How Embracing Content Creation Transformed My Career
I believe anyone can write a book, a blog, create content with video, a podcast, or be a podcast guest. And it’s worth it. It transformed and changed my whole life.
The first decade of my career was successful in its own right, yet looks nothing like my career today; careers, like life, evolve and change based on the market and your experiences and skills.
If you had told me years ago that a small town kid who didn’t decide a college major until his junior year would get to do what I do now, I would not believe you. But let me unpack it.
I had always wanted to write a book; just didn’t know what to write about. During my time at AT&T, I was asked to pen a regular column on sales, and I developed an affinity for it. Writing a sales book, though? There are so many excellent ones – I did not want to compete in that space.
So I created a fictional protagonist who went through the litany of experiences a salesperson does, and featured the book-inside-the-book that he writes about everything sales and leadership.
An unexpected layoff afforded me more time to write. I got a book called Writer’s Market that helped me construct query letters and contact 968 publishers and agents. Fifteen agreed to read it, 6 offered to publish and I picked the one with the best distribution.
The book got my resume noticed for my next job. In that job, I made a relationship that led me to my next, where I met the person who recruited me to Microsoft.
Having written the sales book, I started reaching out to people like Jeb Blount and Jeffrey Gitomer – luminaries of sales – in bulk to see if they would consider having me on their podcasts – and they did! After a year or two of this approach, people asked me to be on their show. I now get multiple requests per month and have been on 100+.
In the pandemic, I lamented not being able to talk about sales and leadership with people only to realize there were now no geographical barriers. This prompted me to start the Salesman on Fire podcast and led to me being asked to be part of shows like Social Selling 2.0 with Brandon Lee and Tom Burton, now the #1 social selling podcast and the Connected Teamwork podcast with Hylke Faber and Olena Sergeeva, people I deeply admire and respect and learn from daily.
Over time and consistency, I amassed over 300,000 followers, which, when Microsoft had an employee advocacy program called LinkedIn Elevate with an engagement scoreboard put my sharing of content #1 in the entire company of 200,000 employees. This, coupled with my generation of over $300M in revenue from using LinkedIn led to me being recognized as the #1 social seller at the greatest brand in the world.
You have something to say. You can add impactful value every day. Just start. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to get a lot of likes right out of the gates, and it won’t transform your life overnight. But it’s worth it, and the world deserves to learn from your perspective and experience.
