Ghostwriting His Book

What should you look for when hiring a ghostwriter for a business book?

Richard Lowe: Hello, thank you for joining. This is Richard Lowe with the Leaders and Their Stories podcast, and I’m here with a friend of mine, Joe Rockey, who is one of my clients. We’re writing a book together. Joe, how are you doing today?

Joe Rockey: I’m doing great, man. How about yourself?

Richard Lowe: I’m doing fantastic. Well, having you as a client, of course I’m doing fantastic.

Joe Rockey: Yeah, you say so.

Richard Lowe: So what’s new in your world, briefly?

Joe Rockey: We’re writing a book. That part’s pretty cool and new.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it is pretty cool.

Why do authors give up on traditional publishing after their first book?

Joe Rockey: So for those who don’t know me, I have already written a book. It’s called Casino Sales Master: Proven System to Beat the Odds in Sales and Life.

I did it through a more or less old-school, traditional-style publisher, and I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like that process for a lot of different reasons I don’t need to get into here.

There was a lot of extra time and energy I put into it that I didn’t want to do again.

Joe Rockey: So, having known Richard for a while, I kicked him an idea for a new book, and he was like, you can do it that way, it would suck, but you could do it that way.

How about you do it a better way? Then I sat and thought about it for a while, mulled it over, and came back to him with a different version.

The next thing I know, you’re like, you’re almost there to be at a good book. And I was like, okay. Now we’re in the process of actually making it happen.

Joe Rockey: That was my starting point. I went through the writing process the first time and didn’t want to do it that way again, and the insights before we even started writing the thing about how to make it better were golden.

So that’s how I’m doing and how we’re doing with the book so far, at least from my perspective. It’s probably hell for you having to deal with me, though.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it was a bit much, but I survived. So did you look around at any other options before choosing me?

Why do so many business books sound the same?

Joe Rockey: I did. I did not want to do the kind of book that I feel like everybody’s doing nowadays, which is basically one chapter is a glorified case study, and that is that.

Then at the end of it, you just hope the guy reading it matches one of your case studies, and hopefully it was early enough in the book that they actually read it, and maybe it turns into a client signing a deal with you. I didn’t want to do it that way.

Joe Rockey: I wanted something you didn’t have to be a client to appreciate, something that wasn’t just self-promoting me the whole time. In fact, with the direction we went, I don’t even know if it will be self-promoting me at all, but it gets the message I want out there.

If you understand that I believe in this message, it’s going to lead to the same results without being a cookie-cutter template.

Joe Rockey: And that’s really what I didn’t want, a cookie-cutter template, and that’s what everybody was pushing except for you. So it was really easy. It came down to either I’m doing it with Richard or I’m not doing it at all.

There wasn’t a choice of someone else, because I don’t want a template. I don’t want it to sound the same as everyone else, whether it’s this guy wrote the same book 40 times or he put it in the chat and this is what the chat said the book should be. I don’t want that.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. As soon as most ghostwriters hear that you want a book on sales and marketing, they tune into that and write your standard book on sales and marketing, and it’s going to be the same as every other book on sales and marketing.

It’ll work, but it’s not going to be as good as it could be. Let’s put it that way. It won’t suck. I know you went to ghostwriters at a pretty high level, so they know how to write, they know how to analyze, and they know how to do a good book.

But from what you told me, they weren’t going to write your book.

Joe Rockey: No, that’s exactly it. Some of them didn’t ghostwrite all of their stuff, they kept their name on some of it, so they could share with me which ones were written by them.

They were all the exact same template. One guy had made hundreds, and as I was listening to his own book on Audible, the core concept, I was like, this is so similar to three other books I have.

Maybe I’m giving him credit for stuff he wrote, maybe not, but it just proved to me how prevalent the template is.

Joe Rockey: That’s the trap I didn’t want to fall into again. I don’t want a template. My first book is nothing like a template. It probably veered wrong in a couple of different directions that you’ve caught for me.

But one of the points of marketing is to be different. If you’re doing the same as everything else, how’s that going to work?

Richard Lowe: Right.

Joe Rockey: Any intelligent reader realizes it by page four, and he’s out.

How does a ghostwriter interview a client before writing a book?

Richard Lowe: Right. Well, today, with AI and stuff, you can get a formula book like that. If you don’t want a formula book, you’ve got to go with a human, and that’s what I do.

I take your ideas and turn them into a good, human-written book. We’ve gone through this process, and we’re still going through it, with a pile of interviews up front.

The first couple of interviews get the outline, and from there we move on to filling in the blanks of your life, who you are, and what your goals are.

Richard Lowe: So we’re not actually focused on the book to begin with. We’re focused on you, because it’s very important for me to know who your audience is.

Why are you talking to them? What are they going to get from it? What should they take away? And what are your goals for the book?

If we write a book that doesn’t meet your goal, we’re just spinning our wheels and you’re spending a whole lot of money to do nothing, and we don’t want that.

What is the real return on investment of a business book?

Joe Rockey: Don’t get me wrong. Part of the reason I’m doing this is the eventual ROI on the back side. I’m not going to lie about that.

Richard Lowe: That’s something we discussed, and I always discuss it: how do you see the return on investment? Some people say they want to sell copies, and I tell them you’re not going to break even on copies.

You’re not even going to come close. That’s not the way it works. There are millions of books on marketing out there, probably a hundred more published every single day.

It could be a bestseller, but it’s not going to match what you’re paying for a good ghostwriter.

Richard Lowe: What will match it is going on the speaking circuit, using the book as credibility to sell a product, or handing it to your customers and saying, this is my book, this is how it works.

If you do any number of other things using the book as the foundation of your marketing, then you have what a book is really for. That’s what it’s for.

Joe Rockey: That’s what I bought into, right?

Richard Lowe: Yeah, exactly. We discussed that in detail, because it’s critical. Who’s your audience? We figured that out. What are they going to gain from this? We figured that out.

I’m not going to get into details, because that comes under the confidentiality of the book itself.

Joe Rockey: I will share this part, though. I feel bad for you. You had a list of very detailed, well-thought-out questions, and over the time we’d block off for it, I’d give such long, tangential answers that you’d get through about three questions out of everything you wanted to do.

Richard Lowe: If I got through three questions, I felt lucky sometimes.

Joe Rockey: Probably fair. But the reality is you actually understood it. You didn’t just discard what I said when I went on a tangent. You could see how it came into play, even if it was just a line of thinking, and how it all connected.

One of the things someone watching this sees over my shoulder is that I believe every business comes down to two questions: what is your business’s relationship with your customers, and what is its relationship with your employees?

Joe Rockey: So many times we’d make sure we were actually answering that correctly, and I’d give all these different client examples, and you always kept the line of what I was trying to say through those vast examples.

I’ve applied it for my clients and it’s come across. And the book doesn’t read like an advertisement, which is the other part I wanted. Obviously there’s a target audience for who we’ll sell our product to, but I believe it has a mass appeal I never would have gotten through a template.

Richard Lowe: Right. Well, the idea is you pick your audience, and that audience isn’t going to respond well to advertising. They’re getting inundated with advertising anyway, especially all the AI garbage out there these days.

So we need to come at it from a different direction, and that direction is to write a real book. That sounds trite. Oh, we’re writing a real book.

But a real book means one that has a plot, a goal, and a purpose, accomplishes what it set out to accomplish, is interesting to read, and is humorous in places.

Joe Rockey: That’s exactly it. As we get deeper into the process, what’s constantly in my mind is, when I’m eventually listening to this on Audible, will I actually want to hear this story?

It’s not forcing a situation. It’s natural, it’s organic. This is how these people would actually be in the real world, and it makes sense.

What is deus ex machina in storytelling?

Joe Rockey: It’s not a trope where it’s like, oh, okay, now we forgot how to kill these aliens that took over the entire world, so we’ll just have microbes do it and punt the entire ending of the book.

It’s nothing like that, like a god power that shows up for no realistic reason. And I know half the people out there with biology degrees are mad at me for that reference.

But from the plot, the way that book was written, that’s a horrible ending.

Richard Lowe: You’re talking about War of the Worlds and the deus ex machina at the end.

Joe Rockey: Yes.

Richard Lowe: Which means God reaches in and solves the problem.

Joe Rockey: That’s exactly it. And that’s not real life.

Richard Lowe: Very, very rarely is that real life, and usually there’s a story behind it. Microbes killing all the aliens at the end of the book, and you see how we go off on tangents, was a fine ending for the 1800s.

But coming forward to today, it’s been there, done that. We went through COVID. We’ve got medicine. You’d think the Martians, assuming it was Martians, let’s just make that big leap of faith, would know about Earth.

According to the book they’d been scouting it, at least a research project or two.

Joe Rockey: It’s like the movie, I think it’s called Signs, where at the end they all die from water. They landed on a water world? That was dumb.

That was the beginning of the end of Shyamalan for me. I’ve never liked his stuff. Even The Sixth Sense is so overrated.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, they depend on a twist, and the twist is sometimes good, but you can usually compress the movie down to 20 minutes and still get the twist.

Joe Rockey: Which makes the rest of it useless. And this is why I talk these things out, and you actually get it. We’re making something people will pay attention to scene by scene, seeing a natural growth that makes sense.

You see why one action, which is good for one guy, might piss someone else off, and you let that be organic. That was what I wanted, not, okay, this will make a nice clean ending to this chapter, or this will make sure the next chapter is about the same length as this one.

Joe Rockey: I don’t care about any of that. I don’t think we’ve ever once talked about how long this story should be. We talked about what’s going to be in it, why it’s important, what’s fluff that should be taken out, and what missing links need to be added in.

Never once was it, we’re doing exactly this many words or this many pages. It was about the message, and that’s what I cared about.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Your book has a message. You’re delivering it to a certain audience, and we need to make sure that audience understands the message through the book.

That’s the whole point. If the message isn’t delivered by the end of the book, the book is a waste of time.

Can writing a book help you get a corporate board seat?

Joe Rockey: That’s exactly it. So the disclosure here is, as anyone watching can see, I have an advertisement to get on my schedule over my shoulder. That’s one of the reasons, to get clients from this book.

But the main reason is for me to get on more boards, which is really hard to do in your forties. Literally one or two boards and I’m running away a winner forever, and they’re all stepping stones to bigger things.

Joe Rockey: We talked about this. My goal is to be on a Fortune 100 board, and this is the stepping-stone process we worked out to get there.

You have to actually be an expert, and you make a book about it. It made total sense to me.

Should a ghostwriter use AI to write a book?

Richard Lowe: Yep. And that’s a very good reason not to use AI to write your book. If your target is high-level board members, they’re going to catch it right away.

AI is really easy to spot. I don’t use AI to write ghostwritten books, and I wouldn’t expect any successful book to be written by AI.

Using it for auxiliary tasks, like helping with outlines, finding weak plot points, or research, is all cool.

Richard Lowe: Research, always keeping in mind that it lies constantly. To me, that’s a great use of AI. It saves time. It’s the same as hiring a virtual assistant to do something for you, except you’re hiring a digital assistant. But writing doesn’t come under that.

Joe Rockey: The way I look at it, you told me in the beginning you’d be using it for the outlines and stuff. That’s fine. I’m not hiring you to make the outline.

I’m hiring you to make the book. If that’s a stepping stone that makes it better, cool. Why do I care? The final book isn’t going to have a digital footprint in it.

If anything, it’s going to have your footprint in it, and that’s totally fine with me. That’s what I knew I was buying when I hired you, right?

Richard Lowe: Well, when you think about it, putting together an outline after, say, 25 interviews is a month-long task done by hand, and AI is going to do a better job.

Joe Rockey: Yeah, you had at least 25 hours to deal with. There’s no doubt about that.

Richard Lowe: And then putting it together is very, very difficult. It used to be one of the most difficult tasks in ghostwriting. If you’re doing it by hand, you try to do it as you go, because doing it all at once is, oh my God, a nightmare.

Joe Rockey: Well, I’m really glad we didn’t do it that way, because at some point we were probably two-thirds of the way in and realized we had one of those God moments that would fix the problem.

We actually needed to change the beginning a little bit, and we did.

Richard Lowe: And that’s pretty common. That’s pretty common.

Joe Rockey: If we’d been locked into the old way, we’d be done.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. So AI is great for coming up with an outline. Another thing it’s great for on a fiction book is finding the weak middle. Most books have a weak middle, because you have a strong beginning and a strong end, and then you’ve got to make the book last a while.

There’s got to be stuff happening, so the middle is usually pretty boring. Look at most movies. The second act is usually boring. The first act is really good, the ending’s pretty good, but the middle part drags.

Richard Lowe: With AI, you can say, here’s the book, tell me about the weak parts, and it’ll almost always tell you the middle sags. It’s called the sagging middle.

Then you go, okay, thanks, and you fix it. AI doesn’t do it for you. Now you know what the problem is and you go fix it.

It might tell you this character goes on way too long, or that character doesn’t have anything to do with anything and just peters out.

Richard Lowe: Then you get to choose. Do you cut that character out of the book, or do you reinforce that character? It’s really good at that kind of pattern recognition.

Do I have enough dialogue for this character? Does the dialogue make sense?

Joe Rockey: That’s the other part. It’s not going to be that if we make this guy a certain way, he’s that guy through and through.

Richard Lowe: I wrote a novel of my own and threw AI at it and said, tell me about the dialogue. Is everybody speaking properly? It said, well, they all speak fine, except they all sound like middle-aged white guys, and some of these are Black people and some of them are Hispanic people, and that doesn’t really work.

And I thought, oh, I’d better change the dialogue. You get blind to that when you’re writing. You really get a blind spot.

Richard Lowe: That’s one thing AI is great at, helping you find those blind spots. Again, you don’t use it to write your book, because AI is a terrible writer.

You use it to find things, to give hints and suggestions, and to do the menial work like an outline, all that kind of garbage along the way. We’ve been using it for that, and it’s worked really well.

How does a ghostwriter capture the author’s voice?

Richard Lowe: When we get to the writing stage, and we’re almost there, we’re doing the final set of interviews in the next couple of weeks, then we start writing this book, and it’s going to be interesting.

The way I do that is I write a couple of pages and send them to you. You review them as fast as you can, overnight if you can, or in a couple of days.

The goal is to find out whether the style matches. You send it back to me, I fix it up and send it back to you, and we do this several times until the style is locked in.

Richard Lowe: Then I write a whole chapter and we do the same thing. So for chapter one, the first couple of pages, the less I can get away with writing while still getting the point across, the better, because it’s going to change.

Joe Rockey: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Then we do that whole chapter, you review it and send it back, and I probably make a few changes. Before long the style is locked in and it’s a very easy process.

The style, the voice, the characters all get locked in. Sometimes that’ll slip, but there’s always your review in the process, and it’s usually pretty quick.

We’re talking 2,000 to 4,000 words for a chapter, maybe 5,000 if it’s a long one.

Richard Lowe: An average person can read through that in half an hour or so. It’s anywhere from a medium to a long short story, so it puts the book in bite-sized chunks for you.

You want to make sure you’re marking things as you go, and I usually ask you to do that in comment form in a Word document.

It comes back to me and I go, oh yeah, you’re right, this is wrong, and fix it. Or, okay, I can see your point, and fix it.

Or I discuss it with you: what do you really want here?

Richard Lowe: We proceed that way through the whole book, at a relatively good pace. The first chapter takes a while because we’re honing the voice. The second and third go faster, and then it starts to zip along.

At the end, when the book’s done, we get one final revision pass, so you get to read through the whole thing and make your final revisions.

One thing we’re looking for there is what changed along the way. Things do change.

Joe Rockey: Sure.

Should a ghostwritten book be self-published or traditionally published?

Richard Lowe: We’ve kept notes along the way, so we know we introduced a new character, say Patty, halfway through the book, and she should have been introduced closer to the beginning, so we might have to shove some things around.

Or there are continuity problems, or the style changed a little through the book. We fix all of those in the final pass, and then it goes to a human, professional editor.

Richard Lowe: From there it goes through getting a book cover. Virtually all my authors self-publish. The traditional publishing path is just too rigorous nowadays. So you self-publish it and then start promoting the damn thing, although I recommend people start promoting as soon as we start writing the book.

How much should you budget to promote a ghostwritten book?

Joe Rockey: Gotcha. And when you talk about promotion, how do you recommend it?

Richard Lowe: Well, it depends on what you can afford. I’m amazed that somebody will spend a lot of money ghostwriting a book and then can’t spend 50 bucks on promotion, and I’m not even kidding.

Promotion can be as expensive or as cheap as you want. The best possible thing you can do is hire an agency to promote it for you.

That’s going to be expensive. But you just paid to ghostwrite a book.

Joe Rockey: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: So you should have that in your budget, and you should have it in mind.

Joe Rockey: Exactly. And that’s one of the things I’m glad we talked about in the beginning, because it was part of it. It’s the process.

Richard Lowe: I have one client right now where we’re finishing up the book and publishing it, and he has a whole promotion plan. He’s hiring a PR agency.

It’s not cheap, but he figured he bought a ghostwritten book, so he’d better spend at least what he paid for it on the promotion, and that’s what he’s doing.

Joe Rockey: As long as you have a product that’s going to give you the ROI on the back end, you’re set.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, and he’s going to get what he wants. It’s a little more intangible than money. He’s looking for the benefit to children. He wants to get it out there so children in schools are helped, so money isn’t really relevant to him.

He’d like to sell a lot of copies, but if he doesn’t, he’s not going to cry over it.

Joe Rockey: Gotcha.

Richard Lowe: So he’s got a whole promotion plan going, and he’s hired a VA to do it. He’s paying agencies for some things, agencies that can open doors, but the VA is doing all the grunt work, all the contacts to those people, and the relationship management, which is a big deal: forming relationships with the people who need the book.

That’s probably the best way to promote your book, through relationships, assuming you’re doing it for your own credibility and not to sell copies.

Richard Lowe: If you’re going to sell copies, find a company that does that like a machine and use them, and you’ll probably be disappointed, because most of those companies are very weak.

They sound good, and they have really good copy on their websites, but I’ve rarely found authors who were happy with them.

Joe Rockey: Makes sense.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. A traditional publisher typically won’t take you on unless you have more than a hundred thousand followers. That’s considered around the minimum. If you don’t have a hundred thousand followers, how are you going to sell the book?

Joe Rockey: That’s because the publisher doesn’t really care about the back-end sale I’m going to have. They care about the front end.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, that’s not what they’re there for. They want to sell copies.

Joe Rockey: Yeah. And I definitely don’t want to spend money on the New York Times just to be on a list.

Richard Lowe: Right, right. Some of my authors have done that, and I think one of them is going to get there. The New York Times bestseller list has its own issues, but it would be a good list to be on, let me tell you.

You’ll sell a lot of copies if you get on it, and you already have to sell a lot of copies to get there. Another avenue is to get into libraries, bookstores, things like that, and each one of those is a separate way to do it.

Richard Lowe: You can also have a launch party, which you and I talked about and I highly recommend. When the book is released, you have a virtual or physical party, invite people, and kind of force them to buy a book, because they’re at a party and they feel guilty.

There you go. So promotion is the other end, and you need to have it at least thought out in your mind. It’s going to cost you some money and time, and you need to find the right people to do it.

Joe Rockey: Yeah. It’s still going to be less time than me doing it myself.

Richard Lowe: Of course.

Joe Rockey: Which is the big part of that.

Richard Lowe: And it’s going to have wider distribution, because you’re going to find the right people, the right companies, and the right avenues. You’ve done it once. You know this now.

Joe Rockey: That is true.

Richard Lowe: And you know what a royal pain in the behind it is to do it yourself.

Joe Rockey: I definitely know that part.

How do you spot book marketing scam emails?

Richard Lowe: Yeah. And how many scams are out there? Oh, Lord.

Joe Rockey: Oh, there are many of those.

Richard Lowe: I get at least a dozen scam emails a day saying, we saw your book on Amazon, we love your book, we think we can make it more, here’s what we want to do, just reply to this email.

You reply, and it costs a thousand bucks, and they don’t do anything. They literally take your thousand bucks and then ask for more.

Joe Rockey: Sounds about right.

Richard Lowe: Yep. So that’s the process, and that’s what we’ve been doing.

Joe Rockey: I’ve been liking it.

Richard Lowe: I’m glad to hear that. It’s a fun process on my side, because I stretch relationships and we keep them humorous. One thing I focus on, and I tell people this in that first pre-sales interview, is to consider it a relationship where we’re both the adults in the room.

If you have a problem, just tell me. If I have a problem, I’m going to just tell you. You don’t need any filters or cushions beyond the normal ones. No need to call each other dicks because we’re being unfiltered.

Richard Lowe: You don’t have to be cautious about saying, I think this chapter needs to be rewritten. Okay, fine, I’ll rewrite it. I don’t care.

Joe Rockey: And we’ve definitely had that back and forth a lot, just calling it out directly, and I think it’s been working pretty well. Based on the whole process so far, seeing the outline and the direction of it versus what I knew the alternative was, it’s not even comparable.

Richard Lowe: Yep. And the adults in the room is important. It really settles things down, because I’ve had toxic clients, I’ve had toxic customers, I’ve had toxic bosses. Nobody needs that in their life.

Joe Rockey: No, no, no. It’s actually one of the things I talk about with the relationship you have with your clients. You’ve got to have a good one, or it’s not going to be beneficial.

Why do ghostwriters lose clients in the middle of a book?

Richard Lowe: It’s not beneficial to anyone. And I think the number one way ghostwriters lose clients is that they’re not communicating with their client about things other than the book.

Joe Rockey: Well, that’s true of anything. Take a nonprofit. Nine times out of ten, the only time they reach out to one of their sponsors or donors is to get more money or to do damage control, and that’s one of the worst things you can do.

If you’re running a nonprofit, having relationships and systematic touch points beyond asking for more money is critical. But most people will never do it.

Richard Lowe: Yep. It’s very important to keep those relationships going. Ghostwriters write great books, the majority of them, especially at my level. If you go to another ghostwriter at my level, you’re probably going to get a good book.

Joe Rockey: No doubt it was going to be a good book. It was just going to be a template.

Richard Lowe: It’ll be decent. You’ll probably come away feeling like it’s an okay book. The problem is you might be a little annoyed, because the communication dropped off halfway.

I can’t speak for all of them, but a lot of them want to do their interviews, go off and write for a few months, and then come back and say, here’s your book. You notice I don’t do that.

Joe Rockey: No, there’s no way to make that work. What’s going to happen? You’re going to forget what you said and then be angry that the book is different from what your brain changed it into over those three months. How could it go any other way?

Richard Lowe: Right. Right. Well, I keep in touch with the client at least weekly, sometimes more if we’re in the thick of it. It takes a little more work on the client side and a little more work on my side, but we produce a better book, and that’s the whole point.

Joe Rockey: And at the end of the day, four years from now, that’s the only part that matters.

Richard Lowe: My bio says I’ve done 54 plus ghostwritten books. That’s just because I got tired of increasing the number. I think I’m at 57 that have been published now, and it’s growing all the time.

It’s important to have multiple clients, because sometimes they decide to go off and do something else and not write books anymore. That’s always a possibility.

During COVID, one died from COVID, so I think that’s a valid excuse to go somewhere else. A little gallows humor there.

Richard Lowe: Some of them decided they wanted to change careers, and one or two lost their jobs, those kinds of things. One of them was from Australia, and the exchange rate basically made her book cost 50% more, because the exchange rate was 1.5 to 1 at that time.

It became too much for her. She didn’t really factor that in when she started. She didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal, but it was.

Joe Rockey: I can see that.

Richard Lowe: So something to consider is the real cost, because I charge in dollars.

Joe Rockey: Sure.

Richard Lowe: And that’s virtually never a problem. Pounds usually come across about the same. I don’t do much ghostwriting outside the US, Britain or Europe. I’ve had a few clients in Australia, and that exchange rate was always a problem.

Joe Rockey: I can see that. I can see that.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. It’s always something to watch out for, but I control the variables.

Joe Rockey: I control the controllables. And like I said, that’s the exciting part of this. It’s one less thing I have to worry about, so the final product is going to be good, and the rest is just the distribution method, how we go about it and how to use this.

This was one of the other major problems I had with the template, and you just went through the reasons people don’t become clients. If I can show the philosophy of how I do something, it’s way more important than a specific instance. It has a way longer shelf life.

Joe Rockey: What happens if I bring out a client, and I certainly have them, who is incredibly dependent on the technology of that day, and it’s basically unrelatable to now?

Now it looks like I have no idea what I’m talking about, or I’m old and dated and it doesn’t matter. Whereas the process, the philosophy, and how it actually impacts people, that’s timeless.

That’s what we’re going for here, and it was those types of conversations where you showed me how my original idea was bad and moved us toward something good.

Richard Lowe: I said it was bad without actually saying it was bad.

Joe Rockey: You were nice about it. You didn’t need to be.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I tend to want to cushion it a little and work to change the mind, usually with the Socratic method, asking questions. Is this really what you want?

Tell me why. Explain your goals. Then you come to the conclusion yourself, which I think you did, that it’s definitely not right. I don’t generally say it’s bad, because people don’t tend to take that well.

Joe Rockey: Well, I definitely came to the conclusion the templates weren’t for me. That’s just the way it was. Now, granted, some of my clients’ industries will be the same a hundred years from now as they are today.

Some of them will be nothing like it by the time this podcast gets released. That’s the nature of the beast. So why date yourself?

Richard Lowe: Yep, yep. I’ve found dating myself to be kind of a fruitless thing anyway. Oh, that was a bad joke. Not very fulfilling. Although I am a nice guy.

Joe Rockey: Being nice is important.

Richard Lowe: Yes. So I don’t really have much more to say. How about you?

Joe Rockey: No, that’s basically it. Like I said, I’m excited to get this into the hands of people who will eventually go, yeah, this is why I need this guy on my board, this is why I need to hire him for his product. I’m excited for that, and that’s what we’re doing.

Richard Lowe: Yep. Well, okay. Thank you for coming. Where would people go to find you?

Joe Rockey: You can click that QR code over my shoulder. It will send you to Elite Business Cruises, and there’s a nice little scheduler right there to have a conversation.

Richard Lowe: Awesome. Well, this has been Leaders and Their Stories. I’m Richard Lowe. This podcast happens usually two or three times a week. I’m running them fast and furious. Come on to the next one. Thank you for coming.

Quotable moments