Undisputed Authority

Debbie Millman is one of the world's leading authorities on branding. For two decades she was President of Sterling Brands, where she had a hand in around 20% of the brands on the US grocery aisle. She has built her career on an understanding of how and why brands work, and at the centre of that understanding is the concept of deliberate differentiation. That branding is the act of attaching meani...

Chris Do is the founder of The Futur, an education business with 2.79 million YouTube subscribers. But he didn't start there. He spent two decades running Blind, an Emmy-winning motion graphics studio working with Nike, Google, Microsoft and the NFL. At its peak, Blind was the kind of business most designers spend their careers trying to build. So why did he walk away from it? And once he made the...

Jonathan Baker co-founded Monday Night Brewing in 2011, then spent almost a decade building it into an award-winning Atlanta craft brewery with taprooms across four states. But at the height of that success, he stepped away to join his father David, who runs a 7-figure, one-person advisory firm in the creative services industry. David's a high-profile authority in the niche, working under the pers...

Across three decades, David C. Baker has become the leading authority on positioning and lead generation in the creative services space. That stature is driven by a phenomenal body of work. He has several books, one of which, The Business of Expertise, is in my opinion the best book you'll find on positioning. And his podcast with Blair Enns, 2 Bobs, is the most listened to podcast in the space. B...

Marty Neumeier is one of the world's most influential voices on brand. His book 'The Brand Gap' has sold more than 500,000 copies, and when Google wanted to create the Dictionary of Brand, they commissioned Marty. But before he worked in brand, Marty ran an award-winning software packaging design agency. At the peak of its success, he launched a magazine called Critique and poured his agency's res...

Rory Sutherland is one of the most influential voices in advertising. He's a best-selling author, a sought after keynote speaker, and his views on advertising psychology regularly find an audience of millions. For almost 40 years, Rory has worked at Ogilvy, one of the world's most prestigious advertising agencies. But it wasn't his status at Ogilvy that turned a respected ad man into an undisputed...

In 2006, Dorie Clark was a consultant working with local clients in the Boston area.  She didn't have a national platform, unfair advantages, or, to start with, differentiated positioning. Fast forward to today, Dorie runs a high-margin 7-figure, 1-person business.  She's also a best-selling author, a writer for Harvard Business Review, and has taught at Duke and Columbia for over a decade. So, ho...

Ryan Hawk launched The Learning Leader Show in 2015, an interview style podcast with no social media presence, email list, or prior podcasting experience. Today, that show is the basis for a phenomenal business, best-selling books, and a leadership development programme delivered to Fortune 500 companies. What exactly did Ryan do so differently that led to these outcomes? He conducted his professi...

Nancy and her husband Mark started their business in their apartment in 1988 with no formal business training, no design training, and no public presenting experience. And yet together, they built the world's leading firm specialising in strategic communication, Duarte Inc. Nancy became THE undisputed authority on storytelling and presentations. Her TED talk has 3.7 million views, and her books ar...

Ryan Deiss is one of the godfathers of internet marketing. He co-founded DigitalMarketer, one of the largest marketing education platforms in the world, and used that platform to launch The Scalable Company. He launched The Scalable Company with an existing audience, a validated problem, and a solution people loved – and the business almost failed. Get the 10 Patterns of Disruptive Wisdom There ar...

Blair Enns is a consultant and author who helps creative firms win business without pitching. He's the founder of Win Without Pitching, author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, Pricing Creativity, The Four Conversations and co-host of The 2Bobs podcast. He's known for challenging the conventional sales process in the creative industry and building a luxury brand through scarce, high-quality w...

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner, bestselling author, and creator of The Sketch Guy column which ran in the New York Times for 10 years. He's known for simplifying complex financial concepts through hand-drawn illustrations and is the founder of the Society of Advice.  In this episode, you'll discover How two blank stares from smart clients led Carl to draw his first sketch Why he em...