If you’re looking for information on how to become an Amazon best-selling book author, you just hit the jackpot! Learn how from Jon Schram of the Purple Guys.
Jon Schram is an IT support expert and the founder & CEO of The Purple Guys, a tech company that has grown since 2001 to become the Midwest’s premier provider of IT support services. The Purple Guys is a fast-growing, 7-digit business that has helped hundreds of companies grow by solving their IT problems and providing them with stress-free, bullet-proof tech support. Jon and his wife, Jill, have three children and have founded two businesses together.
Episode Resource Links
- The Purple Guys Website
- Jon Schram on LinkedIn
- HEMP KC
- Acumen Impact
- Jon Schram’s Amazon Book Page
- Jon Schram’s Amazon Author Page
- Jon’s Schram’s “In the Arena” Podcast episode with John Lovell
1. About John Schram & The Purple Guys
Phil Singleton: Okay. What I’d like to do, firstly, in the last couple episodes that we’ve done is really just kind of let the listeners know what we’re going to cover. So they’ll know how long they want to stick around or if they want to fast forward. And the first thing is, just to get a quick background of Jon and his experience in the business world and give us a brief overview of Purple Guys. And then secondly, I’d like to ask him about what professional organizations has helped his company grow or helped him solve problems either personally, professionally, or what have you.
And then thirdly, a special announcement, Jon has become a published author today, but also an Amazon best-selling author. And we’ve teamed up, and we’ve actually helped him do a little bit of this. And I want to go through that process with Jon and explain how we did it and get some of his commentary on the process. And all the things that we’ve done that have led up to a successful launch that we’re right in the middle of. So with that, Jon, again, welcome to the show. And why don’t you give a little bit of background about the Purple Guys and what brought you here today?
Jon Schram: I’ll give you the brief entrepreneurial background for me. So Purple Guys has been my career for the last 20 years. So this is, as you mentioned, I’ve had a couple of startups. I refer to myself as an unintentional serial entrepreneur. What that really means is I’m a slow learner, and I’ve had really three very successful entrepreneurial startups from a financial perspective. And the first two were very unsuccessful from picking the wrong partner. And if you want to hear the gory details of that, I just did a very deep dive on that history with, with Jon Lovell on his podcast, In the Arena. So you can hear all the bits and bytes, and it’s really better with alcohol when you listen to that.
It’s also better with alcohol when I tell it. But as far as the Purple Guys go, we’re the outsourced it department for roughly 176 small businesses, and we’ve been doing this, again, for 20 years. The Purple Guys itself is a brand that came about because of our customers. We started wearing purple shirts, and our customers started calling us the Purple Guys. So I’m slow, but I’m not that slow. We became the Purple Guys and it’s been a lot of fun branding with the color.
But we help small businesses with their IT. We serve as the outsourced kind of help desk. So for when folks have trouble with anything, with a screen and an on and off switch, they call us and we help troubleshoot those issues. We take care of backups, security, anything to do with email, and basically interacting with all the different technical technology vendors. So, that’s what the Purple Guys do, and we’ve been doing it for 20 years. We’ve seen a lot of change. A lot of fun.
Phil Singleton: Yeah. And the “In the Arena” podcast episode, you really go into your experience. Then we’re going to recommend and put in the show notes and make sure everybody goes and take a listen, and a watch, to that podcast because both of you guys did a fantastic job. And it was a great place to tell a fuller version of the Purple Guy’s story. So definitely head over to In the Arena after this one.
2. Growing Through CEO Peer Groups
But what I want to jump into next is professional organizations. And I know you belong to HEMP and that organization’s done great things in Kansas city. There’s a ton of great companies and we’ve dealt with several of them in different projects. Some of them are clients and everybody that has worked with it has great things to say about it. It seems like everybody that I know that’s in that organization has been successful. And I’d love to get your insight on that one. And any other organization that you’ve joined, how it’s helped you and helped your business grow and solve problems.
Jon Schram: Yeah, well I would encourage just generically any small business owner not to be on an Island because it’s just hard. It can get really lonely. So I am just a huge fan of the peer group model of leaning on other entrepreneurs and other business owners to be able to leverage other people’s experience. So I’ve been in a lot of different peer groups. The Helzberg Mentoring Program specifically, I think is one of the best-kept secrets. And it shouldn’t be a secret, but it’s one of the best-kept secrets in Kansas city in terms of the value you get from participating in the organization.
Barnett Helzberg is just a fantastic human being and he modeled this organization off of his relationship with Ewing Kauffman. And he will be the first to tell you that he learned so much from that relationship in that one-on-one mentoring, that he created an environment where they match seasoned entrepreneurs, or seasoned business professionals and seasoned entrepreneurs, with newer entrepreneurs. And you can lean on each other. They’ve got group meetings. There’s Dr Michelle Robin, she’s awesome. Yeah, they’ve got group meetings, but again, any of these things, you get out what you put into it.
So you get paired up with somebody. You can bounce ideas off of them. You meet with them on a regular basis. You go to the group meetings. You get as much out of the group meeting that you do out of your one-on-one mentoring because other business owners… The business of business is the same across every industry. They’ve all got their own unique pieces, but the thing you can learn from other business owners are just fantastic. So highly recommend this group. And another one I’m actively involved in is called Acumen. It’s a peer-to-peer mentoring program as well. It is a CEO round table kind of a group.
And if you’re familiar with Vistage, I’ve been in that for a while. This has a similar business model to it. 12 to 13 CEOs in a room and a professional facilitator, which I think is actually critical to keeping a group of CEOs on track. Having someone there that’s paid to keep the meeting moving forward. You’ve heard the term herding cats. You get a bunch of CEOs in a room, it’s kind of hard. So having that paid facilitator in the room to help move the conversation forward and keep things on track has been fantastic. But I participate in both the Helzberg Mentoring Program and the Acumen group right now. And I wouldn’t leave either one of them. They’re awesome, awesome groups. One of the groups that I participated in the past, it was a place to come have your answers questioned.
You would show up with, here’s my issue, here’s what I’m going to do about it. Wait a minute, have you thought about this, this, this, and this, and here’s all the stuff that’s happening?
Phil Singleton: So it’s entrepreneurs, business owners, you guys are kind of sharing problems, bouncing stuff off each other. Do you bring challenges that you have and people share solutions? What’s the…
Jon Schram: So the structure to Acumen is we meet a day a month. So you commit to the time and you bring your issues. And you’ll meet with the facilitator before the meeting. You tee up what it is you want to talk about. It’s a structured conversation, so you’re just not showing up and winging it. And I will tell you, I have learned as much from listening to other people’s issues as I have bringing my issue to the table and having people specifically answer my questions because I’ll listen to somebody else’s issue, and I’ll have something that I can add to it. But I will learn from the collective knowledge of the group every time really there’s any topic. So it’s just a fantastic model. It’s the concept of a mastermind group. And it works.
Phil Singleton: I’m assuming that some of these, maybe some are more relationship or network? Is there any level of people working with each other and referring business or is that not really… Is that off the table with some of these…
Jon Schram: it’s specifically not the primary purpose in any one of them, but as with any kind of a group-
Phil Singleton: It happens.
Jon Schram: The more you gather, the more you learn about each other, the more you’re going to want to try to do business. But in all of them, it’s the important part is to be transparent. If you start doing business with somebody, be transparent so everybody in the group knows. And it’s not something that’s just in the background affecting the way you’re going to interact with each other.
Phil Singleton: That’s really cool. The one thing that the Helzberg site does, is they list lot of, I guess, mentees, mentors, and fellows. And I go through here, he has been really awesome companies that have been on here. Some of them…
Phil Singleton:
Yeah. Some of these are… Just going through, Carol Espinosa, I’ve met with her and worked on different boards. She’s really a great person. There’s just so many people on here.
Jon Schram: Yeah, there’s a lot.
Phil Singleton: You’re on here. And I’ve got a client, Robyn Schmitz from High Prairie Landscape Group. Worked with the people at Gutter Cover KC. McIntire Management Group. Gosh. MAKE Digital Group, Evan and Andrea Kirsch over there. They’re great people, collaborated with them as well…
Jon Schram: Kathy Koehler’s in there. Anybody’s bought or sold a home, she’s awesome.
Phil Singleton: There’s Mark Mcintire right here. It’s kind of a who’s who of the up and… Of course Danny O’Neill’s in here. So he must’ve been like a mentor.
Jon Schram: Yeah. Well, Henry Bloch was his mentor earlier on.
Phil Singleton: Oh, wow. So this is really awesome. So these groups are… You through here and it’s like, wow. The people that have… That’s one of the things these guys do, you go through and it’s like, wow, look at the folks that have come through here and what they’ve accomplished. Pretty, pretty amazing thing. And to think that it’s also been a networking group, a place where they’ve helped you come together, solve problems, help you grow, scale, expand. All those types of things. Really cool. So you recommend these types of groups. They’ve been a part of your business Purple Guys.
Jon Schram: Yeah. I’m not smart enough to do stuff totally on my own. No way. I would mess stuff up. I would rather get other people’s advice and learn from other people’s mistakes. And move the ball forward faster. It is a time commitment. It’s both time and money. I will tell you from my perspective, the more important thing is the amount of time I have to invest. It is phenomenal the return you get from spending the time, and again, you got to put the work in. You got to be prepared when you fill… You got to be present. You got to set your phone to the side and actually be there in the meeting. But if you make the investment and you show up and you interact, it is just fantastic.
3. Becoming an Amazon Best Selling Author
Phil Singleton: Awesome. Highly recommended. All right. Let’s transition over to your book. I think we’re both glowing a little bit today. I think I am more than you. I’ve been telling my wife, Jon, it’s a best seller. So pretty exciting to be in the middle of this. And to those of you who are listening on the podcast, we’ve also are recording this on video and I made a really super attractive PowerPoint presentation. White and black text on here. Can you see that, Jon?
Jon Schram: I can see that, yes. You spent a lot of time on this thing I can tell.
Phil Singleton: Thanks for doing this on short notice, but you can tell we’re short notice. But what I really wanted to do here is just to make sure that I covered all the points here. And what I’d like to do for the people listening is I think we’ve done something pretty cool. I’ve helped a lot of clients and other people write books and gather their expertise, and put it in writing so they can use them for different things. In every case that we do one, we learn something a little bit different. So what I’d like to do is just explain Jon’s path from being able to… All that we did to get a book production and writing, put it all together, publish it. And actually some of the things that we did from engineering the campaign to have a good chance in actually achieving bestseller status.
Phil Singleton: So where I like to start on this, and we’ll get Jon’s commentary along the way is, why do you write a book in the first place? So one of the things is I think, and you correct me if I’m wrong Jon, but this is kind of where I came from it. I think everybody thinks about writing a book of some sort at some point in their life. Wouldn’t it be good to write a book, whether it’s on business or maybe some other type of thing? Did you have that as a…
Jon Schram: Absolutely. I’ve got quite the story and someday I want to write the entrepreneurial. It’s very colorful, no pun intended with the verbal, but learned a lot along the way. And I just think there’s good things to share. So yes, I always have thought about memorializing some of that stuff.
Phil Singleton: I think we all kind of have that in our list of long term professional goals. I’m guilty of this. It’s maybe a little bit plays into ego and stuff like that for me, certainly I wanted to kind of do it as a personal thing I wanted to try and do. But when you think about it, and you may have thought the same way I certainly did when I wrote my book, was it kind of felt like it was just a great thing to do someday. But you never really think it’s as attainable as it is. And now more than ever, it actually is with self-publishing and the Amazon network, and the things that we can do to kind of put it all together. But I’ve got this quick slide that I wrote up and it’s like, why write a book?
4. 10 Reasons Why You Should Write a Book
And I put down 10 different reasons of why I think this is a really important thing to do for people right now. And the first, most important one to me is Google. Because Google to me is a monopoly. They know everything about pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. They know what people need to see on a website or in a company to get to buy from them. And they have a document called a Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines. And in that document really spells out what companies need to be doing in order to show up in search results.
But the most important part of this is since they know the whole purchase process, they’ve got this concept called… That they’re focusing on these days called EAT, which is expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And that to me is the number one reason why I try and get my clients to get on this path is because I know that if we get a person like Jon, who is actually a client, if we can get his EAT score, which is an actual score on Google to raise up, his website’s going to do better. His website’s going to get more visibility.
The people that see stuff and see that he’s an author are going to be more likely to buy from him. And so all of these things that happen are the main reason… There’s other reasons for it, but this was my main reason. You may, Jon, get some kind of a commentary on what attracted you in the beginnings. I think you’re seeing some other things that happen because there’s a cascade of wins that we’re going to talk about. But is there anything in particular that when we first talked about this, say several months ago, you thought was a good idea? Any comments on that?
Jon Schram: Well, the biggest thing for me was that you had a process for getting it out there. And how to build the chapters together, and actually create something, and make an actual book. Because just the thought of, oh, I got to write a book. Where do I even start? So your structure that you brought to the table was fantastic.
Phil Singleton: Awesome. So that made it feel like, oh, this is actually doable. “Don’t just throw a book project on my plate. I’ve got other things to do right now. ” We bring it and try and make it easy. Hey, there’s a process where if we have a strategy, we can be basically writing a book on our sleep. But when we get to the why reason, this again, it’s the EAT reason for Google. It’s personal branding. This is one of the things that Purple Guys has done really well from a corporate standpoint, I think. Purple Guys everywhere, you see it on the road, you see the color purple. They’ve got great character, brand recognition. Jon’s out there. His face is recognizable, but there are pieces to I think the personal branding campaign that we’re bringing to it, that a book is actually going to do.
And we’ve seen this with the book that we’re writing right now. You see it with the podcast guesting that we’re doing right now, doing podcasts. You’re going to have a podcast. You’re going to be on more podcasts. This is as much about the Purple Guy’s brand, as it is about personal branding. And that becomes really important these days in an influencer economy. It doesn’t matter if we’re B2B or B 2C. So when we talk about EAT, we’re talking about writing a book, man, it’s the definition of authority. You publish one out.
It creates a massive ripple effect, behind the scenes on the internet. That again comes, if we point it back to the website in the right way, we’re raising that internet authority of the company and for the author. Eventually you’re going to have, and this is the next step of it. You’re going to have, I’d mentioned Robyn Schmitz here of High Prairie Landscape Group, a great person. Another, I think HEMP. I think she might’ve graduated already, but she’s got her ebook, but she’s actually got a physical book which you’re going to have. So we’re going to be able to pass that out and say, look, I’m holding…
Jon Schram: I have one of those!
Phil Singleton: You have one of these too? You’re going to be your own book in your hands. This, by definition, is an authority, right? So you got the physical proof of trust. It’s a big differentiator against competitors. You already have a lot of differentiating factors, but why not stack the deck, right?
Jon Schram: Oh, absolutely.
Phil Singleton: I love it as a pre-sales closing tool. So one of the things we did with your book intentionally, Jon, is that when somebody reads through it… Because we’re going to use it, we use it for authority building, but we also want to use it on your website so that when people come to it we can send it to them.
So if they read through it, they basically are going to read about all the reasons they should choose you, or what red flags to look for. So it warms people up by the time they… It saves people. It should save sales guys, 30 minutes to 45 minutes on the phone where they would be explaining all this stuff. Now we’re going to have a tool to send out ahead of time and say, hey, before we scheduled this call, take a look at this free book or whatever, and read through. It’s going to help whether you choose us or not, you’re going to get the best. So some of those things. Of course, having a great sticky thing, business card on steroids. You’ve already done some of the podcast, guesting. This is a great thing. Once you become an author, you’re by definition an authority and an expert, it’s much easier to get you booked on third-party podcasts as a guest expert because you’ve written a book on the subject matter.
And then finally, as we’ve seen today, and we’re going to talk a little bit more in the next slide is we can actually engineer a bestseller. Now it’s not super easy. And you’ve seen what we’ve done behind the scenes, right? There’s been a lot of hustling, got a lot of emails over the weekend, going back and forth and circling the wagons and stuff like that. But it can be done if you got the right strategy. So any other comments that you have on why to write a book? Would you recommend people to do it?
Jon Schram: I highly recommend it. Again, the structure that you put in place allowed me to just see that, all right, we started here. We’re going to finish there. There’s a timeline. I knew we could get it done. So it made it very achievable and I highly recommend people do it.
Phil Singleton: And then you got… I don’t know if you’ve been there, but some of you guys start to write one. You’re just like, you know what…
Jon Schram: I already got the second one. Absolutely. We’re doing another book!
Phil Singleton: All right. All right. All right. Yeah. This is the one thing I wanted to let people to walk away from is… And I thought about this after we’ve done it, we’ve done it many times for other people. In your case, I really think we’ve honed it down to more of a science. And this is what people should be doing. You got to start off with an optimized website and a digital footprint. So to be in fairness, to get to this point, you and I have been working together from your website from the keyword research. And that goes all the way through. It gets a bit tougher to try and say, let’s go tackle a giant project like this at once. But when we’re working it into a holistic marketing plan, and it’s working in the scenes, and we’re chipping away at it a week in and week out, it’s being done while we’re doing other stuff.
5. 10 Steps You Must Take to Create an Amazon Best-Selling Book
Phil Singleton: So in your case, worked on the website, we figured out what the keywords are. We developed… This is something you’re already familiar with. We figured out what we wanted to write about in terms of a blog series, which essentially is the title. And then we’ve got standalone blog posts, which are actually the chapters. So we’re able to use the blog chapters as blog posts that can be distributed as social media. So you’re getting that win off of it, right? Then they go out to social media, we get a point back to the website. So we get that win. Then we stitch them into an ebook. Now we’re in the stage where we actually stitched in together. And by the way, your team, Paige Lee in particular, did a fantastic job with your Kindle. In fact, your guys’, the production value… If you want to see an ebook, a Kindle version that’s taken it way further than I’ve ever seen in terms of a graphic version, you guys killed it on the design.
It took me beyond our current skill level. We’re at three guys that we work with to try and put these together formatting them, weren’t able to do it. And we actually figured it out in-house. But I’m glad you guys pushed us to do that because I think we came up with something actually really incredible in terms of, it’s basically a magazine quality book with great content and great graphics and stuff like that. So we can stitch those together in ebook, and then we publish it up on Amazon. Again, a little bit of strategy behind making it a best seller. We publish it on Amazon. Now Jon’s already got a little bit ahead of the game on this where we’ve got him on a podcast guesting tour, right? So normally we would publish the book, be a best seller if we get to achieve that, and then use that to get on other guesting shows.
Phil Singleton: You’ve already been doing that just as a guest expert. Now we’re going to have a little bit more of a advantage to get you on hopefully bigger and better shows because you’re going to be a published best-selling author. And then the next step of it is getting you your own podcast so that you can start being the interviewer. So we’re getting that ying and yang of the podcast. And podcasts, that’s a whole nother probably thing we could talk about, but there’s tons of extra benefits that come of having a podcast. And the last one is really launching the podcast up on the podcast hosting site, all the other things that happen in and around it, that really are the benefit if you tie everything together.
So any comments on how that played out? We’re in it, we’re doing some of this stuff. Now you see it in front of you. If you look at it, it seems like we’re doing these things week in and week out, but now you’ve seen these 10 steps in front of you. Is there any comments that you have in terms of expectations that other people might go through, or parts of it that were easy or harder than others?
Jon Schram: The process itself… And again, until you see the end product, I knew the structure of the book, I knew the chapters, I knew what we’re going for, but until I actually saw the final copy of it, and Phil can attest to this, I’m kind of anal-retentive when it comes to checking periods and spaces….
I know. So I would say I probably slowed the process down being very picky. But seeing that, and then kind of just understanding, all right, well, we’re going to push launch, and then we’re going to try to get it to be a best seller. Can we really do that? And then actually seeing it hit today being number one on a couple lists is freaking awesome!
Phil Singleton: Heck yeah. I’m going to show a couple of screenshots. That’s going to be the cherry on the top here, but I want to leave the listeners, and the people, and the viewers in this case, with some simple tips on how we got it to be a best seller. And one is, we talked about this, right? When you talk about we’re both big on StoryBrand. I love StoryBrand too, but you can’t forget about Google, right? You have to put practical language in there that people are searching for. And this is, I think we’re StoryBrand and SEO and Google need to work together because you can come up with much cooler copy that doesn’t have anything to do with, it’s more clever if people get it. But it’s not as practical. So you guys did a really good job I think of working on it.
Phil Singleton: And if we didn’t have to worry about Google and stuff like that, maybe we would have come up with a different title. But look, Amazon’s a search engine too. If somebody is looking for IT, support and IT support book, don’t you think it’d be helpful to have IT Support in the name? Which is why we titled your book the way it is. So you guys were really flexible on that, but we got to be practical. And this is one of the reasons why stuff works is because you marry those two things together. So you got to optimize your title. You got to optimize your book page. In our case, we… In my case for SEO, and in your case for technology, we’re in a less competitive niche, right? So it’s not like there’s a ton of people that want to cozy up by the fireside with a glass of wine and read an SEO book or an IT support book.
So we’re lucky to be in a smaller pool where we can get out there and a smaller amount of sales can help us raise it up. So in any case, when you’re trying to write a book and you’re going for best seller status, you definitely don’t want to go too broad. Broad sounds great, but no, you want to narrow it down and use those categories to your advantage, which we did I think masterfully in your case. And it’s one of the reasons why we were able to kind of get that bestseller. If we went for a general business listing, we would’ve never broken the top hundred. So I think launching on a Sunday really helps. I don’t know what other people think, but I’ve done these many times now and getting them up and making sure that they’re able to get published and give the amount of time so that you got a Sunday to hit it, a Monday to hit it.
And then the rest of the week to carry that because there’s… This rolls into point number five, which is Amazon’s also an algorithm. So they’ve got their own freshness component, which when you launch a new release, it’s got a little bit more weight. So if you get a certain number of sales during that new release period, which is about a month, but really it’s weighted towards the first five or 10 days, if you do it right, you can basically Spock pinch the Amazon algorithm. And pool those things in a way that you can get the maximum amount for the amount of sales that you gather together, which gets into point number six. You know we spent a lot of time circling the wagon. So we’re going to go out and promote and do the things that we do know to promote it.
But you got to beg, borrow, and steal, ask all your friends, promote it like crazy. And again, try and get as many as you can in those five day periods. And it has to have enough. They don’t let you say, I’m just going to go at one or two sales in a two-year period. It doesn’t work like that, but you do have to coordinate stuff and it can be done so in a way that if you set everything else up right, you got a really good chance at achieving best seller status. So what does that mean? Promoting an email, promoting social media. You guys already did a great job. I think you’ve got three reviews already encouraging people to get more and more reviews. And then doing what we’re doing right now, leverage podcasts. You’re already on your own virtual speaking tour, which I can’t…
Phil Singleton: That’s a whole nother podcast we could maybe do another time, but there’s just so many benefits to getting… Again, that by definition is a way to get in front of another audience to get more sales, to get your own listeners out there. As you see now when you’re on other people’s podcasts, they have you on as a guest and then they do all the work on their platform promoting it, right? So you get back links and all sorts of stuff, but it also helps you sell books. And I’m going to jump over now and show people, tada… What this looks like. Hey, guess what? I purchased one on December 6th. That’s kind of the way it works, but we’re the number one new release in computer network security. In fact, we’re number one in network security, we’re number two in information technology.
Phil Singleton: We’re number 12 in computer network security. So that’s really cool. You’ve got this thing up in here. Then if we jump over and look at the actual Amazon bestseller, it’s like, boom.
Jon Schram: That’s awesome.
Phil Singleton: Number one!
Jon Schram: That is totally awesome.
Phil Singleton: Oh man. I spent my whole week on this. This is so cool, dude. You did it…..KC represent! And what’s cool is it couldn’t have happened to a… You deserve it. You’re an expert. You wrote a really good book. This is another piece that you should have anyway. But the fact that we worked hard over this, over the course of weeks, and then it worked, right? We did it the right way and you are more than deserving of anybody else to actually do it. It’s a great book. And again, for anybody that… The content itself is awesome in terms of what people learn.
But I think I mentioned this already. The design quality of this Kindle will blow your mind. I’ve never seen anything like it. So that’s just a great example of how far can you take a Kindle design? Well, I think you’ve taken it as far as it can go. Now, this is the one thing people. I talked about Google’s EAT being really important. And one of the most important thing to me, and this is getting back into my little world of SEO, is in the fact that you get the best selling list, you have your own book page, but one of the things that Amazon gives you as a published author now is an author page up on their domain 99 authority website. So what that means for you is you’re up there. You have your listing up in here, you’ve got it.
You’re a published author, but guess what else they let us do? They let us put our RSS feed up on the site. And every time you post a blog post on your website, comes up and we get a link back to your blog posts. Your site was already very well-engineered with SEO. Now we’ve got another… It’s not a silver bullet, but that’s another piece of that SEO pie where we’re saying, “Jon’s an expert. Purple Guys are an expert.” Now all the more publishing that we do on your website is going to get more expertise, more visibility, because we’re demonstrating to Google and the rest of the internet that you are a true expert in your niche.
So to me, this is actually the coolest thing that happens is getting an author page up in here and being able to drive backlinks to your blog every time we publish a new post on your website. So this is another main reason people should do it. So that’s kind of me wrapping that part of it up. I’d love to get your feeling as where you are in any parts of the process. You haven’t seen the whole benefits that are going to happen as a result of this, but you’re seeing some of the shiny parts of it now.
Jon Schram: Well, and again, I’m blown away that we hit number one the way we did. Which again, it was the execution of your strategy and it worked and it’s been awesome. So I’m anticipating in additional… From these backlinks and having it out there, just that additional little bit that everything is cumulative over all the different platforms, different things we’re doing, but it just helps to just notch the brand up a little bit higher, a little bit higher. Stay top of mind, stay present.
And that’s what drives business for small business for small businesses. And it we’re a small business and we’re trying to be top of mind for other small businesses when they need IT support. So every one of these little things helps. So I’m excited about what this does for our SEO, for our website, for visibility. We’ll eventually get some hard copies we can hand around. That’s just kind of gravy. This is all part of the visibility and stuff that’ll be out there. It just helps build our business.
Phil Singleton: Really cool. Is this fair, it’s work, but it’s attainable?
Jon Schram: Absolutely.
Phil Singleton: I don’t want to say it’s easy, but it’s not that hard. It’s not like you can just do it, but when you got…
Jon Schram: You’ve got to have a framework. You got to have a coach. There’s no way I would’ve got it done if you hadn’t been coaching along the way and had…
Phil Singleton: And there’s no way. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without having a true expert with good content and stuff like that too. So it’s kind of that mix and match. So awesome. And this is so great. We’re able to get it out here and we’ll be publishing this podcast within 48 hours of you publishing the book and becoming a best seller. So this is really awesome for you. It’s really awesome for us. I hope we can bring this to the other small business owners to understand, you should be doing this. Every people should be doing this and doing so in a way where it’s like, don’t drop everything and try and write a book. Work it into your plan so it’s happening over time.
Jon Schram: I still ran the company while we were writing the book. I did not take a month off and write a book. Now we had a lot of other stuff going on.
Phil Singleton: Well, let’s wrap it up with bringing it back to Purple Guys and you. I always like to tell people, hey, any particular things here in Kansas City, or really anywhere, where you… People that you admired. Other businesses that have done things a way that you maybe have modeled your business or stolen or used ideas from, that kind of thing. Just anybody that comes to mind in terms of it’s been inspirational or somebody that you think could help other business owners that you’re taking stuff from in terms of admiration.
Jon Schram: Well one, we crossed him on the Helzberg Mentoring Program, Danny O’Neill on Roasterie. Talk about somebody that knew and understood guerrilla marketing. And now Roasterie and Messenger have been combined over the fair wave umbrella, which is just kind of cool, two Kansas city brands. What Danny O’Neill was able to do with his brand and his passion for coffee. And again, if you ever heard Danny speak, it was very clear he was passionate about coffee. He’s passionate about a lot of stuff, but totally passionate about coffee and about his brand, which was super exciting. And I would say I took some stuff away from Danny on the branding side and the guerrilla marketing thing of just being present at a lot of places. So I’ve learned a lot from him.
Phil Singleton: Awesome. Well, on that note, congratulations on your book and here’s to your next one.
Jon Schram: Yeah, I’m excited to do number two now that we have number one under our belt.
Phil Singleton: Awesome. And I’d love to do a followup on this, on what the print version looks like. And you’re early in on your podcast guesting campaign. You know we have ambitions to have your own podcast for a lot of different reasons. So maybe we’ll do a followup on this if you’re gracious enough to do so where we can say, hey, we went from the book and here were these other parts of the whole master plan that includes podcast hosting, podcast hosting and some print stuff. And we’ll look back on this and see how things have affected the business from today.
Jon Schram: Yeah. I’m happy to. This has been fantastic.
Phil Singleton: Awesome. Thanks a ton, Jon.
Jon Schram: All right, thank you.
