Jason Feifer: evaluation

Transcript context

…And so here's what she did. So her name, I shout her out. So this is Meg O'Hara. And Meg O'Hara is a painter, a Canadian landscape painter. Which again, a small business. And she writes, "Hi Jason, I have an idea for a story I think would be valuable and relevant to you, Entrepreneur Magazine and the Problem Solvers Podcast." That's the show I do for Entrepreneur. And then she says, "Here's what's going on with my business. All entrepreneurs had to be flexible during Covid. This is a story about how one artist in Canada benefited from the border closure." This just sort of intrigues me. Oh, how? "When Covid hit in March, all ski resorts across North America shut down early. Skiers are a high earning demographic in Canada. They fall in the top 5% of income." Okay, well anyway. So she goes on. What she tells me, I remember this now, what she tells me is that her business used to be being hired by ski resorts to come and paint landscapes for their facilities. And when the border shut down and people weren't going to these resorts anymore, she had to come up with a completely different way of doing her business. And so she started to think, well, I can't work for these resorts anymore. They're not hiring me. But all these skiers who used to work at the resorts who have seen my work, or who used to ski at the resorts who were maybe familiar with my work, they're not skiing either. They probably are sitting around wishing that they were skiing. They'd love something to see of their favorite ski location, and they also have money sitting around because they're not spending it on the ski resorts. So then she lists off the problems and the solutions in bullet points. Which I love. Because she has listened to the show, the Problem Solvers Show, which is structured in exactly that way. Tell me the problem, tell me the solution that you came to. So she lists it off. Here are the problems: the skiers can't come, people are spending more time at home. The solution: I create artwork for their homes that depicts their favorite views from skiing as they were. She goes on and on and on. I read this and I just think, there is something here about what this person did to reinvent their business at a time in which one marketplace shut down, but it created a new one that I think people would like to hear. Because at that time everyone was thinking about how to reinvent themselves and their business. And even though I reach people who have very complex and large businesses, sometimes it's really a beautiful thing to hear a single individual who does the simplest thing in the world, which is put paint to canvas, talk about how she did it for herself. Because you can extract these wonderful little lessons about how to reinvent yourself that I think are going to be relevant to a very broad audience. So Meg sent me that email, I replied and I said, "I like it." And we did it. ese wonderful little lessons about how to reinvent yourself that I think are going to be relevant to a very broad audience. So Meg sent me that email, I replied and I said, "I like it." And we did it. So that's a good example of someone who spent time understanding my work, down to the structure of how I'm communicating, and then sent me a pitch that very quickly and clearly seemed customized to me, and told me her story in a way that I could imagine telling my audience. At that point, it's a pretty easy yes, That is an amazing example. I just took some notes on things that she did right based on things you've shared in the past. Even just from the subject line or the first sentence, it was clear that she knew you. She knew you had this podcast, she knew the magazine, and she even expressed this specifically, you're going to be interested in this. She mentioned how this, she has a story. She starts immediately with a story. There's not the value prop of the company, here's what we do and here's why we're awesome. And then the lessons, the mission of Entrepreneur you talked about, is insights and lessons that people achieve, and she just went straight to here's what we've learned.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.