In this episode of the Book More Show, I explore the world of global team building and strategic content marketing with JW Oliver from Zimworx. The conversation centers on his company's expansion from 150 to over 1,100 professionals across Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, and Zambia, where they provide dedicated remote services in healthcare, dental, accounting, and digital marketing.
I learn about JW's approach to building successful remote teams through university-educated professionals in centralized locations. His insights reveal how this model ensures consistent service quality while creating meaningful employment opportunities in emerging markets.
The discussion shifts to using books as strategic marketing tools, where JW explains how publishing targeted content helps establish expertise and build client relationships. This approach has proven particularly effective in specialized sectors like accounting and real estate, where providing value upfront creates stronger connections.
We wrap up by exploring how employee satisfaction often hinges more on feeling valued than on compensation alone. JW shares practical examples of maintaining team engagement across their global operations, demonstrating how this principle applies regardless of an organization's size or location.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
JW Oliver from Zimworx discusses the expansion of his team from 150 to over 1,100 professionals, operating in Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, and Zambia, focusing on dedicated remote team members.
Zimworx provides reliable, high-quality services in sectors such as healthcare, dental, accounting, and digital marketing, utilizing university-educated professionals in centralized centers.
Books are highlighted as effective marketing tools, offering value to specific industries like accounting and real estate, helping to establish expertise and foster client relationships.
The importance of making employees feel valued is emphasized, as it often surpasses monetary compensation in boosting job satisfaction and retention, especially in smaller organizations.
Books are used as conversion tools to transform cold audiences into warm leads by addressing initial concerns and maintaining a focused narrative.
Updating book content regularly is crucial to staying relevant and re-engaging audiences, and books should be treated as tools for continued client engagement.
Writing and leadership are seen as iterative processes, where embracing updates and delegating tasks can lead to more efficient workflows.
Zimworx supports authors and businesses with creative solutions, such as quick turnaround book cover design, to enhance client success.
JW Oliver shares anecdotes illustrating the importance of creating welcoming environments and understanding audience needs in both business and personal development contexts.
The episode concludes by emphasizing the cost-effectiveness of books as marketing tools and their potential to open doors to various promotional opportunities.
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LinkedIn: J.W Oliver
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TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the book more show. It's stuart bell here and today returning guests, which I always love, jw, oliver, jw, how you doing I'm great.
J.W: How are you so good to see you again. Thanks for inviting me back on pleasure, pleasure in the.
Stuart: I meant to look at the date before we started recording to see when the last show was, but it was probably longer than I think, so lots has changed since. Why don't you give us a quick update? We've got new listeners, obviously, so give us a quick update on the JW Story and Zimworks, which is the organization that I know you best from organization that I know you best from.
J.W: Yeah, so I think, more than likely, when we talked last time, we were trying to put that on. Was it pre-mask, was it post-mask?
Stuart: when was that?
J.W: exactly right. I think the last time we spoke, we probably were employing somewhere around 150 or 200 team members doing the virtual remote teamwork out of our primarily Harare Zimbabwe location. We've since expanded. We were now in three locations. We were our biggest center and still our kind of our mothership and it'll remain that way is in Harare, zimbabwe, where we have been since 2017.
A year ago. I'm actually in Costa Rica today and we have a center here that we opened up a little over a year ago April of 2023. We launched it. We had a lot of demand for people saying, gosh, do you have anybody that's bilingual, speak Spanish? We opened that center and then we just launched in June of this year 2024, a center in Lusaka, zambia, which is, if you're not familiar with that, zambia and Zimbabwe are border each other and about a 45-minute flight from Harare, and we launched that again a month ago and we just crossed over 1,100 team members or employees that we offer for remote. So we've grown a bunch in the last five years or so and hey, I give it all to the book right If it wasn't for the book it wouldn't have ever happened.
Stuart: No, it wouldn't have happened. Exactly, it's going to be super interesting talking about the books, because you've done a couple of them and this idea of kind of bundling them down to start the conversation with those particular audiences. So that'll be good. Why don't we give a couple of our team members, both on the podcasting side and the book side with you guys? And that's been a relationship. I mean that's probably. I mean that must be four years now, maybe. Yeah.
J.W: I was gonna say three or four years.
Stuart: Anyway, that's right, yeah yeah, so we're great fans of the service, but for people listening who maybe haven't thought about using remote resources, or they've heard of it but they don't know what it entails, or it seems to be a world that they just don't have familiarity with when you give a bit of a background on kind of some typical use cases yeah, we're a little different than most companies when you think about remote virtual team members.
J.W: Many people are providing like centers, call centers where, let's say, calls come in and could be a number of people that are picking up that call and answering the phone. Hey, this is not. How are you today? And you know they answer the question that we actually don't do that. We provide team members who work exclusively for the class. So you mentioned a couple of team members. I believe one of them designs covers and helps with that production piece. So we provide you with a full time team member that works 100% for you. And that's where we're quite different.
And the areas we serve in are in the healthcare industry. We're quite large. Our largest single vertical is in the dental side where we do what we call director of first impressions. We do patient recare, like if you haven't been into the dentist for six months and it's time for your cleaning. They're actually doing the phone calls that said hey, stuart, we haven't seen you in six months, love to have you come in.
We're also doing a lot of accounting support, everything from the controller level, very high level with chartered accountants, which would be kind of CPAs comparison in the US all the way down to bookkeeping and regular accounting accounts, payable accounts, receivable and then we get into some specialized areas. For instance, digital marketing could be web development. Social media might be one person there's no unicorn that does all the marketing but it could be somebody who does a couple of those areas, maybe help you with the digital marketing and helps with your social media. And then we even advance into areas like chiropractors, veterinarians, and then probably the biggest growing one has been executive assistants. I know that a company of yours and also ours is a big about 2x-ing, 3x-ing, 10x-ing your time and what are ways in which you can gain some of your day back, and most of that is learning to delegate better. So we provide what we feel like are very high level, university educated team members who can handle these tasks and could help expand on those EAs and we have I'll mention this we have five uniques which are important to understand.
One of them is we have no work from home, the people that work for you and for all of our clients. They actually come into our centers where we have good backup power, triple redundancy on the internet, we have a very Googlish kind of an atmosphere with coffee shops and we try to create a lot of fun for people when they do come to the work. They're university educated, they speak a little bit like you, they've got a little bit of an English accent, a little bit of the Queen's English, as you're aware of, and we have no long-term contracts, which was something we didn't want anybody to feel like. They had to sign up for one year, two years at a time. There's actually a 30-day in or out at any time. So we try to create this model where we made it much more amenable to the client to be able to hire and utilize a remote worker.
And I was going to say at the beginning we see sourcing, bpo, all those words, as kind of a negative. We don't see it as that at all. These are your team members, they're part of your culture, part of your team. So we call it insourcing, as we feel like that is a proper word to be utilized for that.
Stuart: Yeah, and it does change the dynamic of the relationship. I mean having full-time resources, that all of our team is remote. It's just that we've got a handful of remote people in the US and a handful of remote people in Zimbabwe, but they work on our timeframe, so it's no different whether I'm speaking to you in Harare or Betsy in Tampa, it's very similar and with all of the remote tools. Now again, whether the geography is 500 miles apart or 5,000 miles apart, it doesn't really make any difference. In fact, your internet connection over there is sometimes better than our internet connection.
J.W: I've had mine go out at the house and they'll say, wow, ours is better than yours. So yeah, you're exactly right.
Stuart: Yeah, one of our guys is sometimes in Tampa, sometimes in North Carolina, and the Tampa connection is fine, but the North Carolina one up in the mountains they're definitely not quite as as commercial as downtown.
J.W: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, and you're right. I mean, the perception has changed on that. It it's gone from this. And again, there's some roles that need to be in office. Right, there's if you're a dentist or a hygienist or if you do the sterilization in a medical office. There's some roles that require interpersonal relationships and we get that. But people are realizing, especially post COVID, right, this works. What you and I are doing right here works, and we have about, I think, 10 US based employees, some of our executive and our sales team and support team. We're in all different areas. We're from all the way in Ohio to out in Arizona, down in Florida and in Texas. So we're kind of spread out and I think it's just become the normal. I had to ask him I'm sorry, where are you at? Again, I can't remember. He's like oh, I'm in Pennsylvania.
Stuart: Oh, that's right, it just doesn't matter, and it wouldn't matter if you're in Ferrari right now either. Yeah, exactly, all those barriers and boundaries just come down, so that it's the connection and the conversation, and I think that's what's nice, or that we find nice about the dedicated team is that you do build a relationship with people over the period of time the same way that you would do if it was local, and, as we have no one physically in an office, it's not like we've got a remote team that feels separate from the local team. There isn't really such a thing as a local team, so that makes it easier not to have any differentiator between the two either, although I would imagine that even if we did have a local team, the guys do a pretty good job of constantly checking in and making sure even the management team that you've got there, kind of like our account managers, do a good job of checking in and if there's anything that we need and upcoming changes and just making sure that it's running and being facilitated as smoothly as possible.
J.W: Yeah, I also think with the people are understanding how to use various KPIs and measurement tools and reporting tools so that you have markers how many calls did you make today, how many sales did you have today, et cetera. So I think there's ways in which we've learned to do that. And I'll add this too we highly recommend, and I'd even recommend it to you. You may already be doing it. We say you know what, once a month, do a virtual lunch. We can facilitate. On our side, we do it all the time.
We will bring in, you know, subway sandwiches, we'll bring in chicken or whatever, and we'll have a virtual lunch or a virtual coffee or a virtual time and say, hey, let's don't talk about work, how's your family? You know what do you guys do on the weekends? I know you love to play golf. Are you still playing golf? And that can really that's the old water cooler talk, right, what we used to be in the break room and say, hey, stuart, what are you doing this weekend? You're like, oh, yeah, we're going to go to the beach. Now you can do it virtually and I think that's helped build those relationships, which helps make those jobs more sticky and they feel like part of an organization too.
Stuart: Actually that's a great point. On the stickiness front, I mean churn and turnover. It's such a I think unless you're in the HR space in a big organization where you really pay attention to those metrics for the majority of small, medium-sized businesses, where we're just dealing with it as and when it happens, you forget to really account for just how impactful that churn is and the real cost of it. It's, the inconvenience is very real in the moment but you tend to forget about it day to day because we don't like, volumetrically we don't deal with that much churn. But to have the guys who do feel like they're part of a team and that extra personal connection, it really makes a difference, which is for most businesses who are using you guys as a service. I mean that's really very impactful because for organizations like us, losing a person is is a big headache A couple of months really.
J.W: Yeah, just, you know, I don't. I think a lot of. And the reason that's so important is is there's a headache, but there's also some physical costs. When you lose a person, right? I mean, for instance, if you lost one of your team members, somebody else has to pick up that slack, somebody has to be retrained, and that causes some downtime, maybe some lost production time, lost revenue, etc. So you're right it, because you're smaller, a lot of times it seems more personable. But because you're smaller, also, when one person leaves, it's more impactful and it's harder to recover.
So, look, I think, whether people are working in an office or whether they're working remotely, you need to make them feel a part of something. Because when you do those, when any company, any survey, when you ask people what makes them love their job, money is not number one on the list. It is on the list, but it's not number one. You know most of it is that they feel valued and appreciated in their job. Right, and so you need people to say hey, stuart, you're doing a good job, man, thank you. That's what you want to hear and I think you can. That gets lost when we get into the busyness of our world too. I'm guilty of it myself.
Stuart: It happens me too it's. It's easy for the time to pass to look back, and I should have done it rather than practically get ahead of the curve. Let's pivot into the books. We're joking about the books being solely responsible for all the growth, which I'd love to believe that was true, but obviously it's. It's only a small part in the overall conversations that you're having with people. So you've got a couple of books. You've done targeting individual. Do you want to talk about each of them just quickly, to set the scene for people, and then we can dive into the use cases a little bit more.
J.W: Yeah, I actually grabbed the one that we actually use it all the time. Our latest version is called Outsourcing Redefined and it is a quick read. I think we did expand the last one. I think we're almost at 100 pages, but they're still small and we just talk about leveraging remote virtual teams. We've done some other initiatives where we've targeted in the accounting world. We did an accounting book, we did one where we did something in the real estate. We're just about to launch one into the executive assistant space where we can use that.
I can tell you, for even in the digital world today, it's interesting. Our book's on Amazon, our book, we can do digital downloads from our website. We've got all ways in which we use it. But I'll tell you, it's interesting.
We go to, we do about 30 events a year in person conventions, events where we display in person and we put these out and we say, hey, I'm telling you, there is nothing like the value of being able to pick up a book and hand it to somebody and they go hey, I appreciate that it has. I don't know, there's something about it. It has more value than a download that's on my iPad, right, right, or on my Kindle or whatever, and so we use them. We order these. You know, as you know, the nice thing about it we can order these on demand now and have them in a few days. We'll typically take 40 or 50 of these to an event and we'll give them all out most of the time, and so it's a great marketing tool and it's informative. We didn't just put a bunch of fluff in here. It really talks about remote virtual teams too.
Stuart: That's such a key point, isn't it? It's given value.
You're never going to answer the whole question. At the end of the day, the business, your whole business, is not really knowledge. Selling it's service. Selling it's actually having customers needing to buy the service from you. So the book itself it's not a situation we get.
Some financial advisors may be concerned about giving away too many of the secrets in big air quotes, worried about giving away too many of the secrets in the pages, which isn't the case for you guys.
But even in that case, information is freely available everywhere. It's very unlikely that you'll write something that's absolutely unique that no one could find elsewhere. But the fact that you're starting that conversation by giving that value of giving the insider secrets, the behind the scenes secrets, to outsourcing as an opportunity to give people the catch points or the things to look out for, or hey, here's the most important thing. As you're talking to someone at one of the events, understanding what their particular take on it and pointing to chapter three and saying I know what, for you particularly, this is the thing that's really important. Take a copy of this and go read it. That ability to start the relationship by giving something of value makes such a big difference compared with just hey, we need to book a call and have a conversation about it. It seems to it's like the gary vaynerchuk job right, hook type thing. It's to asking before giving, whereas having content in the book is giving before asking.
J.W: Yeah, and I think also, look if you've taken the time and while these are not difficult to do, they do take time. We've revised this, I think, twice since the first time, and we've added updated content, things like that but it also puts you in a position where you are a knowledge expert in your particular field, because you've put it together in a book form. So, while you may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, you at least have some knowledge of and I would put myself in that role you at least have some knowledge of your industry, right, and you've taken the time to put that together as well.
So that's why I think it's important that you can leverage these and look with the cost of marketing. Today, this is a very inexpensive tool to be able to use for that purpose as well.
Stuart: And something that you can leverage in lots of other marketing ways as well. Once it's created, you then start opening so many doors towards using it in different contexts. You were saying there's downloads available on the website. So just from pure advertising, that's one option. The whole referral and recommendations opportunity of saying to the clients who know, like and trust you already hey, if you've got a friend or here's someone struggling with resourcing, give them a copy of the book, that side of things. They use them at events. It just opens so many doors once the work is done of creating it in the first place.
I like what you say as well about the. Even if you feel like you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, it creates that authority and credibility. The other thing that I think people forget is they undervalue how much knowledge and information they do have, because as business owners, we're all kind of so deep in our own world and we're very rarely dealing with the. I'll call them entry level questions, but the kind of the introductory questions, because either we're dealing with new products and services which are down the track a little bit, we're dealing with peers who are talking at a higher level, or we're trying to fix problems that have gone past the introductory level. But those are all the edge cases. The 90 of the business is someone saying I don't even know where to get started without sourcing, and it's easy for us to undervalue the answers to those questions. But capturing them in something that delivers value, that's a bit of a game changer yeah, I, I totally agree.
J.W: When you think about even our business and I'm sure many businesses are the same you know if I was wanting, you know if I was a, if I was a black belt in karate and I wanted to open up a karate school. I do know that there's the apprehension about somebody saying man, I'd really like to take karate lessons, but I don't know where to start. I'm going to be so embarrassed when I go in there. I'm not going to know in the kicks, how do I tie my belt? Do I wear the uniform, do I not? Is there an inch?
And I think if I was and I don't do karate, I'm not a black guy, I don't know nothing about karate. But if I was, you can see I probably had the interest before and I just I'm not doing that. You don't know where to start, right, you kind of go. But if I had like a manual and that's what we did with this book is we said, hey, this tells you what are the roles I can hire, how do I get started, why do we call it insourcing? And then it gives you a little bit of a roadmap, at least to make that first call. So you're right, there's a lot of things we do that you know. You know how, if we don't understand something, one way to not feel like an idiot is just to avoid it. Just don't go there, right yeah? And so you lose a lot of people that way too.
Stuart: It's such a great point and a great illustration because I think it's easy for everyone to kind of picture that and it's sometimes easier taking it completely out of your own business and thinking about another situation because you're not coming with all of the baggage and the caveats in your head. But that exact example if you walked into a gym, or the correct term for karate places see, it's not my own expertise either dojo, dojo.
J.W: Yeah, I think is that right. I don't know why. I know that because I don't know karate.
Stuart: We need to go watch Cobra Kai or whatever that Netflix show is. Yeah, imagine going in there and the instructor made you feel bad or was condescending about not knowing how to tie the bell or what one move is. That would be a quick path to a very failing business. What's successful? And even if it was for your kids, even if it wasn't yourself, what you want is to go in there and to be made to feel welcome, for things to not to be made to feel stupid, for there to be a clear roadmap and expectation of the path to the next steps, to have that kind of nurturing feeling of hey, we've got you, here's the next. I refer to it as like a minimum, viable commitment, that next little step that you can take, that it's not an overwhelming commitment, but bringing all of those things together in the book, in the asset that you're using to start the conversation, it just launches it all in a much better, more supportive way.
J.W: It's funny, you just brought that up. I was just on a call with somebody actually in Harare. We were actually interviewing him for an internal position and I said, hey, what do you like to do? He goes ah, I'm doing this and I'm. Hey, I just joined a group of, or I started a group for, novice golfers who had never played golf before, because you know, when we went to the golf course, we didn't know how we're to stand and how do we get started and how do we hold the clubs and what clubs do we need. And so we started this group and he's like we started with, I think he said four people and we've got 28 people in there now in just a couple of months, and so that's not a business. But if he was running a business, that would be a successful business, because they said, hey, we're not going to make you feel like an outcast, and so in a business, you're right.
We've had plenty of people that have said I just don't know where to start. Well, I don't even know where to start. I don't have a job description, I don't even know. I know I need it, but I don't know where to go. So I think the book can give them a hey. If you're really interested, take a couple of hours, read through this, and then I think you'll be ready to ask more questions. So you're right, it can be a very useful tool, especially when you're trying to explain your business as well.
Stuart: Yeah, the explaining the business thing, that's an interesting one. I was just on a call with someone this morning a new client so we were going through the outline stage of the book and one of the important things there is kind of understanding who the audience is and what their motivators are and what kind of captures their attention. So more most people, I think they're using the books in the sense of addressing probably a more of a cold audience than a warm audience. That's at least the way that people think about it in the first place. Now we've got lots of strategies for using it with a warm audience as well and it accelerates those conversations a lot.
But it's easy for people to think about the cold audience and the thing that we were talking about on the call this morning is, as the business owner, you know what they really need to do and what you want to do for them. But actually here's a whole load of questions that they've got and the concerns that they've got, which aren't necessarily closely aligned. But positioning in the book to answer their questions rather than give your knowledge or give your perspective on it, that's usually more successful because you need to join the conversation where they're at that moment, and not two or three steps down the track, because they just might not know what they need to know in order to be asking those questions. So for in our world, for example, a lot of people ask us how big should the book be, how many pages should it be, which is almost the most irrelevant question, because it doesn't matter. No one goes onto amazon and sorts books by page count and then picks the one.
Okay, I've got 127 pages of attention I can give to something. Let me pick that book. It's the value. So the better question is okay, what is stopping them? So the one that you've got there talking about the high level concerns around outsourcing. That's a better way of starting the conversation rather than what should I look for in an outsourcing contract? Should I be calling an outsourcing contract an insourcing contract?
J.W: Well, it's interesting. You talked about the. I just picked up on something. You said something we do.
I can't tell you how many times I've been on the call with somebody and where one of our team has and I'd say, oh, so you're interested in an executive assistant? Yeah, I just need one for you know, probably eight or 10 hours a week. I don't really need one full time. Oh, okay, well, here let me send you this intake form or let me go through it with you right now. Could you use help here? And you start saying help with my email, help with my projects, returning phone calls, scheduling my travel, you know, making sure that my whatever conversations or notes from a meeting get taken to, the meetings get take place, you know, and you go through this and it's over 100 tasks we've lined out and you have a new little checklist.
Could you do this? And then they go. Yeah, I could really use that. All you go. Well, you need two people. You really need two full-time, but let's start with one full-time. So, again, our minds don't imagine what's possible. We typically focus in on. You know what. I just need somebody to help me with my emails, but that's just an hour a day, and then you get into this conversation so you can educate people again on what are all the roles that they can do as well.
Stuart: That's interesting because you could see a scenario there where the book is titled around the email solution, going back five hours of your week by fixing this particular problem, but then the actual content of it. That's the first chapter and then the content introduces all of the other opportunities. So by addressing the problem that's in their mind, having that as the starting point I mean we often talk about the book as the starting point of the conversation and it's the book is really a conversion tool. It's the first point in several steps towards getting on the phone with someone. But even within the book itself you can break that down further so that the table of contents is talking about three or four areas leading them from the beginning to the end of this bit of the conversation. But the title is the thing that gets them to the table of contents and the title making that resonate with the pressing question.
It's like the insourcing versus outsourcing. On the one hand, I could see a scenario where you write the book that is the manifesto book that extols the value of insourcing, which that's valuable, but maybe that doesn't have as big audience because the audience isn't necessarily sat there thinking, oh, you know what I really could do with a better definition of insourcing here. So, that being the intersection point, it's not necessarily the one that's getting more people to raise their hand, although that is something that comes through in the conversation well, it's funny, I just thought of it, I wrote it down, actually a title of a book you were.
J.W: you and I were talking about this executive assistant book we're working on, and I thought you could do another one. Just call it email. Hell right. And because we all live in that where it's like, oh my gosh, I've been out of the office for three hours and I have how many emails oh goodness gracious or people who send me a message, you know, a text or a WhatsApp, and going, hey, could you check your email? I sent you an email 30 minutes ago. I'd like 30 minutes ago.
Stuart: I don't check my email that often, so I think you're right, you could talk about leveraging somebody to help you with your email, but what you're really talking about is that's just the beginning of things that take up a lot of your time yeah, and that introduction, like even within the book itself, the first, we always tell people that you need to deliver on the value and the promise of the title because you don't want to bait and switch people in, as like the worst case example, and you want to deliver value so that you're not superficially talking about things, you're actually giving something useful and moving someone to the next step. But you have as many pages as you want to write on something, and we're often talking to people about keeping the scope narrow rather than giving yourself a huge project and drifting off into too broad subjects. So keep it narrow. But that one, it's only the first chapter, it's only the introduction. Almost that needs to be.
Mirror the, the title and the question that's in the head. You could then pivot into something else completely. Now the value proposition is a thing to bear in mind. Don't want to bring in someone on a email subject and then say, oh surprise, actually email's got nothing to do with it. It's all of these other things still answer the question that they were hoping to get an answer to. But again, treat it like a conversation. Think about it like a conversation. It's not just a one-way broadcast, it's a two-way conversation, albeit that they're just on the receiving side. But the immediate next step it's not read book, become it's read book. Consume some more information, evidence to yourself that you're right place. Jump on a tailoring, an ea tailoring call that really looks for the opportunities for you, not book a sales call type thing. So yeah, it's really interesting when you chunk it down that way yeah, good point.
What is the what's the follow-up sequence for you guys? So a lot of people are thinking about a book and then I'll get to the end of the book and then think, oh, thank goodness that's done, wipe their brow, another fire comes up and they're off to the next thing. It's always a pet peeve when you see clients who have a book but then you go to their LinkedIn page and there's no reference to it, or you see them doing some marketing material and it never talks about it. It's almost like it's build it and they will come and people are sat there waiting for people to turn up. You guys using them in events and then the follow-up after those events. Talk about that a little bit more. Are the team kind of trained and looking for opportunities to use the books as amplifications for the conversations that they're having?
J.W: Yeah, we actually a couple of ways we've done it. We have these little swag packets that we send out. It's got like a little either somebody who's considering us using us, or somebody who's just signed on. We've got a nice little mug and some other things and then we do put the book in there. We do encourage our what we call client solutions, our sales reps, if you will, to offer that free link, say, hey, feel free to download the link, or you can also order it on Amazon at this link.
So, again, another resource that we can have. And then, yeah, we do leverage it on social media. Obviously, you can use that on your LinkedIn, on your Facebook, et cetera. I think it can be very beneficial because, again, you're giving them something that has value and if you use the digital version, that's something that has value, that's of no cost, or I guess if you want to sell it for $2, you can do that as well. And then we do ship a lot of our clients a free book if they're interested, and obviously we just do that right from Amazon. That's a very effective way to do it right. We can just order it and drop ship it.
So lots of ways that we feel like you can use that we probably are not as good as we should, and you've actually thrown some ideas at me like, oh, I need to check and make sure our team is doing that, because I think, being consistent and, to be honest, to be fair to them, we get a lot of stuff they have to send. There's sales decks they can send, there's all kinds of things but offering that free book is just something else as well, and I think what I would also encourage people is don't write a book and say, like you said, I'm done with it, I got that part done. Not only should you be using it in some form or fashion right, you need to be using it at events or using on digital marketing but keep it updated, make a plan every, because I remember the last time I opened this up and I looked at something, I went well, that's not right, we don't. We stopped doing that. You know we do that differently now.
So I'm like time to rewrite, and so I think and that's probably a note that I would say, be careful when you're writing that you don't date your book in some form or fashion that puts you oh, this thing was written in 1972, and then maybe also be careful. Anything you put in there that is process or procedure-wise, especially if you're thinking about changing it, make sure that you're not antiquating that. But I think, keep it updated and with you guys, it's very easy to make updates, to make changes, and we've done that, I know, at least twice. And so, yeah, really excited about keeping it updated, keeping it current so you can share it on social media too.
Stuart: Yeah, exactly excited about, about keeping it updated, keep it current so you can share it on social media too. Yeah, that, exactly in those points. The fact that you do update something gives a whole other reason for sending it out. And a new update for everyone. Hey, excited that we just made some updates to the book reminder. If you're looking for, if you're having some sourcing can be a challenge, so we've got some great solutions fit for any budget. Go grab a copy of the updated one.
Like all of those reasons to talk about it, it's thinking that it's not set in stone is just a way of making it a live thing and making it referable more and more often. You said something about updating it which made me think about something and it's just gone straight out of my head. I don't know. The set in stone thing kind of overcame. Oh, the making references to particular points in time. There's probably, as you can imagine, a number of books done in the last couple of years that have got covid references that are probably slightly out of date. Now we did one, though, just thinking about a different way of working it.
Someone wanted to write a book that was very specifically financial planner and we ended up politics and plot twists. So, rather than being specific about covid I mean it was written in the middle of covid, so that's really what it was talking about. But we didn't particularly refer to covid, we're just talking about, hey, external forces can impact your retirement plans. Some of those are going to be. I mean, when you look at the last couple of years, pandemics, elections and plot twists was the other kind of catch-all for unexpected things. But there's definitely ways you mentioned procedures or practices or even services that you offer objectives without being as specific as policies, practices and procedures where you can still get the same intent across but have it a slightly more 10 000 foot view than a 10 foot view. So things like that are interesting. It's just other nuances to think about, how it's brought together and the opportunities to use it yeah, really good point where you're saying don't talk about COVID, talk about pandemic, right?
J.W: You might not talk about the 24 Major League Baseball All-Star game that just happened, but you might talk about All-Star games, right? Or? You might talk about the benefit of the Olympics. You don't have to talk about the Paris Olympics, just talk about Olympics. So yeah, I think that's a good point to remember too is you can make a reference to the event, but not a particular event.
Stuart: Yeah, yeah.
It's one of the reasons I like the way that we handle updates and just make them easy and accessible for people, because trying to get all of these elements lined up in the first draft I mean, if you're a practiced author and you've done this 20 times before the one out of the gate will probably be pretty good, but if this is the first or second time that you're doing it, there's so much mental bandwidth around getting the project done.
If you think that it's set in stone and a monk is going to typeset it and then they're going to ink up the printers and then that's it for 50 years, put such undue pressure on the outcome as opposed to thinking about it as okay, this is the first version that we're getting out now and if I want to update it tomorrow, that's easy enough to do. So you can do iterative improvements. I think that takes a lot of the pressure off, because we're all used to doing college assignments where things come back well personal experience, come back with red pen marked all over and then lots of red pen, yeah the next time you're thinking god, I don't even want to do this, but if you think about it as hey, I'm just I bumped into jw at starbucks.
We're having a conversation about something might lead to something, you might not, but it takes the pressure off that conversation you know, I kind of think about wrapping up on one thought that I had.
J.W: I think makes a lot of sense too. One of my favorite guys on leadership is Craig Groeschel, who does the Leadership Podcast and is part of Life, church and everything and just an amazing leadership podcast, and he talks about delegating. There's a guy named Rory Vaden who's written a book called Procrastinate on Purpose. I picked up a lot from his book and Craig Groeschel, I believe, was interviewing him and they were talking about if you can find somebody to do something 80% right, let them do it. Even the 20% mistake in there it's worth it that you don't have to do it, that you can delegate that to someone and they do it, because that's close enough. And I would probably say that on writing a book, I think I've thrown them all away because they were so bad.
I remember the first one I wrote. I kind of read it a year later and went oh wow, did I say that? Did I put that? Did I prove that? And then we made again a change then and I think we made a change maybe a year or so ago. And so I would encourage if you're writing a book, don't try to make it perfect. Just't even attempt that right. Just just get the information on paper. People get it, they understand it. Get the point across and then if you want to make some changes, but if you're going to try to make it perfect, you'll never put it in print. That's for sure, and you probably experience that a lot, I'm sure yeah, exactly, it just never.
Stuart: The project never gets done and there's ways of. I mean, the reality is readership is astronomically low, even for fiction books where the whole job of work is for the book to be read. I mean, that's completely 100% why they're written Lead generation type books and kind of this type of book where the user, the recipient, they don't really want the book. To a certain degree they don't even really want the knowledge, they want the outcome, they want the problem fixed. It's just they see the book as a stepping stone to the outcome. So if you think readership rates of fiction books where it's 100 job of work is to be read are tiny, and then you think of that trickling down to how many people request a copy of the book versus read the table of contents, versus read every page. So this whole not getting anything out because we're trying to make it perfect, it's such a mismatch in the job of work that it actually does out there in the world. Now, obviously there's a minimum standard, but you can preface things by saying typically we're not charging $15 for a book on Amazon, which means it's getting compared with Seth Godin's latest book. We're giving it away as a lead generation tool to start a conversation and adding a degree of value. So you can preface that in the introduction, in the copy that you send in the follow-up email in the conversation.
Hey, listen, we get questions. We're at the event. We get questions all the time. Obviously, we've only got so much time to spend with people, but actually JW pulled together the six most important questions asked all the time. It's a quick read. Give us a shout. There's obviously personalization or it depends on your situation, but give us a shout. In these podcasts I always take a breath and then look at the clock and realize that wow, I'm burning a lot of your time and really appreciate it. That's all right. I want to make sure that people can find out more about the organization. As I say, we're a fan. We've got two team members and have had for a number of years. What's a good place for people to go and find out more about what you guys can do?
J.W: Yeah, just literally go to Zimworkscom, z-i-m-w-o-r-xcom and you can read a little bit about us. You can also schedule a discovery call. That's the best thing to do, I think, is to schedule a discovery call. It takes 20, 30 minutes. Somebody on our team can explain what we do. If you're interested, at that point we'll actually schedule interviews and you can meet people. Again, no obligation.
One of the neat things is if you called me today and you were in a bind and said my book cover designer just walked out the door and I'm in a bind, and said, oh my gosh, my book cover designer just walked out the door and I'm in a bind, and would say, okay, we could probably have you interviewing in two to three days and we can have you hired in five.
So literally, we're sitting here on a Thursday. You could have somebody by Wednesday or Thursday of next week actually going to work. So I think we've got a really quick timeline where we can get you in front of an interview and meet people that have the qualified skills. So yeah, go to zimworkscom, check it out. Love to you. Hit me up on linkedin. Hop in jw oliver. I'll come up, happy to answer questions there too. And and I'm just a big fan of what you guys do and it's been great for us and we as we were talking a little bit before we started, I've got, we got two or three more that we'll be putting out in the next six or eight months, so we're excited about that too.
Stuart: Fantastic. Well, I definitely have to circle back and not leave it so long next time and see how the new books are working and maybe next time we can dive into each of those funnels a little bit more and just help people get this concept of a conversation with a group of people leading to a next step and do a bit of a deep dive there. Really appreciate your time.
Absolutely. This is always a pleasure. I'll make sure that I link both the company and your LinkedIn in the show notes so, as people are listening to this, they can just click straight through. And again, personal recommendation we love working with you guys and really enjoy the team and the staff that we've got and the team who are looking after them, and the staff that we've got and the team who are looking after them. So thanks again and thanks for the time today.
J.W: Absolutely Appreciate it. Thanks for being on. Yeah, we'll bring the new book on next time.
Stuart: Perfect, that sounds like a plan Alrighty. Thank you, brother. Everyone. Thanks for listening. We will catch you in the next one.