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Becoming an entrepreneur takes grit.
Deciding to do it solo takes courage.
This is 1,000 Routes, the podcast where we explore the stories of solopreneurs who have made the bet on themselves to build a business that serves their life. Every episode you'll hear about the lessons they've learned and the uncommon routes they've taken to stand out in a world that is purposefully trying to commoditize them.
Christopher G. Fox [00:00:00]:
The way that I kind of operate psychologically, is that all right? Well, I've made my decision and now it's my responsibility to optimize the consequences of that decision. And I can't really go back. I wasn't going to go back with my tail between my legs asking for employment again after I resigned. I wasn't going to pull back from this project or say at some point in the process, oh no, actually we can't deliver. I was like, alright, well, whatever problem comes along, it's now my job to solve it.
Nick Bennett [00:00:36]:
Hey, it's Nick, and welcome to 1000 Routes, the podcast where I explore the stories of solopreneurs who have made the bet on themselves to build a business that serves their life. Every episode you'll hear all about the lessons they've learned and the uncommon routes they've taken to stand out in a world that is purposefully trying to commoditize them.
Christopher G. Fox [00:00:58]:
My name is Christopher Fox. I'm the managing partner of Ideas led growth. We're a company that develops thought leadership strategies and develops written, spoken and video materials for companies to help them with their thought leadership. We focus exclusively within the financial services space.
Nick Bennett [00:01:18]:
So, Chris, I'm stoked to have you on today because I put up a post a little over a month ago after I had interviewed Aaron Balsa and you left a comment that got me thinking. And I wanted, like this one comment got me to want you to come on the show and chat about this. And you said to me, you said, two of the biggest wins in my life looked like giving up from the outside.
Christopher G. Fox [00:01:43]:
Yeah.
Nick Bennett [00:01:44]:
And I was like this, I need to know about this. And just for some context, right? Like, I think this idea of giving up is often, well, it looks like when things look like they're giving up. And I even interviewed a friend, my friend Dylan the other day, who recently closed up his solo shop to partner with someone else and become a co owner in an agency. And he said it really well, which was failure is a perception. You can feel like you failed if you want, or you can feel like you learned so much that you can now move on to, you can now go do the next thing. And it's all about perception. And he said for a few days it felt like failure. But then I realized that if I didn't go through all of these things, I would never have created this opportunity in my life.
Nick Bennett [00:02:31]:
So I'm like very fascinated with this entire way of thinking and how people move through it. So tell me about two of the biggest ones in your life that look like giving up from the outside.
Christopher G. Fox [00:02:43]:
Yeah. So I'll start with the first one, which is really foundational for my professional, even my personal life. So I went through university, got my master's degree, got my doctorate in french literature. I was all ready to go to bed an academic, to live my life in academia, teach french literature at the university level. I get a position doing that for two years. I don't like it. I don't like it at all. I hate the professional climate.
Christopher G. Fox [00:03:17]:
I'm frustrated by the overriding sense of nothing really ever has any stakes other than power and influence. People are always kind of worming around, trying to get the ear of the department chair who's worming around, trying to get the ear of the dean or this or that, this just bizarre kind of palace intrigue nonsense going on within the university context. And it was a tough situation after having invested four years of undergrad where I was already, like, I knew where I was going. I knew I was going to grad school, six years of grad school, getting my masters and doctorate. So you're talking about investing a decade of my life and realizing at the end of the process, I don't want any of this. And it felt, in a lot of ways, at the start of this process, it took me, like, three months to work my way through my own feelings and reactions to what this looked like of, no, it is not the case that I'm going to think of myself as a failed academic. I left a tenure track position that was just completely untenable. Not untenurable, but untenable in terms of just the toxicity of the department that I was working in.
Christopher G. Fox [00:04:33]:
It felt like I was being chased out in a lot of ways, but I did it with a very intentional mindset, which is what I realized in the process of this two year stint as faculty is there was something in my motivations that was heavily entrepreneurial. Wherever I wanted to, like, get in and solve problems. I was teaching at Emory University. It's a university that has a ton of money just to set the stage here. We're talking about the mid 1990s right now. So they had wired all these buildings with this magical thing called ethernet, like, there's this thing called the Internet. But I was teaching, and I was. My office was in a humanities building, so there was really just a weird phone jack in the wall.
Christopher G. Fox [00:05:18]:
Like, what's this thing do? Why is it bigger than the other phone jacks? And I had to figure out everything. I literally had to figure out everything. If I wanted email I had to figure that out myself and set up an email account for myself. There was no support because it wasn't considered something that any humanities faculty would need. This was right as that first generation of websites was getting started. And I had this idea of the classroom experience for my students and for myself. Was kind of boring because we're doing french lit, so let's say we're reading something from the 17th century. The classroom interaction was, what does this word mean? Can you explain the sentence, who is Louis the 14th? I was basically just an interactive lookup tool.
Christopher G. Fox [00:06:06]:
And so what I did was I developed very, like, in this day and age, extremely rudimentary and primitive hypertext versions of the materials that we're going to use in class so that students would come prepared knowing what those things were, getting all the historical and cultural and literary references, getting the complicated vocabulary or sentence structures all sorted out before they would come to class, so that we could have meaningful and relevant discussions about, what is this about? Not, can I just help you understand it from a word to word level, but let's have a more substantive discussion about the meaning of this text. So the point of all that in this story is that there weren't other humanities faculty that were down there on their hands and knees figuring out what this jack is. There weren't other people setting up their own email server or web server. I was really motivated by that idea of figuring it out and in the context of all the other weird and toxic things that were going on within that department that I don't really wanna go into too much. There was also this sense of I was just sort of an alien monster even doing these things. People hadn't really even considered things like interactive or digital courseware. I'm not saying I'm this magic innovator that invented these things, but within that specific space, it seemed just extremely unusual. And what I decided to do over this period of, like, academia is not gonna work.
Christopher G. Fox [00:07:40]:
I cannot sentence myself to life in an academic department. Even if I imagine myself on the other side with tenure and all these other things, I don't want to be like these other people. I had to work out a plan of how I would get out of it. And my trajectory in a very short and simple way was, all right, well, what's the closest thing to getting out into the world of business and entrepreneurship? From where I was, it was university administration. So I took some administrative positions at other schools. From there, I was hired into one of the.com boom consulting firms and developed a consulting career. And that was really the thing that, well, you might think, like, all right, I did all this work in academia and got to the end of the process, and it was a fail. It wasn't a fail.
Christopher G. Fox [00:08:30]:
It was a complete and total reboot.
Nick Bennett [00:08:32]:
So the idea that you could invest ten years of your life in something to basically get two years out of it is, I would say the ratio feels off. And I think I get why you said you kind of wrestle with this in the moment. You're like, you almost want to stick it out because you've invested so much time on it.
Christopher G. Fox [00:08:54]:
The sunk costs alone would make you think you should stick with it.
Nick Bennett [00:08:57]:
Yeah. How did you. How did you. I mean, I think the toxic cultures of, like, any environment like that will push you out. But, like, was there a turning point for you that said, this is the. This is it. I'm kind of done dealing with this. Whether it's the fact that we don't have the same tools as in other departments, something as simple as email or, like, what.
Nick Bennett [00:09:20]:
Was there a turning point for you that made you say, that's it, it's time to exit academia and get into consulting?
Christopher G. Fox [00:09:28]:
It really turned out to be that I was more motivated by results than I was by kind of mysterious political influence within a viper's nest. That didn't motivate me. It wasn't something that I even wanted to get to the top of the heap of vipers. What I saw was that in the world of business, there were people that were getting results and actually doing things. And when I was within this consulting position, everyone would talk about how, oh, you got to watch out for this situation or this thing. It's very political. First of all, I would laugh. They're like, you have no idea what that means.
Christopher G. Fox [00:10:05]:
But second of all, there was this kind of unquestionable thing where, as I worked my way through this consulting firm, I got in a position where the book of business that I was responsible for, the client relationships that I was responsible for, were about a quarter of the firm's revenue. And this is a large firm, too. It's not just like me and three other people. So that a quarter was proportional. It was me and, like, 98 other people, and the results mattered. Having those results, being able to say, well, like, regardless of anything else, if I might have some kind of difference of opinion with the CEO of the firm or some other internal politics situation, at the end of the day, there was also just the raw results of, well, 25% of the revenue is coming to through things that I've built and that results orientation was really like, I kind of already saw that coming. The difference is that I want to work in an environment that is results oriented rather than influence oriented.
Nick Bennett [00:11:08]:
I could not agree more. I think this like, shadow government that looms over academia or any type of business. Like all companies, I think at certain sizes end up with some, something weird like that going on. I've experienced it in the past, working for massive companies, and you're like, what is the deal with this? But, okay, so you see the writing on the wall. You're like, not for me. You choose to get out, you end up in a consulting firm, and now you're categorized as a marketing consultant. Like, the ideas led growth is kind of categorized as marketing consulting. So how did you end up making this leap from french literature to marketing?
Christopher G. Fox [00:11:48]:
Yeah, so the common thread, and we can go down this path a little later if you'd like to, is this idea. And I actually, I hate the word content. I have a lot of issues with the word content, but everyone knows what we mean when we say content. So I'll leave it be for now and say the common thread was content. Right. The ability to assimilate and make sense of a series of 20 novels, like long, chunky novels written by a single authorization and develop a coherent point of view, as well as all the research based on that author's work. To me, that was a transferable skill that worked really well in my early consulting positions as being brought into the content department. Now I'm a junior content person in a consulting firm.
Christopher G. Fox [00:12:39]:
And then over time, it's like, all right, well, now I'm managing the entire content team, and now I'm managing all, I'm the director of user experience, because content rolls up into that. So the common theme there was that because I had all the research and writing skills that anyone could ever possibly need, I had the skills of being able to communicate and articulate things by doing things like lectures, classroom interaction. Like, I had all those skills that were transferable. And in the world of business, content leads to strategy. The strategy, especially the marketing piece of the strategy of the company. And I became closer and closer to that level of not just what are the words that go here? And more like, what's the point of any of these words?
Nick Bennett [00:13:32]:
This is the most incredible through line that I have never considered. I think there's a lot of people who are like, you know, just like, I love writing and I love doing this other stuff. And so I went into marketing. This is a through line that I have never considered, and I love it because, I mean, like you said, content can mean a lot of different things, but just for the sake of discussion, it's like the fact that an individual or a company's body of work can be as large as it is, and to be able to, like, parse through that and discern certain themes and all these types of things that you did through french, literally, like, through your understanding french literature, you're like, well, I can do this on someone's blog. Like, the company that I most recently worked at before going solo, we had, I think, at the time, before I left, something like six or 7000 articles published. And it was like, for someone to even look, to be able to look at that body of work and try to understand it, that is a very unique skill set, but you end up in content. Okay, I see the through line there. What was the catalyst to going out on your own from there?
Christopher G. Fox [00:14:41]:
Yeah. So I almost started telling that story when I said I was in a position of having 25% of a firm's revenue associated with the business and the client relationships that I was responsible for. I started to realize that I didn't really need either the backup or the overhead of a whole firm behind me or on top of me, that my ability to understand the client needs work with that client in a way that perpetuates business over time. Form an internal team of people that will do the things that were necessary for whatever that client would be. Every piece of the puzzle that would be necessary for supporting clients, doing the kind of work that I'd been doing, I already had at my fingertips than I knew how to do. And so I had this realization that I don't need all of this other apparatus around me. I have the ability to go out and do this on my own, just.
Nick Bennett [00:15:41]:
Like the bureaucracy and overhead that is large firm. Okay, so you went out, and that was this is like 2007, correct. When you made this decision, and it was that that became Syncresus?
Christopher G. Fox [00:15:58]:
Yes.
Nick Bennett [00:15:58]:
What was known as Syncresus at the time. 2007 was a very different landscape than 2024 is in the way that people go about finding and acquiring clients. How were you able to acquire your first clients back then?
Christopher G. Fox [00:16:15]:
Yeah, so it was really through personal connections I started the firms. The other piece of the story I talked about, realizing that I didn't need the whole apparatus, and I would be able to field and lead a team of my own with a client. The other piece of that puzzle is through personal connections. A midsize healthcare group asked me what should our web strategy be, and would you be willing to do a project that would help us define our web strategy? It was very much a side hustle. It's like, sure, I can do that. I mean, I do that kind of thing all the time. Why not? I'll give it a try. So I do this and we get to this point of the strategy is done.
Christopher G. Fox [00:16:59]:
And now their head of marketing and patient communication, because we're talking about healthcare, asked me, well, now we have the strategy. Could you help us figure out what we need to put in an RFP to get someone to build out this strategy? The light bulb went off in my head to say, first of all, two things. Absolutely, I'll help you write the RFP on the condition that we're allowed to bid on that RFP as a brand new company. We already have a slot in your competitive list of possible vendors to do this RFP, which was completely revamping their entire website, building out a content management system, building out a whole set of database tools so that people could find the healthcare practitioner based on location, based on specialization, based on all these things. They needed to do all of this because their website was extremely rudimentary. And I realized that not only could we create this RFP, but we would be then the best people to develop that RFP. And so that's where I realized, like, yes, this little side hustle is actually a seed for a company. And all I have to do is put a little water on it and that seed will grow.
Nick Bennett [00:18:18]:
So you won that bid?
Christopher G. Fox [00:18:21]:
Yes. So we won that bid.
Nick Bennett [00:18:23]:
And you're saying we. It was just you at the time, though?
Christopher G. Fox [00:18:27]:
It was, yeah, a little bit of the royal we.
Nick Bennett [00:18:29]:
However, I do it too.
Christopher G. Fox [00:18:31]:
Yeah. But as we were going along, or as I, let me use grammar properly here. As I was going along, I realized that I could become a we really fast through other people that I know. So what did I need for that project? I needed a project manager. Well, I can do that. I needed a client manager. I can do that. I needed a graphic designer.
Christopher G. Fox [00:18:57]:
I knew one for designing the website. I needed a person that could cover the content well, kind of a combination of me and some other people that I already knew. I needed technology resources. I had those within my network. I realized that within the space of two weeks I could form a team.
Nick Bennett [00:19:17]:
Did you hire these people on, or was this like a hub and spoke model where you were like, you are the hub and you're saying when I need to deploy a contractor for design, I have someone ready to go pass through the payments or how did you manage that?
Christopher G. Fox [00:19:33]:
Yeah, no, it was very much the hub and spoke model of I'll set up the company, I'll bring in a team of resources as and when needed. One of the lessons learned from the consulting firm where I worked is that carrying all that overhead is really expensive. I don't want to carry the responsibility of keeping that graphic designer paid and or busy for the foreseeable future and all those other people. So I brought in a network of contractors and I kept that hub and spoke model in place.
Nick Bennett [00:20:05]:
I think there's something to be said for basically having an army of entrepreneurs ready to roll at any moment and for an operator trying to utilize a hub and spoke model, but also for a business hiring out. Entrepreneurs are highly motivated to work and to do good work for a whole bunch of obvious reasons. Not to say that full time employees aren't motivated by any and don't do good work at all. But now that I'm on this side of the equation, I can see the value of having access to people, to people like that.
Christopher G. Fox [00:20:39]:
I agree. And I still do it. I still do it. I keep my own operations light and there are resources that I know I need on an ad hoc basis. I have a highly trusted network of people that can support various things that we don't necessarily do as a core service. In our service offering things like around design, I'll work with a client. We do a whole bunch of thought leadership. They want to develop an ebook.
Christopher G. Fox [00:21:05]:
Well, I don't need a desktop publishing expert or an ebook designer on staff full time for something that will happen once in a while. What I do need is a network of people that I know can deliver excellent work and are willing to join projects as needed. Especially since I've been doing this for a while, I've developed this very trusted network of people who I trust. I know they deliver with excellence, they really like working with me. It just all works out really, really well.
Nick Bennett [00:21:36]:
Yeah, I think it's a fantastic model. I know a lot of people who are still operating in that kind of way and who choose to operate in that way when required, and it works fantastic. I think there's a lot of benefit to it, especially when projects are get that big and it's more effective to bring in someone with a core competency like that. So you go out on your own, you win this deal. I'm sure that there was a whole bunch of things in the moment that you were second guessing. What kind of things were you questioning back then?
Christopher G. Fox [00:22:09]:
Yeah, it's a funny question. I'm not really much of a second guesser, the way that I kind of operate psychologically. Is that, all right, well, I've made my decision, and now it's my responsibility to optimize the consequences of that decision, and I can't really go back. I wasn't going to go back with my tail between my legs asking for employment again after I resigned. I wasn't going to pull back from this project or say at some point in the process, oh, no, actually, we can't deliver. I was like, all right, well, whatever problem comes along, it's now my job to solve it. Some of those problems include the downside of working with a network of contractors, is sometimes you find one that's not all that reliable, and then all of a sudden you find yourself having to do damage control and course correction to fix whatever huge leak in the boat they might have left behind as you discover it at one point. So you go ahead and fix it.
Christopher G. Fox [00:23:05]:
You find another person who can help you work through that situation, and you deal with it accordingly. I put myself in a position where, like, all right, great. Well, now I don't have health benefits. I figure out how to get personal health benefits, figure I get myself in a situation of realizing, all right, well, that means that not only do I need one project, but I need steady and some sort of sense of steady and predictable revenue over the medium and long term as well. So I have to figure out how to solve that problem. That's really how I approached it. So there definitely are these massive oh, no moments. But at that point, I don't really allow a lot of room for second guessing, because even if I did second guess, I'm still in that situation.
Christopher G. Fox [00:23:54]:
So I might as well focus my energies on figuring out how to get out of it and get out of it by moving forward, not get out of it by going backwards.
Nick Bennett [00:24:04]:
What did you call it? You called it optimizing for consequences. I love that mindset. And you said, it's like, how do you get healthcare? And all of these. I consider the worst parts about owning a business because it's all of the things that come with owning a business that are nothing. The thing you want to do right. Like, it's not your core competency to find people, to find health care for yourself. Marketing is your thing. And so it's like, that is the, that is, by far, at least in my opinion, some of the most frustrating aspects of doing this type of work.
Christopher G. Fox [00:24:40]:
Yeah, but the same, the same, same way that, you know, that I was talking about bringing in a network of trusted people for delivery. It's finding that network of trusted people for all of those other administrative things. So finding a person who does healthcare and retirement planning for small business owners, finding a person who does tax accounting, finding a bookkeeper, all of those things. For the first few years, let's say the first two, three years, I did it all. I did literally all of that myself. But over time, as things continued and grew, I would find resources to help fill in those gaps.
Nick Bennett [00:25:22]:
How did you stabilize your income and your client, like your client acquisition? Because that was something that you had mentioned. You're like, okay, well, now that I have this thing and this healthcare project will come to an end, how did you figure out recurring client acquisition?
Christopher G. Fox [00:25:37]:
Yeah, so there were two pieces of it. So I will say that part of it is I do have the good fortune and luxury of a pretty good personal network of people. So that does play a huge role, and there are ways to compensate for that if you don't. I don't mean to suggest that if you're not in, you'll never be in, but it really did help having a network of people that I knew I could tap into for various projects. The other thing, and that this was true even before I went independent. I am really good at longevity in relationships. This early client that I talked to you about, that I landed in 2007, finally separated in 2015.
Nick Bennett [00:26:22]:
Whoa.
Christopher G. Fox [00:26:23]:
So what are the reasons why? One of them was, while we built their whole content management infrastructure, we were responsible for basically running their entire digital platform in the cloud. And we were doing that. And so some of it just came down almost like rent. Like, here you are, you've built this platform, they're using it. I made a strategic choice not to productize this whole thing and start selling it as a product and continue to do that. But that was a big piece of it, is the long term client relationships. The only reason they left is the firm that acquired them. That acquired them, that acquired them, finally decided, well, we have our own resources for this.
Christopher G. Fox [00:27:04]:
It was three acquisitions later before they actually disappeared.
Nick Bennett [00:27:08]:
So, like, what, eight years and three acquisitions? Most people can't get through, like one budget planning cycle. Yeah, that's amazing. But that is a testament to the relationships and the results, I think that's amazing. I think there's a lot of people who burn, run out of steam within a few months of working with clients. I think that's fantastic.
Christopher G. Fox [00:27:31]:
And that was a unique situation in that we had built a technology infrastructure that they didn't want to migrate from. But I maintain a similar philosophy with my existing clients where I'm developing thought leadership strategies and writing and populating those strategies, helping them run their thought leadership strategies. Those are also long term engagements. I haven't done the math, but if I were to guesstimate the average age of client relationships that I have right now, live clients that I'll have to talk to after we have this conversation, those relationships are at least five years old on average.
Nick Bennett [00:28:06]:
That's fantastic to consider that the vast, maybe not the vast majority, but there is a lot of new consultants right now. Over the last few years, the mass migration, solopreneurship and independent consulting, whatever you want to call it, has been exponentially higher because the barrier of entry has never been lower, which is a great thing. I mean, I am a product of that, my own myself. But not many people have been in business long enough to have clients for as long as you have. And I think when early on it is easy where I think people find themselves rotating through clients at a relatively high rate. And when I say high rate, I think maybe like 6369 month engagements is pretty common for what I've seen. So to have a roster of clients with you for five years is really incredible. And I think, like I said, not many people have been in business long enough to pull that off.
Nick Bennett [00:29:00]:
But also it's just the nature of, I think a lot of business today is much shorter. And you said we're talking about productized, everything's all packaged up, which I'm a big advocate of for a lot of reasons, but the longevity factor, I mean, that's stable. I tell people, if you can get a year with a client, that's a fantastic engagement length these days. Five years is absolutely incredible, though. How did you, how do you, what do you think it is then? Allows for that, or enables that within your engagements?
Christopher G. Fox [00:29:33]:
There are a few things about it. One of them is that if you think about what a thought leadership strategy looks like, it only can have a shelf life of twelve to 18 months anyway. If you think about what is our plan for all the different topics where we intend to demonstrate thought leadership, and how will we demonstrate that thought leadership, you get to a certain point in the process, well, we need a refresh. So there's that piece of it I tend to work with. The majority of my clients are large financial institutions, so they have many lines of business. And one of the cool things that I really like about it is that I'll work with one particular line of business and other lines of business within that client company will say, hey, how are you doing that? We like that. We want to do that, too. That also adds this perpetuity effect of just continuing.
Christopher G. Fox [00:30:27]:
But the fundamental piece of it is trust. You get into a position of, I work with clients that know I know their business inside and out. I know them really well. Sometimes I know them better than they know themselves because I've been there the longest. This is actually a very common situation. People in my industry tend to switch jobs a lot. I will show up at client meetings, and I am the person who has had the longest tenure with that organization. Everyone else is new to the table, but it's based on trust, right? And it's trust that's established through really taking their needs and interests seriously.
Christopher G. Fox [00:31:05]:
Partnership, it's a word people throw around a lot. Well, what does it really, really mean when you're working side by side with and thinking through complex challenges alongside clients that develops trust? And then the other piece of it, which it's a hard advantage to replicate. But because I work in this institutional finance space, it's an area where you need a lot of expertise and subject matter, knowledge even, to begin to have conversations with thought leaders in the industry, because it starts to get into very arcane elements of financial instruments, different types of asset classes, regulatory questions, all of this stuff that the more you know it, the more you're able to build trust with people who want to keep. They want you to keep coming back because they don't want to have to explain it again to someone who doesn't understand it in the first place.
Nick Bennett [00:31:57]:
Institutional knowledge is incredibly valuable, especially in that kind of sector where to catch somebody up to speed is like a project within itself. I think there's benefits to having the outside looking in, because at some point, it's hard to read the label from inside the jar type of thing, but the institutional knowledge of the inner workings and how to navigate the organization. You said, it's like you said, you look up and you're the longest standing member of a team. I mean, I think at some point, like, they need you, right?
Christopher G. Fox [00:32:32]:
There is an aspect to that, and it comes with disadvantages sometimes. I mean, there's. The proverb of familiarity breeds contempt. And when you're in these relationships for too long, all of a sudden, I. Sometimes things just get a little fuzzy around the edges and some boundaries that maybe should be there, aren't there, and you have to kind of reset, say, wait a minute. Don't forget, this is still a separate relationship. We're not the same person.
Nick Bennett [00:32:57]:
We're not friends like we are friends, but we're not. We're not hanging out. I get that. So let's fast forward a bit. So this is the beginning. This is the first half as increases recently, I would say last six months or so, maybe a year. Now you have rebranded the business from some crisis to ideas led growth. Talk me through the motivation and why you decided to make that change after 15 plus years.
Christopher G. Fox [00:33:28]:
That's a great question. It's a question I had to ask myself a lot before doing it. Why do I even think I should be taking? I don't have a lot of visibility, but there's a degree of brand equity there. Why would I shift it to a new name, a new logo, a new identity, and sometimes even a new way of doing business? Well, I think part of it is that that original name didn't really mean a lot to a lot of people. It's actually based on a concept in Greek. It's something. It's a word that's used once by Aristotle. He only uses it once.
Christopher G. Fox [00:34:06]:
It's not a word that's anywhere else. But it means the ability to reconcile opposites in a political context. And a lot of the work that I do is being able to reconcile those opposites of technology and creativity strategy. A lot of times you're really focusing on reconciling opposites. And it's a great name. I love it. I didn't fully get rid of it because it's actually still the name that I use for contracts, for business accounts, all those kinds of things. Partly because I didn't want to spend all the time and money to make those changes.
Christopher G. Fox [00:34:38]:
That would be a huge pain, so I kept it. But ideas led growth is much more. It's a phrase that says literally, exactly in ways that people can understand. Regardless of whether they happen to have seen that one word in Aristotle or not, they know what it is, which is that I work with companies to help them excavate their thought leading ideas in a way that translates to business growth, product growth, client growth. And so as I thought about, well, what is it that I actually do as my own business evolves from? Like, okay, well, I mean, there's a whole story to tell about why is this company that started off building a content management system for healthcare now doing thought leadership for financial services? That's maybe more bizarre than how did you get from french literature to marketing? The more that I got involved in working with these large financial institutions on their thought leadership strategy. The more that I began to see this fundamental entity within the business of an idea, we have this idea for how we're going to improve a particular transaction flow, or how we're going to improve the way certain investments are managed, or how any very, sometimes very, very niche things that are happening within the industry, those are all predicated on an idea that needs to be articulated. And by articulating it, you fuel your growth not only outside in that you acquire new client relationships, but you actually start to build new products and services around that idea. But you can only do it if you've articulated that idea.
Christopher G. Fox [00:36:15]:
And that's how thought leadership is more than just marketing, but it actually brings you to a position of being able to fuel your business growth. And so I just had this kind of moment of inspiration literally sitting in my car at a stoplight, I should call it. This is the genesis of the idea. What I'm really talking about here is ideas led growth. And then the whole chain of wasn't that long of a stoplight. That seemed like it at the moment. Like that's actually, if that's really what I am doing, what we're providing, why not call the company that? And if I do call it that, well, all right, what's the first thing I need to do? I need to register ideasledgrowth.com. i better do that when I get home.
Christopher G. Fox [00:37:04]:
Uh oh. If I do that, people are going to see, like ideas sled. Should I put the hyphens or they're going to see the word sled in there. And then it hit me. No, that is, the logo is a sled of the whole idea of doing this thought leadership process is that it's fun and fast and we're going to do all these cool things. So you're going to get on the idea sled with me. And that's the moment where it all clicked of like, absolutely, yes. This is the thing.
Nick Bennett [00:37:33]:
I was going to ask you about the sled because I have always seen it, ideas hyphen led growth. Looked at the URL in isolation, just because I was in the same community as you were when you were coming up with this idea. And I just never saw it in isolation. And then once you said the domain, I look at it and I'm like, idea sled. And it just like clicked. I love that. I love this so much.
Christopher G. Fox [00:38:05]:
No, it's just this moment of seeing the perfection inside the word. It's like, okay, that's what it needs to be.
Nick Bennett [00:38:10]:
The sledd. It's amazing. I was gonna, I was gonna ask you, like, what's up with the sled? It makes so much sense now. The idea sled, this is fantastic. Okay, so I see the, I see the through line here in the transition. What I appreciate about your take on thought leadership as business strategy is because what I have found is that most people don't know what they think, and you really gotta pull it out of them. Right. They wanna be thought leaders.
Nick Bennett [00:38:37]:
But we've been indoctrinated into, like, the HubSpot school of marketing, and it's like being a thought leader. Washington showing up in the search engine result page for commonly asked questions, which was fine, like, you could be known for certain subjects simply for that at a time. But what ended up happening and why? I think your approach to thaw leadership is important or is powerful, because once you know what you believe, now, all of a sudden you can start steering the ship based on it, and you can start guiding product strategy and product development, and you can start, like, communication in the things that you write about, the ideas you want to be known for. It's this idea that people forgot that thought leadership. Like, you're supposed to lead people somewhere with your thoughts, like you're supposed to lead them somewhere to a new and different place, to a different direction than the place, the direction that they're currently going. So you are very much pressing on that with your entire platform. And I think you even said, I saw a headline somewhere might have been on your LinkedIn, I think. Yeah, thought leadership, that takes both thinking and leading seriously.
Nick Bennett [00:39:50]:
I was like, Chris is on the same wave as me right now, so I greatly appreciate it. What's the connection between that and your grace method? I think the grace method error Greece like methodology that you have is really interesting. How do you connect the dots between those things? Mostly just interested in, like, how you're growing this as a platform and kind of your vision for thought leadership. Right. There's a lot of people out there that talk thought leadership, your approach and your vision for it. So I'm always curious, how do people come up with their platform and how do they aerate that and grow that?
Christopher G. Fox [00:40:31]:
Yeah, so, you know, I started to notice that, you know, there was this certain point where I, as thought leadership became more and more of a buzzword, it started to become. It's almost like thought leadership is just synonymous with long content. If your content is long enough, somehow or other, now it's thought leadership.
Nick Bennett [00:40:50]:
That is a perfect way to describe it.
Christopher G. Fox [00:40:52]:
That's not right. It doesn't work that way it connects to the methodology that I have. So you're talking about the Grace method, which is something that I have branded as. This is the approach that we take to thought leadership. It's a five stage process. Grace is an acronym for generate ideas, reorient your business, act on those ideas, communicate with expertise, and then expand your business. You'll notice that in that acronym, the only piece of it that sounds like traditional thought leadership is the c. There's three things you need to do before you even get there, which is generate those ideas, bring them out to the surface, make sure that they are differentiated and strong and justified.
Christopher G. Fox [00:41:37]:
But then you need to act on them and change the way you do business around them. So that's the reorient and act piece. And those then become fuel for expansion, which is the e part of it. So the communication is something that makes those ideas accessible to the outside world because that's how you articulate them. But it's that whole process of everything that you've done internally to bring those ideas out and challenge those ideas. Thought leadership. Another common misconception is that thought leadership and educational content are not the same thing. Just because you're writing at length about a particular topic, if you don't bring a specific and different insight into that topic, you're just kind of doing a literature review of everything people have said in the past few months about AI or cryptocurrency.
Christopher G. Fox [00:42:27]:
That's not thought leadership, that's curation. That's right.
Nick Bennett [00:42:31]:
There's nothing leading or thoughtful about it. I would say this is productized, the way that I communicate it and the way that I think about it, which is like, in a good way. It's like it's hard to discern the differences between independent consultants, especially when it comes to in content marketing and content strategy in general terms. And the fact that you have packaged up your thinking in a way that is at least feels highly tangible. It's like, this is the way, this is my approach to it. If you want to do thought leadership in a different way, you can try, but I'm not going to help you with that. This is what I do. And if you would like this, then you need me type.
Nick Bennett [00:43:10]:
That is, I think, a really effective approach because especially as the market becomes more and more saturated with people who are in a, a similar line of work, even if it could be not a direct comparison, but there's plenty of content marketing consultants. It's hard to know what you do or don't need. It makes it frustrating. I found it's extremely frustrating for companies to try and figure out who they should work with if they're not being straight referred in or if they've received a couple of different referrals. It's like, how do we really know who does what and to publish and like really publicly plant your flag in? This idea, I think is an incredibly powerful tool that not enough people, not enough people do, especially in an area that is so as abstract as the idea of thought leadership, which I think you said it verbally. Long content, like people just assume thought leadership is long.
Christopher G. Fox [00:44:05]:
Yeah. Going back to everything we said, and this is your phrase, Nick, is that idea of planting your flag. It's really important, I guess the way I put it, there's a lot of empty holes out there and it's nice to have one or two that actually have a flag in them.
Nick Bennett [00:44:21]:
I like that. There you go. I'm going to steal that.
Christopher G. Fox [00:44:24]:
Yeah, no, you're welcome to it. But yeah, I think that's a really important idea of as you evolve as an entrepreneur, you start off like, I would do business for any client, that that healthcare client was an anchor client. I do business for any, with anyone who came to me that had the ability to pay in at least a reasonably interesting project. It was only over time that things started to crystallize and coalesce and I realized that, well, yes, I was working with healthcare clients, but I also had some other clients in other industries and one of those was financial services. And not only that, but institutional financial services. And I had this, I just made this decision of, well, what if I just really focused in and did only on that? And I position myself as one of the few people who can write well and write coherently and bridge the gaps between marketing and subject matter expertise on a very. It's not just a technical topic. Like it's technical in all sorts of senses because there's technology behind it, there's finance behind it, there's regulation behind it, like there's the whole network of different kinds of stakeholders involved within the global financial system.
Christopher G. Fox [00:45:37]:
And what if I said that I'm going to be the expert who can do that and that thing alone, and I let the other client relationships kind of evolve and erode off over time.
Nick Bennett [00:45:48]:
So looking back over these last 1617 years you've been at this, what's something you would have done differently?
Christopher G. Fox [00:45:57]:
I would have specialized earlier. I had this limiting belief that if I didn't take all comers, that I would constrain my revenue opportunities. And then I would always be chasing business because now all of a sudden it's like I've got to keep going after this one type of client rather than any type of client that happens to come to me. If I had known that choosing to specialize would have, in a very short period of time, already tripled my revenue and would lead even more clients to come to me automatically rather than for me having to go out and chase and prospect, I would have done it earlier.
Nick Bennett [00:46:41]:
Can you just define what you mean by specialize? Are you saying vertical? Pick a vertical. Are you saying specialize in a particular service solving a specific problem? How do you see specializing and how does it apply to your business?
Christopher G. Fox [00:46:56]:
I think it can be any of the above. For my business, it was specializing in this arcane topic of institutional financial services. That's hard to write about, that's hard to grasp. They will tap back into my long history of experience in approaching even through grad school. What are you doing? You're reading a lot of hard to ingest content and trying to come up with something sensible and reasonable from it. I was able to kind of use those skills in many ways to make sense of, oh well, here you go. Here's 400 pages of European Union regulation on corporate bonds. What are you going to do with it? Like, well, unlike most other content marketing professionals or writers in the industry, I'm going to make sense of it and I'm going to come to you as a client and ask you really specific and clear questions to help you not only say what you think, but to advance what you think.
Christopher G. Fox [00:47:54]:
Sometimes challenge what you think or say. Like, that's fine, but it's also the same as what three other institutions that you compete with have already said. So like what else? What else? Let's drive down more. What about this detail? What about that detail? That was the special, the way that I chose to specialize was that combination of subject area married up with my particular concept of what thought leadership really is. But I think other people can come up with other formulas for, you know, it's the form, whatever it is, it's the formula that's very hard to replicate.
Nick Bennett [00:48:31]:
I am a huge advocate of what you call specializing. I call niche down. And because you are known for doing something, for solving a very specific problem, for very specific type of company in a very specific way, however you choose to articulate that it has massive impact on the business. So when did you niche down?
Christopher G. Fox [00:48:57]:
It actually comes back to an untold story that we went around at the beginning of this conversation where we were talking about two moments where I almost quit and it looked like a failure. Another moment where I almost quit washing. It was in 2015 ish that my revenues started to decline. I was sort of running out of network to work through in terms of where else could I find new sources of revenue? And I didn't stop syncrasis, but I put it on pause. I put my business on essentially a pause for a year and a half, where I took what was initially a consulting position, and I accepted it as a full time role. So I was full time consulting and then employed by a large financial institution. But it was in that realization, like, well, if I really do want to focus here, what better way than get a lot of inside knowledge of how these firms operate from the inside, as well as solving an immediate problem, which is, oh, wait a minute, now I actually don't have any longer know where my revenue is coming from in six months. Here's a fix.
Nick Bennett [00:50:09]:
So going in house, learning all of the intricacies of the financial world, gave you the insight to shape the next kind of iteration of your business. So how long were you in house with them?
Christopher G. Fox [00:50:25]:
About 18 months.
Nick Bennett [00:50:27]:
And then by then, you're financial institution wizard, understanding all of the things that you need to know. And it was like that was basically game on for you.
Christopher G. Fox [00:50:37]:
That's right. That's right.
Nick Bennett [00:50:39]:
I think there is a lot to be said, and you put it perfectly. It looks like a failure or something from the outside, but that gave you the leg up and the knowledge that you needed to not rebuild, but to, like, basically rebalance your business.
Christopher G. Fox [00:50:55]:
Yeah.
Nick Bennett [00:50:56]:
So I think that's a thing that not. I don't think as many people would be willing to do, or at least kind of use as leverage to grow their business. And in 18 months, I mean, that's not a ton of time in the grand scheme of things having been added for so long.
Christopher G. Fox [00:51:12]:
It could have gone either way. Right? Like, I could have gotten pulled deeper within the hive and all the.
Nick Bennett [00:51:17]:
You could have hated financial institutions.
Christopher G. Fox [00:51:18]:
There I am. I mean, it could have been one way or the other. I could have hated it entirely and like, okay, now I've really wasted some momentum and time, or I could have gotten completely anchored in, and it would have been much harder to separate. But I got to this point about 18 months in was like, I've had enough of this. And again, you might think, well, then that's like a fail after a fail, because I walked away from what looked like a really great job. People within the firm were like, you are crazy. What are you doing? Why would you leave this role that you have? It's such a great role. Also, I can't believe that you're walking away two months before bonus season.
Christopher G. Fox [00:51:52]:
Like, what's wrong with you? At least stay for two months and get your bonus. Like, no, I knew it was the right time and the right move to.
Nick Bennett [00:51:58]:
Make, to not even sit waited through bonus season. The level of commitment is off the charts looking forward. Right. What do you want to build that you haven't built yet? What is the future of ideas led growth look like?
Christopher G. Fox [00:52:17]:
Yeah, so the future is a couple of things is we talked about it a little bit, that I have a different spin on thought leadership than what's out there in terms of the conventional wisdom of just kind of long content marketing. I would love to do more to get that vision of thought leadership out there in the world outside of the bubble of institutional finance where I work. I think part of what's next for ideas led growth, and another reason why I chose to rename it with a much more approachable name, comprehensible name, was that it really sets the foundation for me to start doing things like, there are lots of pieces of what I do that are highly bespoke and hands on. There are other pieces of it that are much more packageable. I think the next generation where I'm evolving my work towards, is having a piece of the business that stays as is highly bespoke, long term partnership relationship business. However, adding on something that's at a more accessible price point that scales better. Problem is that right now we're really at a point where people are swamped with digital courses. I don't know if a digital course is the right thing or some other model.
Christopher G. Fox [00:53:32]:
I don't have the answer to what I'm doing yet, but the goal, I'll figure out how to get there with whatever mechanisms make sense, would be to make this vision of thought leadership more accessible and more widely adopted to a broader universe of people, so that, you know, ultimately, so that people out there in the world of business are thinking better and communicating better.
Nick Bennett [00:53:56]:
I would not stop yourself from creating a course if you feel like there's a way to teach people this stuff through it. Like, course saturation prevents a lot of people from doing it. It encourages people to do it too, but it definitely prevents people from doing it. And I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with creating a course. It's not going to make us rich. Like, we're not. We don't build our businesses in that way. And if your mission is to help more people gain access to this kind of thinking, not to like, you're going to get rich off of services.
Nick Bennett [00:54:29]:
That's how people like us build our businesses. It's like the traffic. It's a relationship based play. And there's one to, it's like one to few, one to one versus one to many, and trying to, you know, sell $47 courses. So I don't think. I don't think this is a saturation problem. I, I absolutely think that there's room in the world for a type of, for that type. Of course, if you.
Nick Bennett [00:54:51]:
That's something that you want to make, so don't stop yourself from doing it. I think there's definitely room in the world for. Because one, people can buy more than one course, but you're not competing against the, the commodity courses that are out there. You're not competing for those dollars.
Christopher G. Fox [00:55:04]:
Right. No, that's, that's a good point. I appreciate that. It's a testament to the, the power of limiting beliefs, right? If I tell myself that, well, the world, of course, is saturated and therefore I shouldn't build one, I'm not going to build one.
Nick Bennett [00:55:16]:
Yeah, I, you know, we all have limiting beliefs no matter what level of success we do or don't achieve. And I think there's room for it for you. So, Chris, thanks for coming on and sharing your story. I greatly appreciate it and I know more people feel seen because of it. So thank you for sharing it with me and it really means a lot.
Christopher G. Fox [00:55:35]:
Thank you. This has been great. I really, really appreciate your invitation to have me join, and it's been a great discussion. So thank you for all the fantastic questions.
Nick Bennett [00:55:49]:
Hey Nick again, and thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can sign up for the 1000 Routes newsletter where I process the insights and stories you hear on this show into frameworks and lessons to help you build a new and different future for your own business. You can sign up at 1000routes.com, which I have the link in the show notes.
What would be your last meal on earth?
Christopher G. Fox [00:56:19]:
That's a pretty complicated question. You know, I think my last meal on earth would be, I would want to go out for extremely intentional, well crafted, bespoke omakase sushi meal from a, like a premium sushi chef who is going to do something absolutely earth shaking. In terms of my own experience, this.
Nick Bennett [00:56:44]:
Is a first and I appreciate it. I've never had sushi like this.
Christopher G. Fox [00:56:49]:
It's an amazing experience. I mean, I've done it at various scales. And, you know, when you have that sushi chef that is specifically making things for you when you're engaged in not only a service interaction, but a conversation about what do you like? What did you like about it? What's new and fresh? Why is he. Or why is she giving you this in the first place? Like, that is a really fascinating experience.
Nick Bennett [00:57:17]:
Yeah. It's like you don't really order the food. You're just giving food.
Christopher G. Fox [00:57:24]:
Not at all. And it evolves over time, you know, especially if you're sitting right there at the sushi bar watching them and interacting with them. It evolves based on your own experience with it as well, which is something that I really love.
Nick Bennett [00:57:37]:
I love this. Have you ever seen the. I think it's a Netflix documentary, dreams of sushi?
Christopher G. Fox [00:57:42]:
Yes. Yes.
Nick Bennett [00:57:43]:
This is, like, what I imagine your last meal being. Is that just, like, going and having Jiro make some sushi.
Christopher G. Fox [00:57:49]:
Yeah, it is. It is exactly. Something like that.
Nick Bennett [00:57:52]:
I love this. I've asked so many people this question. I don't know what my last meal would be, but this is like, this is a top contender right now. I'm with you on the sushi.