Simon Chappuzeau 11:18
I wasn’t running the festival. But what happened was that when I realized that this film script editing thing is not like the thing for me, doesn’t really pay the bills, I produced a documentary film that we manage to screen at the film festival, which made me realize we need a space where we can hang out with the film with the whole film crew. And being the visionary entrepreneur, I then came up with, Hey, let’s do a festival lounge for the whole festival. And I rented a space close by the by the, to the festival grounds, and had a really nice festival lounge for 10 days. And after that, I was like, hey, this was kind of fun. What about if we do this for like 365 days, and I rented the space and had to realize that the festival takes 10 days. And then there are three and 55 more days in the year where you have to fill the space with something so you can pay rent and to pay the employees. And so that’s how I came to learn about good marketing and bad marketing and a good product and a bad product. Because during the 10 days of the festival, we had zero problem to rent out the space and sort of host free events per day. And it was like amazing. And then the other thing, 55 days, we sort of scrambled by and tried to find customers who would rent the space. And that is what I understood. Location, location, location is all and being able to identify your customers by in this case, pulling up the festival catalog, calling all the companies that we knew would come to the festival and say, Hey, we know you’re doing a premiere of this film one do you want to rent out space? So that was a very effective direct selling strategy for for the space. But for the other 355 days, you would never know who wants to do a function presentation. Team party saw was really hot selling debt.
John Corcoran 13:23
And it was. So it was kind of like an ancillary business inspired by the Berlin Film Festival, which then becomes its own business. And you 12 years, I believe you said you were in the corporate events? World. Yeah, that business must have evolved and changed over time.
Simon Chappuzeau 13:40
Yeah, I mean, we had we had to evolve. Because when we realized the film industry is too small to support us over the year. And the 10 days are not enough. We started doing all kinds of events. And we had to understand the industry. How does the events industry work, and I was never in the industry. So I had no idea how to budget for catering and how to hire the whole team for the bar and all that. So I had to learn that on job. And yeah, it was an interesting experience.
John Corcoran 14:14
Yeah. And so how did you end up discovering LinkedIn will point in your journey? Did that become something that you realize was a platform that you had aptitude for? Good question.
Simon Chappuzeau 14:27
I mean, I was always I always liked communities and bringing people together. That is what I also liked about the event space because we managed to bring together a whole independent film scene at the festival, and you could see that there was a community of people that kind of knew each other and that would work together and so we always come back gravitate each other. And I was very intrigued when the social networks came up a small world in 2008 and six At Facebook, and you certainly could form these communities online. And I just loved that, and ended up building another business and 2016 2017, where we started a community for blockchain entrepreneurs. And we ended up with 250 entrepreneurs, a very exclusive small group, but it was a community. And that took me to LinkedIn. And seeing that it’s a great way to see who is available for a certain topic or who’s interested in something, because that’s something you can see on LinkedIn, unlike Facebook or Twitter, where you have more than an unlimited, so what say it’s, that’s when when I came to see it as an interesting tool, but since then it has massively, evolved often think the past two or three years were like a huge shift for the platform.
John Corcoran 15:59
Let’s talk about the the structure of a LinkedIn post and some of the things that gets attention. So I’m looking at your feed right now. And I see you have an image on Audible. I think all of your posts here. I know there’s some people that don’t do that. There’s some people to experiment with video, talking about some of the different things that you see that are that are working well these days.
Simon Chappuzeau 16:23
Yeah, I think that’s a popular question to ask what works well, and everything can work. I mean, I see people who do not do any pictures, any videos, it’s just the text post. And that’s all they do. And they they’re killing it. And you have other people who do video that do very well, I always have a an image, it’s this yellow square that is becomes like the brand. But I think the really interesting question is, what do I need to do not in terms of like the format, but the the rhythm and the consistency. And what I see with those people who really have a huge audience on LinkedIn, they are very consistent with a posting, people know exactly what to expect. They’re very clear with who they’re targeting. And usually they are very narrow, or they have a very clear focus. And they just show up every day or every week, but it’s very, very consistent thing. And if you do that, then it doesn’t really matter that much. Whether you do video, or slideshows, or text posts, yes, they do have certain certain advantages with like one having a wider reach than the other. But I mean, just think about Justin Welsh, one of the people that really inspired me on LinkedIn. He never does any images. But you know exactly what to expect from him. He talks to solopreneurs. And whatever he does, it’s always insightful. It’s always valuable. It’s it’s super consistent. And he has conditioned people to wait for his post, because they know it’s great. And I think the question is more like, how are you going to condition your audience to love what you do? And absorb? Should I do videos or text posts or slideshows?
John Corcoran 18:20
Yeah. And then, so talk to me about clients that you work with that struggle with this that aren’t producing regular content on LinkedIn? How do you approach it with them? How do you, you know, I know that the challenge would be one to get clients to actually produce it, because they’re not right now. And then the, you know, one alternative would be to write it all for them. But I imagine if you do that, then it’s not going to be really reflective of their voice. So how, how do you strike that happy medium between having it be in their voice, but also dealing with the fact that, you know, the clients I imagine you work with are busy, they got stuff going on, they’ve have a proven track record of not having produced content on LinkedIn. So you know, it’s not like they’re going to suddenly change.
Simon Chappuzeau 19:11
I mean, it’s always like, if you see the value of something, you have to invest your time and energy to do that. And what we often see is, if people are not willing to do that on LinkedIn, they don’t really see the value of what it can do it. So I’m like, Yeah, we have to do it, and everybody’s doing it. But if they don’t want to do it, they don’t see the value. And what we then usually says, hey, when was the last time you were going to some sort of convention and she said, You intern to present your due to do business development. It’s you would never do this because it’s sort of like the one thing where you can go and meet potential customers and clients and socialize and it’s sort of, there’s a randomness to the people that you’re going to meet at a conference. And it’s very similar with LinkedIn. It’s a business development tool. If If you play on it, if you invest the time you like you would invest into conference or a convention, you will meet people that will help you develop your business. And the one thing that does work, in my opinion is if you hire somebody to write something for you, which will not be fully reflective of your personality and your voice and your, your, your humor and who you are, it’s gonna be maybe authoritative and informative, and, like, top notch industry knowledge, but let’s be honest, I mean, if we, if we go to a social media platform, there’s a desert, interest in learning, but also there’s an interest in being entertained and sort of have a sense for who are the other people. And that is something that I believe only you as the author can do. And so what we do is we first of all, try to get people excited about LinkedIn to to help them see how it could be a tool of business development, so that they then see that they have to audit themselves, because it’s something you don’t want to give away. And when they see that, then we can help them to develop their own unique voice, and hold them accountable so that they get to rhythm of posting weekly or daily or whatever they choose, it doesn’t really matter. But to really get them into the habit of doing it. And then once they see it’s working, then we can leave because then they will continue doing it.
John Corcoran 21:29
But how does that work? Like? Do you get on a call with them? And talk it out with them? Or do you get on a call with them? And say, Alright, start writing? Do you need to write this write out these stories now? I mean, how does it practically work?
Simon Chappuzeau 21:40
So very simple. Depending on how much they’ve already done on LinkedIn, we look at what they’ve done. And we sort of take stock off where they are, what are what are the assets? What they I mean, how many followers do they have? Is there some traction or is it like a cold start. And we then basically get on a call once or twice per week, depending on how much time they want to invest, and start with, looking at what they’ve done, and giving feedback of what they should pay attention to. And we also worked through a couple of frameworks that we have not invented, we’ve just stolen them. But the Lean Canvas is a great tool to just capture who you are, what market you want to target, and use it as a guide to hold it against a post. Because if you write something that is not interesting to the target market that you set, you want to address that in Canvas, then there’s no point in posting this post. So we capture a couple of core elements about the business. Also with the video from us to vision traction organizer, to really have a documented clarity of this is what we do. This is why we do it. This is how we do it. And then out of that it is easy to then co develop a content plan where we brainstorm pieces, where we show them how now to use tools like ChatGPT to pre write these things, and then really turn it into their own piece. And then we work depending on how the client wants to do it. That’s either we preview the posts and give feedback or they just posted and then we review what happened after they posted it and what correction they got. Why? How could have possibly been better?
John Corcoran 23:27
With it? This would be great. Where can people go to learn more about you check out your new podcast. Follow your LinkedIn posts. Where can people go?
Simon Chappuzeau 23:36
Yes, well, LinkedIn, so they can find me on LinkedIn. If you look for StoryLux LinkedIn or for my complicated last name, Chappuzeau, there’s only one guy like me. So they can easily find you. There’s also our website, StoryLux, but I definitely would recommend coming to to LinkedIn because that’s where we have the most information and you can see the policy style and what we do.
John Corcoran 23:56
Alright, thanks a lot, Simon.
Simon Chappuzeau 23:57
Cool. Thank you.
Outro 24:03
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.