine, too. Wonderful performer. But what he did is he realized, he thought to himself, really, radio audiences are that big. Radio audiences are a lot bigger than tv audiences because radio, there's 17,000 radio stations. Still. People dismiss it like it's old.
Mark Masters [00:30:01]:
Still the number one most consumed medium because you consume it while you drive. 70% of consumption is when you're mobile. Right? But Roger looked at Rush's audience and he thought people were listening to this guy for 3 hours. Yeah, he's funny, he's light, he's talking about news and news event. I wonder if I can cross-collateralize that radio audience into TV. So he did a late-night TV syndication of Rush's 30 Minutes show every night with Rush Limbaugh, and that audience became instantly huge because he transplanted radio audience and it TV. But Rush couldn't do 3 hours a day and another half hour at night. But what Roger got from that experience is, my goodness, what if I can hijack radio, send all their audiences of radio to a TV channel where I showed visuals of what we were discussing on radio, on TV, I can cross collateralize, and I don't have to pay for it.
Mark Masters [00:30:51]:
All I got to do is serve that audience. And that audience was about 55% of the american public.
Kevin Bailey [00:30:56]:
So you've taken all that knowledge, and really now you use that to empower these companies to build media brands and obviously, you do other things as well.
Mark Masters [00:31:05]:
Let's talk about that for a second. What I do for 30 years, I've fixed any type of company you can imagine because most of the weaknesses of companies aren't in their back room. Even if the CEO has ego flu, normally spread out a pretty good staff doing a pretty good job. Where most of them fall down is in the way they engage their customer. The process they go through to engage that customer. And what I help them understand is you can't pay enough money for marketing to have mind share dominance with paid marketing. You can't. There's not enough money in the world to do it.
Mark Masters [00:31:36]:
You have to control the news narrative in your sector, period. So you're going to have to be in the media business. You're going to have to build a news division that looks and smells and tastes and is a benign news division. And you're going to become the thought leader and then you're going to do something you're not going to want to do. And they say what? They says you're going to honor your competitors and interview your competitors, build relationships with your competitors. And they say, why would I do that? I said, because the truth is the competition is so bad in most businesses that you're not competing with them. You're competing with your own ineptness. Let me give you an example, which goes back to Fox in the media world.
Mark Masters [00:32:15]:
And the potential audience of all conservative media companies is I talked to one of these clients recently. I said, do you realize in conservative media, if you're just trying to serve conservative media right now there's 135 million potential clients or customers subscribers in the United States for your particular services. All of the conservative media combined have four and a half million subscribers. I said, you guys are so focused on each other, competing with each other, fighting with each other. This is that niche. And I would say the same thing on the left, but I'm just giving this example. But you're never competing with each other because you have 95%, 95.5% of the marketplace is still available to you, and you haven't even surged into it. It's non-competed for available audience.
Mark Masters [00:33:08]:
And you're fighting over four and 4% with these guys over here. You're not competing with them. You realize you don't have competition until 100% of the markets saturated.
Kevin Bailey [00:33:18]:
Preston, I was part of that group where I couldnt. I still have trouble with it, but I cant stand the competition between those media networks. So im part of that 95% underserved by news.
Mark Masters [00:33:29]:
But here's the point. If you're an app developer or a tech company, look at the size of the potential market, ask yourself how much, how many other competitors are in it, and normally is four or 5% less than 10%, meaning you don't start competing with those other guys until there's 100% of the market is accounted for. If only 10% of the markets accounted for, you are competing with your own ineptness, with your own ego, with the fact you don't ask the right questions, like even the way you market yourself, the way you engage the customer. Why do companies acquire you? If you're a CEO listening, there's only one reason their company will acquire you. Another one pay a lot of money because you figured out some mystical way of controlling the mind share over the market niche you have and engaging the customer so well in such a cool way that they can't figure out how to screw you, they can't figure out how to destroy you, so they have to acquire you because they don't have the time to screw you. Because your relationship with a customer is so good that the only way they can do it is you force them to pay you a super premium. Whatever way that is has to do with the mind-share relationship you build the way you communicate, the way you super serve, the way you show thought leadership, the way you show innovation. So yes, what I do is I build that part of the company that faces the customer, that forces people to acquire you.
Mark Masters [00:34:53]:
And I get paid a lot for it because a lot of people don't know how to do it, because it's not marketing that's part of it. It's not PR that's part of it. It's being the news. Voice over your entire sector, it's being so dominant that all of your competitors live inside the narrative bubble your company has to create for that space.
Kevin Bailey [00:35:14]:
Let's tie this back around to ego flu and humility. Deming asking questions tie it back around because to build a great media empire, to be a great journalist, what do you got to do, right?
Mark Masters [00:35:28]:
You have to ask great questions. And the truth is Deming I was one of the last people that was able to study under doctor Deming when he was still alive. And in 1979, Donald Peterson of Ford Motor Company brought Deming in to the Ford Motor company to teach them how to build quality into the process. Building quality into the process is pretty interesting because to go back a little further in time, when dimming was sent to Japan in the early 1950s to teach 88% of the leadership of Japan at that time, how to build quality in the process. People didn't realize that Japanese products were considered low quality, had always been. Deming went there after they were defeated, and they all learned from him. And he realized the problem with Japanese management, the ego flu, has been codified. So he realized, how do I do this? How do I talk to a culture where ego flu is structurally endemic? And he realized, well, they understand commerce in a way that makes sense, because they do listen to their customers, the Japanese, even though instead of their internal structures, might be saving face.
Mark Masters [00:36:28]:
And this is why the Japanese banking system, by the way, was also so brittle in the eighties and nineties, because everyone was saving face inside the banking system, which is another story. But what he said is, he said, let's break up your company. If you're Toyota, let's break up your company into customer vendor relationship. Whoever is receiving a part or a service is the customer. Whoever's supplying it is the internal vendor. And let's break them up at Toyota, for instance. And if the engine department is delivering an engine to the chassis department, then the engine department has to ask their customer, the chassis department, what their needs are. And they had never thought of doing this because they didn't want to offend each other.
Mark Masters [00:37:12]:
And they said, no, you're the customer. You're not offended. You're not an internal company anymore. Your internal vendors and your internal suppliers, if you have a supplier outside of Toyota and they deliver you something wrong because they didn't ask you what it was for, would you turn it away? And they said, yeah. He said, you have the right to do that internally. Now, it forced the engine department and the chassis department to start working together at what's called the O stage to understand the customer's internal needs. Because it turned out in most Japanese companies, 40% of the entire cost of the car was reworked. Not rework, because it needed to be repaired after it was built, rework because when they get the engine, they'd have to cut, they'd have to change every frame, and there's a certain amount of time every day where they having to retrofit early the chassis to fit the engine, which the guys that built the engine didn't really think about how it was going to fit into the car.
Mark Masters [00:38:07]:
That process of asking the right questions, of looking at each department as if is a customer-vendor relationship, resulted in a profound change in Japanese quality process that we think of as monolithically Japanese today. That was all Doctor Deming, and that's who I learned from. Anyway, in 1979, 2030 years later, Donald Peterson of Ford Motor Company brought Deming into Ford. And within three years, the Ford, I think the three or four or five-year Ford Taurus, came out, became the number one selling car in the world. Ford's quality was equal to Toyota's because Deming had taught Ford the Japanese first, and then Ford, and then later all American industry, how to ask questions. How to ask the right questions. You can't get the right answers if you don't learn how to ask the right questions. And the right questions always start with, what's the biggest enemy of the future of the company? Has to be the ego of the founders, has to be.
Mark Masters [00:39:06]:
There's the only thing it can be because the marketplace is there calling for your product. You have mind-share opportunities to control the narrative over your space. Why aren't you doing it? You're doing it because one of the founders, or both the founders, aren't asking the right questions of themselves, of their clients of the marketplace. Essentially, ego flu is as it takes on another form. It uses the momentum of your original humility to become lazy. And dismissiveness is a lazy emotion, as is impulsiveness. Both are severe laziness disguised as, oh, I've already succeeded. No, your true enemy has to always be your own big fat ego.
Mark Masters [00:39:47]:
It's never been your friend. It will never be a mate to your spouse. It will never be a father or a mother to your children. It will never be something that you are loved for. It'll be something that tortures you and hurts your company and alienates you from your family. So you have to overcome it. And when you overcome your ego, you start asking humble questions. Humble questions.
Mark Masters [00:40:09]:
Look, think about how many guys they go raise $40 million, let's say, and they put 15 million towards marketing, and somebody makes a marketing presentation to them. Whatever marketing is, I'm going to tell you, ninety cents of every dollar is going to be wasted. And they get, they have one raise and they're going to waste 90% of it. I can prove it to you. If they don't really understand what that marketing is for, they damn well better before they spend a penny of it. And that's where all the future of your company is, right there. Because that's where everyone, everyone else subs that out. That's the one thing you can't sub out.
Mark Masters [00:40:43]:
The one thing your company doesn't need you to do is spend more time in anything other than the relationship with the marketplace and the customer. You better be right in front of that and understand how to control it in an elegant way where everyone lives inside of the narrative bubble you create for that space, all your competitors have to live inside of it. That's how dominant you have to be. And then nobody can screw you. You're above it because you control all the news and all the news narrative and all the thought leadership in that space. Hundred different forms. That's why you have to be in the media business. If you're going to be the leader sector leader in any niche, you have to be in a subsector of the media business.
Mark Masters [00:41:25]:
And the way you approach the customer is also the way you approach everyone you want to recruit into that brand. Because you got to understand, everyone you want to recruit are watching you. They're watching the way you engage their customer. And the only way you're going to grow, once you start growing is you're going to have to recruit. And the only way you can recruit is by having such mind share dominance that all the top executives from your competitors want to come to you. 1st, 3rd having that level of mind share dominance is the way you get the first m and a picks if you want to acquire and start rolling up your competitors. Why? Because you're interviewing all your competitors as part of your news service.
Kevin Bailey [00:42:05]:
The answer to building a great marketing presence, a great media brand, the answer to ultimately getting acquired, to being a great CEO, to building a great team, to recruiting, is being humble, which is an entire other podcast to talk about, cultivating humility. But it is the answer. I agree with you on that, Mark. This podcast has been amazing. It's incredible to hear your stories. We could talk for another few hours. There's so much career to kind of talk through, so many experiences. I'm excited for our audience to hear this.
Kevin Bailey [00:42:34]:
Is there any last piece of advice you want to give to the audience before we sign off on this?
Mark Masters [00:42:39]:
Well, I would just close by saying this. The twin killers of a company and of a family is dismissiveness and impulsiveness. Dismissiveness because it's profoundly disrespectful to other human beings. Because you're assuming that their input doesn't have value, and it very well might. And it usually does. Right? The most humble employee in your company is closest to your customer. Therefore their input might be more valuable than your executive vp. So dismissiveness, you have to ban it.
Mark Masters [00:43:13]:
People that hate you, people that put you down, sometimes tell you the truth, don't dismiss them either. You don't have, doesn't have to feel good, but be an adult about it. Take it in number two, impulsiveness. Impulsiveness is laziness in a different form. You cannot spend your company's money on anything unless you understand what you're spending it on. Not that you think you understand, but that you really understand why you're spending it. Because you don't know if you're going to get capital. If the stock market crashes in the next three months, capital is going to dry up.
Mark Masters [00:43:48]:
So I would suggest putting half your money aside as if you don't have it and work with half as much money as you can for anything you're going to do that faces the customer for a while. Act like you have a that is put away in a bank account because when the stock market collapses, we can have money can become really expensive. Don't waste your marketing dollars or your pr dollars, or your customer engagement dollars. Don't waste it on impulsive actions you don't comprehend. Because if you don't understand it, it's because you haven't asked the right questions. If you ask the right questions and the people you're asking the right questions to are supposed to have the answers, you can't clearly understand their answers. You're about to get screwed. So don't go with them until they have the right answers because they're providing a solution to a problem you might not have.
Mark Masters [00:44:40]:
You need solutions to problems you actually have. You don't need solutions to problems you don't have. True. So 90% of your marketing, 90% of your customer engagement dollars is going to be wasted. It's going to be wasted unless you understand, and you can't afford a penny of it to be wasted. So you know what? Just experiment. Take a tiny bit of a budget, take a little budget, put your rest of your money aside, experiment until you perfect something in experimental mode, and then only go wide with it when you've perfected it as an experiment. Right? Thirdly, 90% of the value of your company is going to be future value of your company is going to be the way you develop the relationship with the customer and the market space overall.
Mark Masters [00:45:27]:
If you build a news division that overarches and sits benignly on top of your entire niche, nationwide or worldwide, you force your competitors to live inside a narrative environment of your design. That's what I do anyway. To learn more about me, you can go to Mark mastersconsulting.com. and there's also white papers and articles I've written on my experiences with Fox News and others. Anyway, those are my three things. Dismissiveness, impulsiveness and make sure you really understand the customer engagement process and the mind share process. And don't waste your money until you do.
Kevin Bailey [00:46:01]:
Well, I really appreciate your time, Mark. It's been great to have you on the dream fuel show, and I know people got some great value from it and see you later.
Mark Masters [00:46:07]:
All right, thanks, my friend.
Kevin Bailey [00:46:11]:
Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed The Dreamfuel Show. If you'd like to continue listening to more episodes, subscribe to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be here every other week. And if you want to learn more about Dreamfuel's octane program for tech leaders, go to dreamfuel.com/octane or just click the link in the description.