Steve Sims is an expert marketer within the luxury industry and the founder of Bluefish, one of the top personal concierge services in the world. Also known as the “Real Life Wizard of Oz” for his ability to make the impossible possible, Steve has worked with Elton John and Elon Musk and has been quoted in various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and London’s The Sunday Times. He joins the show today to share his lessons on success for any size business.
Listen in as Steve explains why communication is so integral to success, as well as the most important question that you should be asking your clients. You’ll learn why sometimes ignorance is a superpower, how he turned one client into James Bond for a day, and what it takes to make amazing things happen in life and business.
Learn how to make amazing things happen in life and business with @SteveDSims1, author of BLUEFISHING. Share on X
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On Today’s Episode We’ll Learn:
- Why communication is the key to success.
- How to create loyalty without buying it.
- The importance of developing a strategy instead of a personal brand.
- How Steve turned one client into James Bond for a day.
- Why we must go below the surface with clients to find out what they really want.
Key Resources for Steve Sims:
- Connect with Steve Sims: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube
- Amazon: Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen
- Kindle: Bluefishing
- Audible: Bluefishing
- Hardcover: Bluefishing
- The Bluefish Personal Concierge Services
- Sims Distillery
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Full Episode Transcript:
- Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.Now, here’s Roger.Roger Dooley: Welcome to Brainfluence. I’m Roger Dooley.Our guest today has a modest calling. He makes the impossible possible. Steve Sims is the founder of Bluefish, one of the top personal concierge services and an expert marketer with the luxury industry. He’s worked with Elon Musk and Sir Elton John. He sent people to the bottom of the ocean floor to see the remains of the Titanic, and presumably return them to the surface safely. He’s been called the real life Wizard of Oz. He’s the author of Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen. Welcome to the show Steve.Steve Sims: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.Roger Dooley: How would you describe your job to somebody you met at a cocktail party?
Steve Sims: Oh, probably illegal because it’s so much fun. If I had to be brief, I’d probably say I am the Make A Wish Foundation for people with really big checkbooks. That’s probably it in a nutshell.
Roger Dooley: Right, well that’s such a great thing and not something that you can actually … When you talk to your career counselor in school, that’s probably not one of the options that they’re going to offer you. I guess your first experience with that started in Hong Kong, right? Where you were a greeter at a bar and this really sounds bizarre, but there were five bars named Neptune’s in the same street. And somehow you ended up in number one. There was some really questionable branding there I think. So how did you turn this greeter job into a major success story?
Steve Sims: Well, you’re putting it politely. I was the thug on the door. I was the doorman.
Roger Dooley: Okay. Well, we’ll call you a bouncer too.
Steve Sims: Yeah, exactly. Basically we can get into my head space first of all. I had gone over there because I’d applied for a job as a stockbroker and I lasted one day and then they realized that I couldn’t do it because my only thing I was qualified for was to be a brick layer. So as I kind of lost that job in 24 hours, I’m now in Hong Kong and I had nothing else to do. I was drinking at a first bar on the street. It was called Neptune’s One, as you quite accurately said, bad branding. But it was the first bar. And they asked me if I would help them get a couple of people out of the bar. Now I was a big fella so it was very easy for me to do, by funny enough, just talking to them and saying look I don’t want any trouble. I don’t want to get into a fight, but could you please leave? Because if you don’t they’re probably going to come out and not be so polite.
And so I talked to these guys out of the bar and they said, hey, will you work on the door for us? So I needed a job and I started working on the door. But the beautiful thing about being a doorman is no one wants to talk to you because they’re all basically scared of you because you’re the guy that’s basically got to come in and throw them out. But the good thing is I now had a pedestal to look at humanity. I could literally look at the rich people and go, well, I want to be him. Why is he rich? And why am I not? So the inquisitive entrepreneur in me used this very strange environment to be able to now start a conversation.
Hey John, did you enjoy last night at the club? There’s another club opening up on Thursday. Would you like me to see if I can get you in? I was giving these people a reason to talk to me and what I was going to do, and I say going to do because it never happened. The whole point was for me to, can I build up a relationship and a report with them so I could go, oh, by the way, Jimmy, why are you rich and I’m not? But what I was doing was I was giving them an excuse to stay in conversation with me, by letting them know where the best nightlife was, where the best premiers were, where the best clubs were. And then I started throwing my own parties to, again, keep them coming back to me. Before I realized it, I was involved in Formula One Monaco.
Now this took about five years. So it wasn’t overnight, but all of a sudden I’m in Monaco. I’m working for the New York Fashion Week, the Grammys. Before you realized it, or before I realized it, I was working with some of the biggest brands and events in the planet. The idea of me asking what makes you rich, never ever came up, but they say you are the combination of the five people you hang out with. I realized that I was hanging out with broke bikers, but now I was hanging out with people that owned, not jet charter firms, but owned the jets, owned airports. I had clients that owned buildings and factories and all of a sudden I was surrounding myself with people that did and saw things differently. And just by being in that room, I started looking at things differently. So that’s how it happened. It all came from being a brick layer, working on the door to now working with the biggest brands in the planet.
Roger Dooley: Right and I think that’s a really inspirational story Steve, but also I’d like to add to our listeners here, if you’re thinking, okay, this is not really related to what I’m doing because I do not deal with billionaires and such. Steve has some really great lessons that apply to any scale of business, any kind of interpersonal reaction. We’re going to dig into that. But before we do that, I’m going to ask you about one story. And this is the James Bond story where all of our listeners know James Bond. He’s been a cultural icon for decades. Men want to be him. Women want to be with him, or maybe some women want to be him these days too. One of your more interesting projects was to turn someone into James Bond for a weekend. So how did you accomplish that?
Steve Sims: Well I’m glad you pointed out the beginning, I don’t want people to come and listen to this and go, well he works with Elton John. How the hell can this help me? Everything I do for everyone I do it for, you can do with anyone in your life. You can do it with your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, the girl you want to be your girlfriend. My super power, and I have two. One of them is I communicate with people and I’m stunned how people don’t do that today. They will yell a message on social platform and hope someone responds, but they don’t enter into a conversation. And if anyone listened to the first statement that I made, being a doorman on the nightclub, I wanted to give those people to enter into a conversation with me. That was still what I do today.
So I communicate with people. That’s one of my superpowers. My other one, and this one was, my wife came up with this. I have the super power of ignorance. I’m not scared of things. And I’m not scared because I wasn’t informed of how terrifying these things were. People get really frightened of things before they look at the opportunity and they go, oh, I couldn’t do that. Me? I’m like, okay, that sounds great. Let’s try it. So I piecemeal it down. One of the things that I do with my clients in the concierge firm that I opened was quite simply, quite blatantly, never give them what they asked for, give them what they lust for and desire and they’ll always talk about. So someone will come to me and they’ll go, oh, and this is how this one started.
Oh, my husband is a great fan of James Bond. Could we get some memorabilia of James Bond? Could we get something autographed? Could we get him to drive in a DB5? Could we get something James Bondyesque for him to do for his birthday? And I said, no, why don’t we turn him into James Bond? And that’s where we start dreaming. We’re in a world today of AI. AI responds. We’re growing up in a transactional society. You go on Amazon, you don’t have a conversation with Amazon. You push the button for what you want. You turn on Siri or Alexa and you tell it to turn the radio on or put the lights down. You are giving and barking orders now, you’re not engaging in a conversation and you’re certainly not dreaming and creating. That’s something AI can’t do.
So when clients come to us and even now with my consultancy, I want clients. I want to give clients permission again, to dream. If you could do anything, if you couldn’t fail, what would you do? And then whatever they say, go, no dream bigger. So when the client asks us about getting something autographed by James Bond, we wanted to give them the memory. So quite simply, we looked at the pinnacle places of James Bond. Monte Carlo, fast cars, Aston, Martins, sexy women who wanted to kidnap you, yachts. And we literally got a Hollywood screenwriter to actually write this script with our client, was turned into James Bond, he’d been in retirement. This was the whole story. He’d been in retirement, was now coming back into field service. But he had to go through some tests to make sure that he was healthy again. He had to drive a car around a race track fast. He had to do armed shooting guns to make sure that he was a sharpshooter again.
He had to drive fast boats. He had to be doing all of this in Monaco. And he had to be in the casino in the tux. We laid all of this out for him and then peppered it with villains that literally confronted him in the casino. We actually had a guy in there with a stuffed cat, stroking the cat saying, “Mr. Bond, I hear you are coming back into service. Beware.” And it was brilliant. But the client was like, “I am. Maybe you should beware.” It was so much fun to see this.
Roger Dooley: I bet casino security loved that.
Steve Sims: Well, we had to warn them. One of the funny things was they actually, even though we had warned everyone, when we turned up with this stuffed cat, they were like, no, no, no, no animals. We were like, hey, this is a stuffed cat. Look at it. We would hold it up by the tail. It isn’t alive mate. One of the funny things was James Bond, as everybody knows, is the most well known secret spy in the world. Every bar he goes to, they know what he drinks. So this client of ours, and I’m trying to think what it was, but it wasn’t an Old Fashioned, maybe a Negroni or something. But he had a drink that he loved. So we made sure that every bar that he ever went to and we’d have what we called ghosters. They would pre-warn them, he’s coming now, he’s coming now. So the bartender will be like “Mr. Bond, your Negroni,” and would give him his drink without him ever having to ask. Because as you know, James Bond in the olden films would just turn up and they would just give him his martini. It was just hilarious.
Roger Dooley: Right. We can all hope that we know somebody who is as generous a gift giver as that person’s spouse. But I think you hit on an important point there Steve, and that is not necessarily always giving the client what they ask for. And I think part of what has underlined a lot of my work for years has been the fact that people, even our more typical consumer transaction can’t always tell you what they want or what they really want or what they’re going to do. And it’s important to get below the surface. So how do you do that in your situation? A client comes to you and whether it’s, it could be something very small as opposed to James Bond memorabilia. But how do you sort of get past that initial request to see if that’s really what is going to serve that person’s needs, which it might be in many cases, they might know what they want. How do you determine that?
Steve Sims: I ask them a very vulgar, offensive word, and it’s crazy, but this actually upsets a lot of people. So here’s how it works. Someone will come to you and let’s be serious. The internet has made a lot of stupid people stupider. And it’s allowed you to think a lot about things when you actually don’t. You can watch the internet and get 20 different answers depending on how you actually ask the question. So people will come to us and they will go, hey, I want to do this. I believe this is going on and I want that. And what do you do, first of all, is you marry or match the enthusiasm. You go fantastic. That sounds brilliant. And then comes in the offensive word. You go, why? You lower your tone of voice, you go quiet and just go why?
And that stops people in their tracks. Some people actually will respond to you, I told you what I wanted. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. And I’ve had people get upset and hang up on me. Okay. I will get people that will text me going, oh, I’ve got a brilliant idea for you. And I’ll just respond back with why. Oh yeah, can we have dinner? We’ve got to talk about it. Why? I will respond why so many times and then you’ll get people, the people that you end up working with. They’ll go, good question. It’s because of this. And I’ve actually got a story. Can I give you a story on this?
All right, so this will give it to you hopefully in a beautiful example. So again, it’s an elaborate event and most of my stuff is expensive. But funny enough, my consulting clients range from real estate agents, attorneys. I’ve got a client I just took on about two months ago and owns a bakery. So the people I work with are the richest and most affluent people in the world, the people I consult with are those people that want to get to those clients or want to build up their businesses. So I’m working on all ends of the spectrum and the details never change.
So this year 2020, was the last year that I worked for Sir Elton John for his Oscar party. And every year we would be involved in the party they’d have for his national fundraiser, the Elton John AIDS Foundation. And we had a client. Sorry, let me rephrase that. We had a gentleman contact us, who said he wanted to meet Elton John. So I said, okay put him through to me. So one of the team put them through to me and I said hey, how are you doing? He’s like, hey, I want to meet Elton John. Same thing, you match their enthusiasm. Oh, that sounds fantastic. Why? And then shut up. And the guy’s like, well, he’s one of the last icons. Everyone knows Elton. I want to get a selfie with him. I want to get a picture because he’s going to die soon. It’s his last tour. Yeah, that’s it. And that was it. That was literally what he said to me on the phone.
So I was like, oh that sounds great. I’ll get back to you. And as you can imagine, I didn’t. Why? Because there was no depth to it. There was no core. It was a shallow request that whether I had charged him 10 bucks or 10,000 bucks, he wouldn’t have valued what he got. Okay. Because he had no drive in why in it. So what I did, I just ignored that one.
Now a month later, we get another phone call that came into our office and one of the girls contacted me. She went, I’ve got a guy on the phone that wants to meet Sir Elton John and I said, is it this guy from last month? And she said, no. And we both came to the same conclusion. Maybe it’s his friend trying a different angle. So I went put it through to me, don’t waste your time, put it through to me. So I had already written the guy off. And the guy comes on the phone. I’m like, hey, are you doing? This is Steve Sims. Hey, I want to meet Sir Elton John. I’m like, Oh, that sounds great. Why? So he goes quiet, which kind of threw me off because I would’ve thought if the other guy had prepared him, he would have been prepared for this word.
But he went, Oh well Sir Elton John is one of the, and again, when you ask people why they slow their tone down because it’s a pattern interrupt. And the guys like well I’ve got a lot of history with Sir Elton John, it’s his last concert. And I’d like to be able to meet him and tell him a story and well there’s things. And it was that last peter off of the conversation. So I responded with what things? Now you do actually end up becoming almost like a psychiatrist in this job and a Sherlock Holmes detective, trying to find out where’s the core? Where’s the button? So this guy goes even quieter and he responds with this.
He said, when I was a kid, I used to go to school in the morning and in the car and come home in the car. And it was my dad that drove me. It was our thing, not my mum. My dad drove me to school, my dad picked me up and brought me home from school. All the way up into high school this is what he did. Now when he first started doing that, we had a cassette player in there and only one cassette and it was Elton John. We would sing Elton John all the way to school and all the way back from school. And as the cars progressed, as I got older, we had a CD player. My dad would still put the Elton John CD in, we would sing it all the way there all the way back. And I remember loving it up until my teenage years where I hated it and didn’t want to sing, but he would still insist on putting it on. And even when I didn’t want to sing, he would sing.
See now my dad’s been gone about 20 years ago. But when I’m driving down the road for an appointment and Elton John comes on the radio, my dad is sat next to me singing. I just want to say thank you to Elton for bringing my dad back for the occasional five minutes of my day. And there was the core. That was it. So we introduced him to Sir Elton. He told him the story, they hugged it out, they got a picture. There was some meat we could use. If someone can’t give you a why, then what they’re going to do is they’re going to start arguing over the price. The bottom line of it is never chase the price tag. Chase the value. If you can’t establish value in the person’s request and can’t demonstrate the value and they start asking the question, can you do it cheaper? As soon as someone starts talking to you about a price, there’s either no core reason or you failed to demonstrate the value in what you actually do.
Roger Dooley: Interestingly enough, Steve, your interview technique is not dissimilar to what some neuro marketers do called deep interviews where it is almost like a psychoanalysis approach in trying to get at the customer’s motivations. And they’ll do it, not for a one off thing like this, but more to a modest number of people to try and determine what people really feel about the brand or the product area. Like what’s really driving them. And so it’s pretty interesting that you came up with kind of a similar strategy. Now I want to get to a technique that I think can apply to any individual in any sized business where they’re, whether they’re part of a large company or just getting started. And I’m not sure if they still put SkyMall catalogs on airplanes now, Steve.
Steve Sims: I haven’t seen one for years.
Roger Dooley: No, but I think the same strategy could be applied in any number of ways. Explain your SkyMall catalog strategy.
Steve Sims: I’ve only ever focused on one thing, commence a conversation. That’s the only thing I’ve ever, ever, ever focused on. A lot of people go into a meeting focused on the sale. Hey, I want there to be a point in my conversation, but it all starts with a conversation. So what I would do was I would fly a lot. Through me doing speaking and consulting and so my travel firm, the concierge, I was constantly on a plane, still am. And there used to be a magazine on there. The magazine actually, I don’t believe exists anymore, but there is a formula or format of it on most airlines still. It used to be called the SkyMall and the SkyMall used to be this magazine that had all the kind of tacky rubbish that you could buy that no one ever wanted. But they had a captured audience for a six hour flight.
And it would be things like a postbox, or a skeleton for your cleaning cupboard. So just stupid, ridiculous novelty stuff that usually was overpriced as well. Maybe that’s why it went out of business. What I would do on the plane, and this was again pre-internet because we’ve started getting a lot of planes now that have internet on the planes. And even though that’s sketchy, but it’s starting to get better and better. What I used to do was I used to do two things. The hotel that I was staying at, I would actually take a lot of the stationary and I still do this even today. I would say to the hotel, hey, I’ve got some memos to my, to my clients. I need 50 envelopes and 50 sheets of paper. No hotel ever says no, because they want you marketing and branding their hotel to your clients.
If you’re staying in a four or five star hotel, they assume your clients are four or five star hotel people. So they’ve never ever said no to me. On the plane, I would write a little note and I would stick it in the envelope. So you would get a letter from like the Hotel de Russie in Rome, or you’d get a letter from the Savoy in London. You don’t know who it is. And it would force you to open it up because you’d be like, who do I know from the Savoy? But I took it a step further. I would get the SkyMall. And I would find one of those stupid things like a suit hanger in the shape of the top half of a body. It’d be a cutout face that would be the hanger or something. And I would rip it out badly, tear it out and with a Sharpie write on it, I can see you using this in your office, Steve. And I would put it in the envelope. So when I got off the plane, I would then post all these things out.
Now, when you get the envelope, you can feel it slightly squishy because it hasn’t been sent to you by a fulfillment center sending you a bill. It’s been a hand written envelope and your curiosity opens it. And all of a sudden there’s a postbox, or there’s a phone in the shape of like a bone handle or something, just something stupid. And me saying, hey, this would look good on your office desk. It’s just something surreal. And I would get my clients. And here was a funny thing. My clients would contact me going, you send me some stupid stuff. And then I would say to them, do you want me to stop? And they’d be like, hell no.
And so I would always try to find novelty, silly thing, and I still do it today. I send my clients stupid mugs, or if I see a pad with something ridiculous on it. I went to Nashville the other week and there was this lighting pad. And it said on the front of this writing pad, it looked like a very nice, eloquent writing pad. And it was only like 3.50 or something like that. Less than four bucks with tax, tiny little pad. And it said, “Namaste that shit away.” And I just thought, well that’s comical. So I just bought 10 and just sent them to different people. So they get this silly little pad with a quirky little quote on the front of it, but it keeps me at the front of their mind.
And again, that’s all the point there is, isn’t it? To keep your clients knowing about you. People talk about loyalty today. It doesn’t exist. People try to buy loyalty. If you’re shopping at Sachs or if you’re shopping at Bloomingdale’s, you’re going to shop at either one of those that gives you the best price or gives you the most rewards to cheapen the price of what you’re buying. You’re not loyal to these brands. You’re loyal to the best price. Yeah, your best mate that always goes down the pub with you, he has no rewards program to be your friend. He has no loyalty program to say whether or not he goes out with you.
So you’ve got to create the loyalty for these people to stay with you. And if it’s put smile on their faces by sending them something a bit silly, a bit quirky, a bit different, and let’s be blunt. The only post we get nowadays are bills or telling us about the new Chinese restaurant around the corner. So when you actually get a letter from another place in the world, from a hotel you’ve never heard of, you get inquisitive. And that’s the power of the impact.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. Just to highlight a couple of key points you made there, Steve. One is those ads you ripped out rather badly, and you might think, well, gee, wouldn’t you want it to be neater? But in fact, you’re showing that it was done by hand by you. And it was not some kind of mass produced clip out thing that you bought a bunch of, and also it was personalized. When you can, you would somehow make that relevant to the individual, where in the book you talk about sending somebody a goofy mailbox ad because they were moving into a new house.
Now clear, they weren’t going to buy the dinosaur mailbox or whatever it was, but it showed wow, hey, this person is keeping up with me. They know what I’m doing. They took the time to do this and that engenders tremendously good feelings. And also the handwritten aspect too, because again, how much, truly hand … Now junk mail uses fake handwriting, which is kind of amusing because it still doesn’t look like real handwriting, but we just don’t get too many things that are addressed by hand anymore.
Steve Sims: No, we don’t. We don’t. And why? Because it takes effort. When something is handwritten, when an envelope is handwritten, you know it’s hand written. And you’re right, there’s a lot of printing now that makes it look like it’s handwritten, but it doesn’t gleam, it doesn’t have the imprint. You know that it’s a printed look. Now it may have caught your attention at first. But when a letter’s actually been folded and put in an envelope and licked and you put it down and here’s one note that I like to use. I call it the Squiffy Stamp Method.
When you put a stamp in the right hand corner, when you put your thumb down on it just suddenly tilt it to the left quickly, make sure that stamp is not perfectly aligned with the corners of the envelope. Why? Because a fulfillment center is accurate, pristinely, soullessly accurate. It will place that stamp or just do the code, the actual squiggly lines, just the actual imprinted, prepaid postage stamp print onto it. But when you put a stamp on it and you squiff it slightly to the left, it makes it imperfect and tells the recipient this wasn’t done by a computer. This was done by a person and that gains you attention.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. I’m going to disagree with you there slightly, Steve, and believe it or not back in the last century when direct mail was pretty common, some canny direct marketers discovered that technique. And they would apply stamps at an off angle deliberately because they found it raised response rates, I think something like 15% just for that reason. So back in those days, they not only figured that out, they had automated it. But anything that makes it personalized, and as I was reading your book, I was thinking of a experience from my own early days. Long ago, decades ago, as a young manager in a company. I got a Christmas card from the general manager of that division, who was like the top guy in our city and our company. Actually, we were part of a bigger company, but he was the top guy in the company. And it was a Christmas card that had not only sort of clearly hand done calligraphy for the name and address.
But then there was like a little Christmas elf and some designs sketched onto it. I mean, it was probably the most elaborate envelope I had ever seen come in. And it was clearly done individually. It was not produced by a machine by any means. So I was really impressed by that. Later on, I had a chance to ask him about it and he says, oh yeah, my, my daughter really enjoys doing those. So I have her do the Christmas cards. Now he probably had to send out, I don’t know, something like maybe 50 of those or something. It wasn’t a big company. I don’t think the hourly workers in the factory got those, but I have probably received thousands of Christmas cards in my lifetime. But right now when we’re talking, that is probably the one Christmas card I actually remember, could describe compared to all the others that sort of just sort of went, either sat on the counter for a little while or went straight into the recycle bin.
Steve Sims: Yeah, it does that. I know when I get the Christmas cards, join the December month where it’s just a picture of a perfect family with nothing written on the back. Yeah, I’ve told people don’t even bother sending them. They’ll just going to line, as I call it, the circular filing cabinet.
Roger Dooley: Explain your approach to personal branding. I know no personal branding is really … Obviously it’s important to you and you’ve worked on your brand, but how do you tell other people to work on their personal brands?
Steve Sims: I tell them not to. People try to develop a brand. I tell them to develop a strategy and identify it as what problem they solve. If you wake up at 12 o’clock at night and you’ve got a headache, you’re going to reach for some headache tablets, you have no care whatsoever what the packaging looks like. You just care that they do the job. So I tell people when you’re focusing on your brand, focus on the problem you solve and let all of your clients establish your brand. Like if you’re trying to do something and all of your clients, let’s say, for argument’s sake, you’re a baker and you make brilliant yellow cakes. And all of your clients are telling everyone, you’ve got to go to this baker, his red cakes are amazing. Then what you think you’re establishing is off of what is actually being established.
So let everybody else brand here. Now you can help. You can suggest taglines, like Just Do It with Nike and stuff, and show loads of repetitive images of what you want people to imagine for you. But your real brand, like it or not, is what one person is going to tell another person at a cocktail party. That’s what you stand for.
Roger Dooley: Sort of along the same lines. What I discovered was that you actually, I telepathically I assume, stole one of my litmus tests for people. For years, I’ve just sort of had this mental way of evaluating people, would I want to have a beer with that person? Would I sit in a bar and have a beer with that person? And if the answer is no, then that is probably not a person that I want to somehow be involved with as a client, as an employee or in any other way really. So I was kind of surprised when I saw, that you use a similar line. Would you chug a beer with that person?
So that sort of one ups the game a little bit. There’s a little bit tighter filter than mine even, but I think that’s really so true when it comes to your brand against too. You can try and craft a brand that isn’t really you, but ultimately people are going to have that sense about you, whether, hey, do I want to hang out informally with this person and just chat, hangout? Or is this a more transactional thing where yeah, I’ll do business with them because they’ve got the best product for the best price or whatever? And so I think that is a great test. Would you chug a beer with that person?
Steve Sims: Yeah, it’s a simple one. It’s a really simple one and I can delve into it further and I will give a shallow plug. But if you end up at stevedsims.com and you sign up for the newsletter, it’s actually a video that I send people to first of all, do an audit on your social circle. And it literally is the beer test or the chug test as we call it. And the test is quite simple. If you’re walking up the high street and on the other side of the road, there’s someone in your life. It could be in your workforce. It could be in your relationships. It could be your buddies, could be your accountant. It could be anyone in your world. Instantaneously, do you quickly turn left and look in the window and pretend as though you’re really interested in buying, I don’t know, a new kitty cot or bicycle or mattress or whatever it is, and check out the reflection to see when they go past you? And as soon as they pass you, then resume your position and start walking up the hallway street.
If you do that, get them out of your world. If on the other side, you want to cost the road and jump in front of them and you go, Roger how are you? Let’s go grab a coffee, chug a beer. Let’s go hang out for a sec. That person needs to stay in your life. So it’s the beer test, it’s the chug test. Would you want to cross the road and intentionally jump in front of that person and go, let’s go and chug a beer or not? Dictates whether or not they need to be in your world or not.
Roger Dooley: Great. Well, I think that is a great piece of advice and probably a good place to wrap up Steve. Let me remind our listeners that we’re speaking with Steve Sims, an expert in getting all kinds of things done and author of the book, Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen. Steve, how can people find you?
Steve Sims: Well, if you want to come and get a bit more into speaking to me on a monthly basis, I do live webinars and stuff. I have simsdistillery.com, but you can find me pretty much everywhere under Steve D Sims, D for Dashing and Sims has just go one M in it. So stevedsims.com or find me on Instagram, Facebook under An Entrepreneur’s Advantage With Steve Sims, I’m pretty easy to find.
Roger Dooley: Great. Well, we will link to all of those places and to any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast. And we’ll have a text version of our conversation there too. Steve, thanks so much for being on the show.
Steve Sims: It’s been a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.
And remember, Roger’s new book, Friction, is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”
For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction.
