Episode 39: Unemployed, Jobless, and Searching?

Does any of this "advice" sound familiar to you?

• Just start a business.
• Just freelance. 
• Pursue self-employment.
• Monetize a hobby and make it full-time.

If someone is unemployed, searching, and scared, this is what they often hear. 

Unfortunately, most small businesses fail and random visibility ≠ success, trust, new clients coming in, etc. 

Business gurus sell you using a familiar formula:

You're doing _________ wrong.  →  But I know the secret.  →  And it's simple.

🤔 Is it though? Let's explore...

BLS stats on business failure: https://www.commerceinstitute.com/business-failure-rate/

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Subscribe to my weekly newsletter, The Unicorn Dispatch, here: https://sara-causey.kit.com/2d8b7742dd

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

#businessfailure #badbusinessadvice #randomvisibility #salestactics #caveatemptor 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In Episode 39 of the Decoding the Unicorn podcast, host Sara Causey discusses the misconception that exposure equates to trust and profit in business. She highlights the challenges of job loss and business failure, citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing a 79.6% survival rate for businesses at one year, dropping to 34.7% at 10 years. Sara critiques predatory sales tactics that emphasize visibility without considering audience alignment, using the example of Jane Doe. She argues that random appearances and irresistible offers often fail to convert into sales, urging caution and rational decision-making in business strategies.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Podcast episode, monetize drive, Thanksgiving holiday, job market, business ownership, staffing and recruiting, pandemic impact, Great Resignation, predatory sales, visibility myths, networking events, brand awareness, irresistible offer, business survival, audience engagement.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 39 of decoding the unicorn the podcast. I appreciate you joining me in today's episode. I want to tackle the topic of you can't always or even often monetize drive by attention. First things first, I want to say that if you're here in the United States, I hope you had an excellent Thanksgiving holiday. I certainly did. I ate a little too much, as is the American way, on our kind of national gluttony holiday. I also had a very good birthday, and I'm back in the saddle now. Another housekeeping note, there will be a new episode today, obviously, for December the ninth, and another new episode for Tuesday, December the 16th. The podcast will go back on hiatus for Christmas and New Year's. So there will not be new episodes on the 23rd or the 30th. It will come back live on January the sixth in the new year. In the meantime, however, I want to focus on this idea that exposure does not always equal trust. It doesn't always save your business and it doesn't always equal dollars in your pocket. If you've been in this scenario before, or you're feeling like you're struggling, stay tuned.

Sara's award winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her forthcoming project Simply Dag, will launch globally next summer. To stay in the loop join her email list. The link is provided in the write up for this episode. And now back to the show. 

Let's think of a scenario that unfortunately, is quite common. Maybe you're in a job that stinks. You don't like what you're doing. The boss is a jerk. Your co workers are backstabbers, and you're just not feeling it. You deeply do not want to be there. Maybe you like the job itself, but your boss and your colleagues are the problem, or vice versa. Maybe you have a great boss, but the job itself is tedious, mind numbing, awful, soul crushing, etc. Maybe you've been handed a pink slip. Perhaps you liked what you were doing. Maybe you were even planning to be a lifer at that place and retire from there, but the dream died. They handed you a pink slip and told you you were no longer needed. Maybe the entire company folded, and everybody from the company went out on the job market at the same time through no fault of their own. That's a very real thing that's happened to plenty of people, and they're finding, as they get turned out onto the job market, that there's just nothing out there. I know that that sounds gloom and doom, but based on my experience, you have to understand, I was a staffing and recruiting SME. I niched in hard that was my area of expertise for 15 years, and I'm glad to be retired from it, because I could steadily see the wind coming out of the sails year after year 2020. Was difficult, obviously, because of the pandemic, 21 was artificially manipulated and inflated due to the great resignation. It was a lot like the FOMO and the Yolo in the housing market. The wind started coming out of the sales in 22 even more so in 2324 was a nightmare. I would have no idea what 25 was like. Thank God I was already living as a creative and an artist, because if I was trying to make a go of it, in staffing your HR for non existent jobs, you're going to fill jobs where and for who, plus you have an increasing number of HR departments turning to AI and robotics. So it's like I would have been doing what exactly with all this time. So what's the solution? If you're looking for a job you can't find one, or you're stuck in a job and you're hugging it because you feel like you have no other option, but it's slowly killing your soul. What to do? Well, in America, we're told, start your own business. That's another part of the American dream, isn't it? We've been told for years, buy a house. Don't rent. Buy a house. Buying a house, having that pride and ownership of your own place, is part of the American dream. Back in the day, w would give speeches about it. It's good for America. It's good for you to own a house, and it's like, well, if you can afford it, I guess, and the maintenance and the insurance and the property taxes, but it's way, way out of reach for most people in this country at this point, the prices are insane. Well, there's a similar and analogous side of the coin with business ownership, people get told, start your own business. That's the solution to your problem. Work for yourself. You'll control everything. You'll have better odds of success. You won't have a boss that's a jerk. You won't have colleagues that are backstabbers. This is the solution, sure. Just like home ownership is the solution, right? According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics looking at the average business survival rate for 2024 so this information is pretty current. At the one year point, it's 79.6 by five years, it drops to 50% by 10 years, it's down to 34.7 and I would argue that those are probably optimistic statistics. I would also say that it doesn't factor in is the business open, ostensibly, but on ice, meaning there are times that people will keep their website up. They will keep their LLC active, but they're not doing anything in the business. They've had to take freelancing gigs, or they've had to go back to a full time eight to five job because the business is in the toilet. But we're not seeing that. All we're seeing is the point at which somebody has officially thrown in the towel and said, I can't do this anymore. So is business ownership really a solution to the problem if you can't find a job, is that the only thing that you could do instead? Now you may be wondering, well, how does that tie into this thing about exposure and visibility? Here's where I'm going to thread the needle. I'm going to give you a fictional composite character, because I'm not trying to blast any one particular person. I'm trying to call out an entire industry of people, an entire genre of what I would personally call predatory sales. So let's just imagine Jane Doe. Jane is smart, and she knows these statistics. She knows that most small businesses in the US fail, maybe not immediately, but over the course of time, they're probably going in the dumper the odds are against the business surviving, especially when you factor in people that have to put the business on ice and go work a quote, unquote regular job because the business is not profitable, and so these people know that information, and they look for ways to prey upon people. One way that they do that is by telling people the problem is visibility. Nobody knows about you, nobody knows about your business. And so I can help you with that. Hmm. And it sounds like it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? It works on three psychological levers. You're doing it wrong. In this case, nobody knows who you are, nobody's aware of your business. Nobody knows what you do. You're basically a drop in the ocean, or one grain of sand on a big beach, so you're doing it wrong because you're not getting exposure and visibility. The second lever is, but I know the secret, so that way you hire someone like Jane Doe to come in and tell you the secret. The third psychological lever is, it's simple. We love that in America. It may not be easy, but it's simple. It's not rocket science. You don't have to be Albert Einstein to understand what's happening here. And that draws people to a predatory sales tactic, a predatory sales person like Jane Doe. So let's look at some reasons why random visibility, random appearances, don't work. When somebody like Jane says, You need to be seen. Go to networking events, join the Chamber of Commerce, and anytime they have an event, you need to be there. You need to go to the pancake breakfast at the Elks Lodge. You need to go to the Chili Cook Off fundraiser at the hospital. Whenever there's an event, just go. Don't ask any questions. Don't get all up in your head and get rational. Just do it because you're told to do it. Make appearances on podcasts. Don't fact check anything. Don't look and see if they have an audience. If the audience is engaged, just go. Just go. Why does that very often not work?

For one thing, these appearances don't convert unless the audience is aligned, and most of the time they aren't being on any podcast or going to any networking event is like shouting into the void and hoping that your ideal prospect is in there. In the early days of my staffing career, when I was essentially forced to go to things like networking events and breakfasts and so forth. You know who was there? Sales people. I never, ever, not even one time at a networking event or a breakfast, ever met somebody that turned into an actual client? Never. Now, I'm not saying your results cannot vary. I'm just giving you my experience. Experience out in the real world. It never, ever turned into anything. It was people that were meeting in the back room of a Panera, and they all had business cards, and they were all hoping that some client or prospect would show up. And it's like clients and prospects are not at 637 o'clock in the morning, hanging out in the back room of an eatery, hoping that someone will pitch them like when you even begin to think about it rationally, it all falls apart. But people want that hopium. Sometimes the people in the room might be from Grandma's knitting club. It might be a collection of other sales people, crypto bros, that are all trying to pitch you on something, people that say you can manifest your empire in 30 days could be people that are looking to to do random things. I'm a rock collector. I like to ghost hunt, and it's like, do these people care about what you're pitching to them at all? Probably not even a perfect offer will fall flat if you're delivering it in the wrong place. The second thing I want to say is that visibility does not automatically equal interest. And I want to repeat that to really drive it home, visibility does not automatically equal interest. So for example, this is highly germane, since I'm talking about on a podcast right now, people listening to a podcast are had to make my own drum roll there. People listening to a podcast are listening to a podcast. They're not in this space to be pitched. I generally put some kind of role amid credits, or an early credits role, like, hey, my books exist. They're there if you want them. But I don't necessarily expect a conversion out of that, because people listening to a podcast could be driving, cleaning the house, working out at the gym, walking their dogs, zoning out, sitting at their desk at work like I just need something to listen to, besides the sound of my boss's voice that I can't stand halfway listening while they're cooking dinner, listening to something they want to hear, another adult talk while the toddler is taking the nap. That is not the same thing as warm traffic motivated buyers, pre qualified leads, people actively looking for a solution, etc. And so it is with the networking events and the pancake breakfast. You're very often in there with other sales people. Everybody is all trying to scrounge up the same thing with your prospects and clients. Your prospects and clients, however, are typically not in those venues. This kind of worldview, by the Jane Does of society also tends to ignore basic buyer psychology, for someone to buy from you, especially if you're talking about a book like I'm just going to use books as an example, because I'm a writer a book that showcases your expertise or some deep relationship you have with the subject, a consulting service, a high dollar coaching package, whatever it is, they're going to require elements like trust, context, expertise or perceived expertise, resonance, The value of the investment itself and desire one single appearance at the Elks Lodge for a pancake breakfast or the chili cook off at the local hospital, or a random public speaking event at the library, where five people show up, and two of them are only there to get out of the rain. That's typically not going to be enough to create what you need in order to convert somebody to an actual buyer. But the john and jane does of the world who create these packages to lure in the unsuspecting, to lure in people who are desperate to start a business or to keep a business afloat, they frame it as just, have a good offer, dude, have a good offer, bro, and people will flock to you. I beg to differ. You also want to be careful of sales people who collapse brand building and sales into one activity, because that is misleading. When you appear at public events or the local Chamber of Commerce to breakfast or you go on a podcast you've never even heard of that can certainly be a brand awareness activity, especially if the audience there not to be crass, but I'm just being honest, if the people there are worth your time, meaning they're aligned with what you're trying to accomplish, and they're not randos, brand awareness, however, does not automatically equal sales. Brand awareness does not automatically equal warm leads. Brand awareness does not automatically equal high ticket conversions. You can certainly support sales with it. However, you cannot replace sales with it, and the john and jane does who are out here telling you I have. The secret sauce, and that is just go be seen and be visible and have a compelling offer. They're pretending that the difference between brand awareness and actual sales does not exist. They conflate the two together, collapse them together, and the person who suffers is their client. Now this is also very important. There's a subtext here. If you went to these appearances and you didn't get clients, it's not my fault. It's because you suck your offer stinks. You're not any good. Ah. What a loop. What a vicious loop. It's like the Ouroboros of the snake eating its own tail. It's not that I did anything wrong, it's that you did something wrong. So if you go on these podcasts and they don't convert to sales, if you go to the local Masonic Lodge and pitch your services, if you go to the Chamber of Commerce spaghetti dinner and nobody buys from you, your offer must be bad. Oh, and by the way, I can fix it if you don't have a compelling offer, when you go to these public appearances and nothing happens for you, don't worry, I can fix it. It makes the client the problem. In this case, you as the business owner that's desperate for a solution. It makes you the problem. It's not about the tactic or this John or Jane Doe character that you've hired. It's about you. And that is a way that these hustle Bros and hustle sisters Boss Babes, I guess we could say that's how they keep people feeling guilty, deficient and dependent. Now with podcasts in particular, there's something else that I want to say, which is podcast audiences are fragmented. Now, we're not living in 2009 or 2010 it used to be a bit more glamorous, quite frankly, to be a podcast guest. But now people can dial into hyper niche shows where there's one super specific topic. They may only have 200 listeners, or it may be like, well, the content is consumed across platforms. So there's 200 listeners on YouTube, but then there's 1000 listeners on Spotify, and then there's maybe 42 that are tuning in through Apple podcasts. It's fractured and it's not monolithic. It's not a mono culture. So the idea of just go on a podcast and saying that that's a reliable pipeline is based on information from a bygone era. Now, if we want to think about public appearances, going to the public library, renting out a meeting room and hoping that it works, like if you build it, they will come. Or maybe if you join the Chamber of Commerce and you get super active, hey, I went to the neighborhood car wash. I went to the spaghetti dinner. You want to just consider, are your ideal clients, your ideal prospects, likely to show up for that? If you're doing it for the photo op, if you think, well, this will make me look good on social media, if I can get some photographs of the local car wash or some kind of charity dinner. It's a feel good photo op. Do what you feel is right. But if you think that your prospects are going to be there, I would say, don't put a lot of faith in that idea, because more than likely, based on my experience, they are not. Here's another unfortunate truth, a lot of these podcasts and public appearances are graveyards, inactive, low attendance, poor quality could be poor equipment can sometimes factor in. There's little or no audience engagement, there's no SEO strategy, there's no cross platform promotion. So you very well could appear on 50 podcasts and have nothing to show for it. You very well could go to 50 events in your community and have nothing to show for it. You could go on a public library speaking junket and wind up with little or no sales. I mean, imagine that. Imagine if you spent 1000s of dollars out of your own pocket, because here's a dirty little secret of the publishing industry that you probably don't know. I had to learn it myself the hard way, because I didn't realize that this was true until I got into publishing.

We think about things like press junkets and book signing tours and book speaking tours like, oh well, the publishing house is going to provide all of that to the author nowadays. In a lot of cases, they don't. Now, if you're some powerhouse, if you're JK, Rowling, Stephen King, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, yeah, they're going to roll out the right carpet for you, because you are guaranteed to sell books for them if you are the average Joe. Sorry, sweetie, they don't which means if you want a book tour, if you want a press junket, if you want public speaking gigs, you have to finance it for you. So you could very well say, I'm going to go on a tour across America of public libraries that will bring me in and let me talk about my book. Then have 10 sales. Imagine that. Imagine if you spent 10 grand doing that and wound up with $10 and or 10 book sales at 10 bucks a piece to show for it. My god, that's crazy. Another thing I want to say is that your subject matter depending upon what it is, depending upon what kind of business you're running, the subject matter can require careful placement, not some kind of spray and pray. There are some mass appeal products, you know, I'm thinking of like some of the things I've seen on Shark Tank. For example, you know, a broom that you can use to scrub up messes while you're sweeping or the scrub, daddy sponge, you know there are some products that will have mass appeal. There are some entertainers that have mass appeal, some movies that have mass appeal, but not every business, not every offering, is going to have mass appeal. And you really want to think about careful placement. Does it make sense for me to do this, is it going to be a good expenditure of my time? Now, if you find something that really is a credibility booster, it helps with your SEO. It builds trust and credibility. It has a long tail exposure strategy. Cool. It may very well be worth your time to do it. But the snake oil salesmen are not going to put all this information out on Front Street for you because they want your money. One part of this formula that they use also is the idea of the irresistible offer, because that's one of the defenses. If you go on all of these appearances and you have nothing to show for it. It must be that your offer is messed up, because, again, that puts the blame back on you, not on them. Whenever I was doing research for this podcast episode, I thought, I wonder where that even came from, because I've heard that so many times, all of this shtick around the irresistible offer. So here's what I came up with in my research, there was an advertiser, an American advertiser, named Claude Hopkins, and he kind of pioneered direct response advertising, things like mail replies, free samples, coupons, and he emphasized things like having a strong headline, having a Simple value proposition and an offer that you didn't have to think about it like you kind of turned your rational mind off. And he could also sell the dream aspirational buying. If I buy this soap, I'll be beautiful. If I buy this toothpaste, I'll have a pretty smile. Women will want to kiss me if I if I buy this toothpaste or this mouthwash. It wasn't anything intellectual. It was about I'm going to sell you a dream. I believe, at least as far as I could come up with in my research for this episode, I think the person who coined the term the quote, unquote, irresistible offer was a person named Mark Joyner, and I think that that happened in the early 2000s and essentially, we break it down as this a quote, unquote irresistible offer. Is a clean promise. It has easy to understand benefits. There's a simple call to action. There's really a minimal amount of things that somebody could put up resistance to and there's a perceived high value. So there's the idea that you'd have to be crazy to not do this. It's just so easy to hit the button and instantly buy it. Now we get to another marketer named Frank Kern, and along about the mid aughts to the early 2010s he starts talking about irresistible offers, mass control, the perfect pitch, selling through story, crafting desire. And so his version is really where the irresistible offer morphs from sell the person the dream, like getting kisses from your sweetie, if you use this mouthwash, or having less wrinkles, if you use this cold cream, it becomes make people feel like idiots. If they don't buy you, you are crazy to pass this up. So from there, we start to see the explosion of things like high ticket value, ladders, funnels, pain points, prospects, conversion triggers, oh, I'm about to fall asleep. Even reading all this stuff like this brings back bad days of being in sales, man. So then we get to the online coaching boom around 2015, and the irresistible offer combined with the online coaching boom really turns the concept of an irresistible offer into a religion or into a cult, because it's easy to sell to the person that you want to sell to, not to your end customer, but to somebody who's trying to sell you as the business owner. And it really flatters the customer, but it also flattens the customer. And what I mean by that is this, this coach, this John or Jane Doe, figure, 10. Tells you you're fine. There's nothing wrong with you as a person. There's nothing wrong with your business. So they're not Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. They're not telling you, take it behind the barn and shoot it. It's a lousy idea. They're saying you're fine. Your offer is the problem. You just need to tweak the language around the offer. You just need to get a little bit better at sales to make it irresistible, so then that allows this John or Jane Doe figure to sell expensive programs to you that promise to fix the offer. The barrier to entry for something like this is very low to non existent. It requires no actual business acumen, no marketing nuance, no understanding of audience psychology and no understanding of product market fit. They just give you some templates and a lot of fabricated urgency, and then the person who unfortunately loses is the one who pays the money, because it, as I said, becomes an Ouroboros. You're not doing it right, you're still not doing it right. You're still not doing it right. And it's like, my god, the person's business idea might be awful. There may not be anybody who wants what they have to offer. And instead of telling them that you're telling them you're fine, it's just, we need to tweak the language around your offer. So is the irresistible offer a universal principle? I would say, No, it's more like a sales gimmick from the early 2000s that just simply has refused to die. So so please be careful out there, because there are people who they see others struggling. They see other people and they think, well, this person can't get a job, so they're going to start their own business. They do that, and they're in a panic, because they realize that it's not all fun and games to run a business. It's not simple in the wind up. It's neither simple nor easy, but they want to tell you that it is. You have a problem. You need to be more visible. You need to get out there more which is the bane of every introvert and HSPs existence. Just pretend to be an extrovert and go all over God's green earth. Don't be discerning. Okay, that's another part of the marketing. Don't use your rational mind. Don't consider whether or not the opportunity makes sense. I actually had an advisor once that told me you're getting too far in your head. You're being too rational. You need to just try it my way and see if it works. Spoiler alert, it did not. But they want to tell you to turn off your rational mind. Just do this like it's magic. Just do it. It'll work. Do it. Do it. Do it. So you go do it, and then it doesn't work. And you come back to them and say, I did this, exactly what you told me to do, and it didn't work. And they say, Well, it's the offer. We need to help you craft an irresistible offer. So then you pay them even more money to craft this supposedly irresistible offer, and it still doesn't work. On and on it goes like the snake eating its own tail. Where does it stop? It doesn't stop until you get off the merry go round with these people and quit giving them money and attention. As always, I do not give you advice. I do not tell you what to do. Think for yourself. I am not going to tell you to turn off your rational mind. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions about the best thing to do for yourself and your business. The only thing I will say is, please beware. Caveat emptor, use good judgment if somebody is trying to sell you on the idea of just get out there. Go more places, do more podcasts, do more engagements. Oh, and then make sure you also create an irresistible offer. Oh, and then we need to tweak your sales language for six months while you pay me. What would not be a bad idea to exercise caution. Proceed with extreme caution on anything like that. Take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others. We'll see you next time.