Manny Wolfe - Marketer / Author / Coach / Former Cult Member

From Cult to Consultant: Manny Wolfe's Unbreakable Marketing Wisdom

Manny Wolfe shares his extraordinary journey from cult upbringing and street life to becoming a successful marketing strategist. He discusses the importance of resilience, the power of storytelling in branding, and offers insights on how coaches and experts can differentiate themselves in a crowded market.

Manny Wolfe is a dynamic entrepreneur who has worn many hats, from professional musician and chef to bestselling author and marketing expert. After a life of searching for purpose and battling personal demons, Manny found his calling in the world of internet marketing and coaching. Today, he runs a boutique marketing agency specializing in personal brand development and high-level marketing strategies. In this episode, Manny shares his incredible journey of transformation and how he helps experts build powerful brands and connect with larger audiences.

5 Key Takeaways:

• The importance of using personal stories in branding
• How authenticity can enhance your brand’s impact
• The role of resilience in personal and professional growth
• Strategies for reaching and engaging larger audiences
• How to build a compelling and lasting personal brand

Link: Connect on Facebook

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Paul Povolni (11:03.774)
Welcome to another episode of the Headsmack Podcast. My name is Paul Povolni. I'm excited to have a wonderful guest today called Manny Wolf, one of the coolest names out there. I wish I had a cool name like Manny Wolf. Manny Wolf has got an amazing story. Not only of entrepreneurship and business and marketing and branding, all those things, but Manny was born and raised in a cult. So we're going to be talking about the 45 years of untangling that lessons learned.

warnings given, head smacks smacked upside and back of him. Manny, welcome to the Head Smack Podcast.

manny wolfe (11:40.534)
Thanks, man. I am glad to be here. Yeah, it's always exciting. And you and I have been connected and friends for a while. And so, yeah, this one should be good.

Paul Povolni (11:51.306)
Well, you know, obviously, as soon as you say something like born and raised in a cult, you know, that's, you know, you don't, you don't put that on your LinkedIn pod on your LinkedIn bio. At least I don't think you did. I haven't, I haven't double checked. Um, but it is, it is an interesting backstory and you know, it's, it's for a lot of people that are in a similar situation. Obviously it's devastating, tough. Not everybody makes it out. Um, not everybody survives it.

manny wolfe (11:56.394)
Right. Yeah.

manny wolfe (12:16.171)
break.

Paul Povolni (12:18.806)
And if they do survive it, they don't move past it. It's still something that for the rest of their life, torments them, troubles them, pulls them back, hurts them. And so tell me a little bit, and you don't have to go into details, but tell me a little bit about what that means to be born and raised in a cult. And then what were some of the moments, what were some of those head smack, turnaround moments that happened to you as you moved away from that and when you did?

manny wolfe (12:36.978)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (12:46.466)
So the first thing I want to say more for the context of listeners is that while the odds are that most of you weren't born in a cult, being born in a cult is just persuasion turned up to 11. There's a continuum. And I think I always find it so funny that I went into marketing.

You know, because marketing is persuasion, right? And it took me a long time to understand that like all tools, persuasion, marketing, guns, you name it, the tool is agnostic. It can be used for whatever. And so for those of you listening, don't get caught up in the fact that I was born in a cult, but the important thing here is that

Paul Povolni (13:16.644)
Right.

Paul Povolni (13:31.912)
Right.

manny wolfe (13:42.378)
we were all indoctrinated in one way or another. And that indoctrination is a reflection of our parents' beliefs, our society's beliefs, our parents' fears, our society. You know what I mean? And it's just because we're little sponges. Mine was unusual, but the sort of irreducible essence is...

Paul Povolni (13:56.809)
Right.

manny wolfe (14:05.106)
what most of us can relate to, which is the sort of parsing out of who am I? What do I believe? What do I stand for? What do I, how do I want to show up and who do I want to be? And, and how is that different from how I was raised or in extreme cases indoctrinated, because again, it's all persuasion. So for me, it was what's called a new age cult.

Paul Povolni (14:24.295)
Right, right.

manny wolfe (14:30.014)
It was 1967. And so if you if you know your history, that was the summer of love. That was sort of the pinnacle of that whole hippie movement. And so I like because I'm a word guy, a words guy. I like to say I was born in the winter of the summer of love. Which is true. And, you know, I was born like right around the corner from the Haight Ashbury sign. I literally one block away at 60 Webster Street.

Paul Povolni (14:48.32)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (14:57.666)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (14:58.118)
And so you couldn't, and this is not an exaggeration at all. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a cult. I kid you not. With the communes, cults, they were everywhere. Everybody was just experimenting with new ways of living. With very little questioning, I found later as to why are you raging against the thing that's already there? You know, there was just that angst.

Paul Povolni (15:21.585)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (15:24.894)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

manny wolfe (15:24.966)
And then there's a lot of things to Vietnam War, all that stuff. But I digress from that. And to get back to the point that. Each of us is to some extent indoctrinated from birth. In some cases, it helps us, in some cases, it's neutral, and in some cases, it hurts us. We're going to focus today with me on the kind of indoctrination that can hurt you, because everything that I was taught really had some central tenets to it.

Paul Povolni (15:28.44)
Right.

Paul Povolni (15:39.426)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (15:49.632)
Mm.

manny wolfe (15:55.382)
absolutely reject capitalism, Western society, and everything to do with money and commerce. That was the big one. The other one was, it was pretty out there because that's like, there are a lot of people today who could relate to that. Although I challenge you that you haven't thought deeply enough if you relate to that. I mean, like, you have to appreciate that if it's, even though it's an imperfect system, you live in a system that allows you to have those feelings and to speak them out loud.

Paul Povolni (16:15.138)
Hehehe

Paul Povolni (16:25.17)
Right.

manny wolfe (16:25.414)
and you can't oversell that, right? You can't overstate the importance of that. That's freedom. That's what it is. You try that shit in China and you're gonna be in trouble, right? You don't just go dissenting the government in certain parts of the world. So.

Paul Povolni (16:33.126)
Yeah, right, right.

Paul Povolni (16:39.086)
I'm Brian.

Right.

manny wolfe (16:44.946)
All that is to say, for me, my natural tendencies from a very young age were to be curious about entrepreneurship, curious about capitalism, curious about money. And I never thought about, like, it wasn't money per se, but it was money as this tool of exchange. And, you know, and of course, I also grew up in abject poverty. And so I wanted money for new shoes and toys and bikes and things like that, like any kid would.

Paul Povolni (17:04.737)
right?

manny wolfe (17:14.162)
Um, but the, the way that it gets hard and unique is that if the conditioning is intense enough, we will adapt to it. Even if it goes against what we need to survive. And this is called a double bind. A double bind is when it's like a Pavlovian thing, right? A double bind is when you.

Paul Povolni (17:29.483)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (17:37.098)
Yeah, yeah.

manny wolfe (17:40.69)
have been taught that the very impulses you have that would get you where you want to go or better you are the things that will hurt you. And so what happens is as you get older and you sort of try to integrate into life, you keep feeling blindsided by life. It's very much like you're just doing what you're doing and a bat hits you in the back of the head. You know, and for me that happened over and over and over and over again.

And I like to say, if I really do have any one strength, it was being too stupid to stay down. You know? And I know that sort of has got a nice shock and awe quality to it, but like really, that's the thing. The thing was I just kept getting back up. I kept getting back up.

Paul Povolni (18:18.102)
Well, yeah.

Paul Povolni (18:30.466)
So what put that in you? What put that getting back up?

manny wolfe (18:32.526)
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I've been asked that question hundreds of times. And, you know, I could look at my father and my father was an extremely, not disciplined, but an extremely determined and tough guy. You know, and he wasn't tough like we normally think of tough, but he was tough in the sense that he never gave up. He just never gave up.

Paul Povolni (18:37.484)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (18:47.392)
Hmm

Yeah.

Paul Povolni (18:58.23)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (19:00.394)
He didn't give up through a 38 year heroin addiction.

Paul Povolni (19:03.81)
Wow.

manny wolfe (19:05.074)
He toured the world twice, unsupported by agents or anything as a musician. The whole world, he's played on every continent and every major, except for like North Korea and China, he's played everywhere in the world. And he was, he was this guy who sort of like was one step away from, from the recognition he deserved.

Paul Povolni (19:19.395)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (19:29.386)
his whole life. He was one step away. He played with Charlie Parker. He played with Miles Davis. He played with Sonny Rollins. He played with every giant of the jazz era. In fact, if you know jazz at all, Ray Brown was on his first album. So like he literally this, this is a guy who for all intents and purposes should have been spoken of in the same breath as these, these just epochs of musicians, you know, and

Paul Povolni (19:29.791)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (19:38.028)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (19:43.138)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (19:55.775)
Right, right.

manny wolfe (19:58.826)
So I learned from his tenacity, but I also watched and was like, what is he doing wrong? Because it's not the talent, it's not the drive, you know? And as I got older, I realized he keeps sabotaging himself. He keeps undercutting himself at the last minute. And that was kind of where I got the idea, maybe I, you know, oops, maybe I'm doing that. And then, you know, from there, it was,

Paul Povolni (20:05.719)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (20:17.302)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (20:25.266)
Yeah, yeah.

manny wolfe (20:31.342)
Thank goodness that whether it was him or somewhere else, that I got the tenacity. Because I mean, I suffered as many of those just like getting your knees cut out from under you moments as he did, if not more. And so everybody wants to ask that question, Paul, like where did you get that from? I honestly don't know. I don't know.

Paul Povolni (20:36.993)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (20:46.371)
Right.

Paul Povolni (20:52.97)
Well, I think you just explained it. I think it is from him. You saw from him that no matter what happens your way, you're not getting the recognition, you know, you keep going. You just, you just keep going. You, you know, maybe, maybe next time, maybe next time, maybe next time. And maybe not recognizing those.

manny wolfe (21:01.213)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (21:04.426)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (21:11.198)
the self-sabotage, you know, and then, you know, blaming it on others and then saying, well, maybe next time, maybe it was their fault and maybe next time. So I can understand a little bit of that tenacity and not wanting to give up because you always had hope. And I think hope, I think hope is that game changer. Even though he was self-sabotaging, he still had hope. Maybe the next gig, maybe the next event, maybe the next city, maybe whatever, I'll make it.

manny wolfe (21:12.882)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (21:16.918)
Yeah, right.

manny wolfe (21:22.735)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

manny wolfe (21:36.006)
Right. Whatever. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (21:39.718)
Yeah, and then you saw that the tenacity and the hope that he held out. And that I think that did put it in you seeing.

manny wolfe (21:47.026)
It could be. I mean, if that kind of stuff is passed down generationally, then yes, and I believe it is, you know, but I think that's not the most salient kind of point we could pursue in this conversation. But I do think maybe that is. I also think that it was very helpful for me, I say helpful to realize that he wasn't in my life almost at all because he was so driven by this thing inside of him.

Paul Povolni (21:53.142)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (21:59.691)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (22:14.934)
Hmm Yeah

manny wolfe (22:17.402)
And because, you know, my mom kicked him out because he couldn't control his drug addiction. And so there was a lot of factors there, but as a kid, you don't think those things and you don't see those things. You just know your dad's not here. And then you have everybody in your life telling you what a legend he is. You know what I mean? It's like, so in a real way, I was raised in the shadow of this guy who was a giant to everyone I knew. And that,

Paul Povolni (22:32.79)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah, right.

Paul Povolni (22:41.902)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (22:44.382)
I can point to that as something that did motivate me, you know, kept me motivated through hard times, for sure.

Paul Povolni (22:47.949)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (22:52.574)
Yeah. So with, with your, you know, your career path, um, what was your first thing where you kind of stepped into that marketing, that, that love for commerce, that love for, um, sales and things like that. What was your first gig like?

manny wolfe (23:04.713)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (23:08.81)
First gig or first legal gig? I'll share. It's in my book. Yeah, I don't have any secrets. It's all about your sort of comfort level.

Paul Povolni (23:13.299)
Well, since this is going to be pretty public, let's go with... Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, let's go for it.

Paul Povolni (23:23.77)
Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable. If we need to put a little E on the podcast, we can certainly do that.

manny wolfe (23:27.822)
Yeah, yeah. So the first time I ever made any real money was selling drugs. It was way, way back, way back. But I sold drugs. And, you know, we're talking about 1991, 92, and I was making 300 bucks a day, which is pretty good for a kid living on, basically living on the streets.

Paul Povolni (23:36.845)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (23:49.878)
What?

Paul Povolni (23:54.598)
Yeah. Now is this in Stockton?

manny wolfe (23:57.186)
No, this was in a city called Chico. Yeah. I left Stockton. Again, I'm not sure how much of the gory details you want, but I left Stockton when one of my best friends and I got jumped, surrounded, and he got stabbed in the heart. And it was completely unprovoked. It was just a random act of violence. And...

Paul Povolni (23:59.469)
Okay.

Paul Povolni (24:07.938)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (24:16.052)
Oh my goodness, wow.

Paul Povolni (24:21.979)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (24:23.398)
You know, I had I had my left knee was bandaged up because a couple weeks, maybe three weeks earlier or less, I had been in a different city with a different one of my best friends. And he got us into a serious scrap and I wound up.

literally just running through a park for my life. And I got away from, there were like seven guys chasing us with sticks and chains and one guy had a croquet mallet. I'll never forget that. Yeah, one guy had a, I guess that was all he could get his hands on. And at the edge of the park, I tripped. I tripped over the curb and I landed on all fours. And I just, I hit the asphalt right in the crosswalk. I looked up.

Paul Povolni (24:50.141)
Oh my goodness.

Paul Povolni (24:54.97)
Oh wow.

manny wolfe (25:07.582)
Look to the left and here comes a Ford Bronco slamming on its brakes. Its bumper went, I want to put this in camera, it goes wha-

Paul Povolni (25:16.61)
Just like in the movies, right? Yeah. Oh my goodness. Wow.

Yeah.

Paul Povolni (25:27.71)
Yeah, you know, I've seen that happen to a lot of people is, uh, you know, they grow, they, some people grow up, some people grow older, you know? And so, you know, there's, there's a point where you've got to make a decision, you know, is, is the circle that I'm with, you know, they just grow an older or they grow on up and do I want to continue in this? Yeah.

manny wolfe (25:36.126)
Yeah, yeah.

manny wolfe (25:45.61)
Right, right, yeah. And it took me a long time to sort of latch on to that. And I think it was because I didn't have a sense of family growing up, you know? I really didn't. And so I went out into the world and I bonded intensely with other misfits and formed little families, you know? And so it was hard to leave, but I mean, that was a massive wake-up call.

Paul Povolni (25:58.488)
Mmm.

Paul Povolni (26:06.188)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (26:15.284)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (26:15.486)
And then I went to Chico and thought to myself, oh, well, moving to a different city will solve it. Spoiler alert. Yeah, yeah. So that was kind of the backdrop. That was the sort of what I emerged from. And at a certain point, I got sober. At a certain point, I just said, I can't keep living like this. I'll die. Without a doubt, I will die. And so I got sober.

Paul Povolni (26:21.58)
Right, but wherever you go, there you are, right? Yeah, wherever you go, there you are.

Paul Povolni (26:36.748)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (26:42.178)
Did something influence that or was that just a moment of late night? Like what influenced that turnaround?

manny wolfe (26:44.638)
Yeah. No, man. So that. All right. Here we go. The story of that was I was up in Chico selling drugs, making money, and I got arrested. And when I got arrested, unbeknownst to me, I made the papers. I made the front page of the papers. But I was the thing that was so weird about it is I was a small timer. I was.

Paul Povolni (26:52.942)
Ha ha

Paul Povolni (27:11.755)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (27:12.062)
You know, I was not organized. I didn't have distribution. I was just a guy who would go buy it, break it down, and sell it. For whatever reason, the law enforcement in that area at that time wanted to send some kind of a message. And so they trumped this whole big thing up about how I was this mastermind. And

Paul Povolni (27:18.793)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (27:34.431)
Wow.

manny wolfe (27:34.494)
I just want to stop for a second and say none of this is made up and none of this is hyperbolic. This is literally, I don't need to inflate this story. And so I wound up spending about three and a half weeks in jail. And when I got out, all my friends were totally freaked out. What I didn't know is they all saw the papers. Right? And so they thought I was going away for years.

Paul Povolni (27:39.822)
Hahaha

Paul Povolni (27:43.981)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (27:57.472)
Oh wow.

Paul Povolni (28:01.39)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (28:01.534)
Because the papers said I was this kingpin, and there was this huge bust, and it was this tiny little pathetic bust. So I get out of jail, and I was homeless when I went to jail. I had my stuff sort of stashed at my friend's apartments. I go from one apartment to another, and everybody's acting like the ghost of Christmas passed showing up at their door. And so finally, I literally, literally kicked my friend's door in.

Paul Povolni (28:07.825)
Hehehe

manny wolfe (28:30.662)
And I'm like, you're going to give me some answers. And I found out that among other things, someone who I had cherished as one of my best friends went around and stole all my stuff, took it all, and started telling people that if I ever got out of jail, he was going to kick my ass and kill me and all this stuff. Well, in any community of drug users, news like that spreads like wildfire. That's the kind of stuff, gossip-wise, that we live for.

Paul Povolni (28:41.408)
Oh wow.

Paul Povolni (28:54.211)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (28:58.986)
This friend was a black guy and I was as equal opportunity as you can imagine. I would party with anybody. If I partied, I'd still be that way. But that meant that I did party a lot with guys that were really, really racist, really racist. And one of them got word of this. He comes down, turns it into a racial thing immediately.

Paul Povolni (29:06.446)
Mm-hmm. Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (29:16.334)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (29:23.53)
And now it's, we got to go find this guy, you know? But the moment that made me get sober was this. He said, hang on a second. And he reached into the glove compartment of his shitty little Datsun pickup, and he pulled out two handguns. And he put one of them in my hand, and it was still wrapped in the rag. And it was like, now, I've told this story 1,000 times, but.

I still don't feel like I've really gotten to what it felt like. I'm not sure I've ever made anybody really understand that moment. The way reality distorts in a moment like that. I could feel the weight of the gun. I could smell the oil on the rag. I could see, and it was dark outside, I could see that it was duct tape around the handle. I looked, I don't know why I looked, I looked and the serial number was filed off. Everything's clicking into place now for me and I'm like, oh my.

Paul Povolni (29:55.991)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (30:17.81)
God, this is it. This is the line, you know? And he said, we're going to go hunt this guy down and we're going to kill him. And fortunately, I don't know where this came from. I thought on my feet. I said, meet me back here at midnight. Let's go do it. He gave me a big old bump. I got all wired and everything. And immediately, I just jumped on the phone and I started panic calling everyone I knew.

Paul Povolni (30:19.745)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (30:27.874)
Wow.

manny wolfe (30:43.366)
And one of my like third string friends, not even my main circle of friends, he's the one who he said, you know what? My cousin and her best friend are driving down to San Diego for Thanksgiving. I'm going to get you a ride in the back of their car to Stockton. And so that's how I disappeared from that life. That was it. All I knew, I knew two things. I can't do this anymore. And I got to be gone before midnight. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (31:00.172)
Bye.

Paul Povolni (31:04.638)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (31:10.082)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and just that sudden hyper awareness of the moment, you know, that, you know, and, and people have those, uh, you know, occasionally where, you know, and it's, it's sometimes good things and sometimes bad things where you're, you're in a moment and suddenly all your senses are just like, you know, you're almost like Spiderman with the, uh, what are they called the tingle? Uh, yeah, the Spidey sense, the

manny wolfe (31:15.878)
It was, yeah, I mean.

manny wolfe (31:24.256)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (31:28.85)
Yeah. Spidey sense.

Paul Povolni (31:36.362)
you know, the realization of the moment they're in. And, you know, I've had it in good moments. I remember, you know, being on the Golden Gate Bridge with my brother, you know, and we're standing there. We'd walked halfway across and it was just a moment of, my goodness, we're a couple of, you know, European immigrants from a small town on the west side of Melbourne, Australia. And here we are standing in the middle of Golden Gate Bridge. And to me, it was like, we've seen this on...

manny wolfe (31:42.612)
I have two.

manny wolfe (31:56.023)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (32:02.579)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (32:05.882)
You know, TV shows, we've seen this in the movies and here we are where a couple of nobodies from nowhere in particular, and we're standing in the middle of Golden Gate Bridge. And it was this hyper awareness of the moment that made you absorb everything about it. And it sounds like you had one of those hyper awareness moments holding a handgun, you know, that you're it's like, okay, this, this moment is going to change everything at this moment. If I take the next step, we'll change. There's no going back. Everything changes. Yeah.

manny wolfe (32:06.98)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

manny wolfe (32:16.582)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (32:22.342)
I did. Yeah.

manny wolfe (32:28.958)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (32:33.474)
There's no going back. That was exactly my thought process, was like, am I willing to cross this line? Because you can't undo this one. This is it. And externally, like I said, I was pretty cool and composed, I think. But internally, the best explanation I can give for it is if I was a glass sculpture, somebody threw a rock right through it, and it just went, poof.

Paul Povolni (32:42.378)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (33:00.014)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (33:00.166)
And looking back, I like to say that was my identity. That was the identity I had built up to that point, and it just shattered. And I was like, whatever else, I'm not doing this. Whatever else happens. I just knew there's a certain kind of clarity and certainty that you can have in certain moments, and that was one of them. Yeah, and so that was the last time I ever got high. It was 29 years ago.

Paul Povolni (33:04.212)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (33:08.952)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (33:12.332)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (33:19.667)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (33:27.274)
Wow. And so that, so being a criminal was your first, you know, first bit of, you know, life change. So how did that transition into, you know, being a marketer, being an author, being, you know, the things that you've done, the things that you've led, you know, you, you know, you escaped something that could have ended very badly for you in the short term, long term, however.

manny wolfe (33:30.368)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (33:34.05)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (33:45.312)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (33:55.306)
you transition then over into professionalism, you know, whatever that means. What was that journey like? What led to that being your next outlet for your experiences?

manny wolfe (34:00.731)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (34:09.902)
So it wasn't until I started that whole journey that I realized, it was maybe two years into being a complete devotee of the 12 steps. And I still give them, those are a miracle given to man. They are absolutely a miracle given to us. I don't know where they came from. Some people say God, some people say higher power. I don't care. The utility of the tool is profound.

I don't give a damn where it came from. You know what I mean? When you need a screwdriver. And so it was about two years in when I started looking around and looking around, I mean, at the meetings and talking to my friends and everything and realizing these people would all hit a certain point. And to my way of thinking, they stopped digging. Now, this is not a judgment.

Paul Povolni (34:40.55)
Yeah. It works. It works. Yeah.

It works.

Paul Povolni (35:05.365)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (35:07.882)
It's not a judgment because again, I know somebody who's in recovery is going to hear this and I just because you know, statistically, and I just want to say for the record and so that God America and you know, the world knows my stance on this. It just got to be a place for me. Where the level of digging and work I needed to do was just stopped being a match, you know.

Paul Povolni (35:33.87)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (35:35.002)
And so there's no judgment. These people would find a balance point and just live. And I envy that, frankly, but I couldn't do it. And so, yes, I had this curiosity and desire to sort of be an entrepreneur and to be just a capitalist, like a good capitalist, but I had to sort out so much crap first. And so,

Paul Povolni (35:41.119)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (36:02.758)
Well, yeah, capitalist as a drug dealer is very different capitalist as a product and services dealer. Yeah, you had to sort that out, I think. Yeah.

manny wolfe (36:06.03)
Yeah, right. But it was all the internal stuff I had to sort out because I didn't have any sort of window into what was happening inside of me. What I knew I could see from the outside was that I would keep doing these things to sabotage myself. I would keep. Wish my dad did. I would keep.

Paul Povolni (36:14.785)
Ryan.

Paul Povolni (36:29.014)
Which your dad did. Yeah.

manny wolfe (36:33.602)
reliving the same patterns with my women, the women I would fall in love with, or date, or whatever. And all of that, ultimately, I would discover would stem from more of my relationship with my mother and my lack of a father than even the commune. So the communes, aka cult, really kind of piled on the ephemera and the sort of big abstract concepts that I found I didn't agree with.

Paul Povolni (36:49.462)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (37:02.954)
But the crux of everything, really for me, really when you get right down to it, was I never had a meaningful, secure connection with either parent. And it's really interesting to be in the subset of marketing and branding and stuff that I'm in, where I work with coaches and experts and service providers.

Because, and I say this with a thousand pound heart and all the love in the world, these are the broken geniuses. You know, why? I don't know. Well, I say that because I've worked with well over 1,500 of them now. And you know, you see the sunrise in the East enough times you can start to connect the dots. And these are people who by and large,

Paul Povolni (37:37.378)
Hmm. Why? Yeah. Why do you say that?

Paul Povolni (37:48.226)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (37:52.518)
Right. See the patterns.

manny wolfe (38:00.051)
Um

were able to heal, fix or repair or change something profound in their lives and now want to help other people do it. So the vast majority of them walked a variation of the same path I walked. The difference between me and them is, as I started tinkering with how do I get more clients for what I want to do, people started noticing that about me. And so it was really like my audience told me I was a good

Paul Povolni (38:10.445)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (38:15.79)
I'm Brian.

manny wolfe (38:32.242)
lead gen marketing guy, et cetera, et cetera, which tied into when I went to school, and I went back to school later than a lot of people in my mid-30s, I just on a whim, I took Marketing 101. I kid you not, that's what it was called. And the guy who taught that class was the...

Paul Povolni (38:49.782)
Yeah. Wow.

manny wolfe (38:57.794)
What was his title? Basically, he ran the marketing department for Capital Records for like 25 years. This guy was a legit gladiator. He really knew the stuff. And not only was he funny and kind of like, not like a professor at all, but it was one of those things, man. And I think you, of all people that I know, might really be able to relate to this. But as he was speaking,

Paul Povolni (39:04.026)
Wow, he knew his stuff. Yeah.

Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:23.307)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (39:27.142)
Every time he spoke in class, I was just having this, I can do this work. And that was not something, I don't just walk around finding different things that going, oh, I know I can do this. That was the opposite for me. I spent most of my young working life doing menial jobs because I didn't believe that I had anything more to offer. So customer service, restaurant work, door to door sales, that kind of thing. And then...

Paul Povolni (39:33.409)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:40.642)
Right.

Paul Povolni (39:47.787)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:52.46)
Right.

manny wolfe (39:54.658)
I found this guy Roy for the life of me. I can't remember his last name, but you can look him up. He was the he was the senior VP of marketing. He told a story about the day he quit marketing was the day that the company, the agency he was working for, wanted him to go to Don McLean, you know, buy by Miss American Pie. And see if they could buy that slogan to sell dessert pies.

Paul Povolni (40:14.091)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (40:22.308)
hahahaha

manny wolfe (40:23.194)
That was his breaking point. That was literally when he said, I can't do it. You can buy by me out because I can't do this. Yeah, exactly. That was because I mean, you and I both know that this industry is full to the brim with horrors. Is absolutely full to overflowing. But here's the thing.

Paul Povolni (40:25.647)
I can't do this. I can't go on.

Paul Povolni (40:31.75)
Yeah, yeah. Bye bye, Capital Records, right?

Paul Povolni (40:44.544)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (40:50.878)
Marketing, sales, branding, these are all things that are, well, they're tools, right? So they're agnostic, but they have the potential of being so profoundly noble. And this is the part, this is where I wanna spend my time and my energy, because without these, the idea that changes the world never comes out of obscurity. And I think that, you know,

Paul Povolni (41:14.798)
I'm Ryan.

manny wolfe (41:17.594)
with all the cynicism, especially in the internet marketing space, I think it's good to like put that idea out there. Say what you will about Apple now. Steve Jobs pulled it off. He did change the world. He did it now just because to us, it wasn't like, you know, a lightning bolt from the sky doesn't mean he didn't change the world. Elon Musk like him or hate him. That guy came out and said, I'm going to single handedly move the world.

Paul Povolni (41:30.462)
Right?

Paul Povolni (41:37.919)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (41:46.242)
to a better energy system and he did it. And I love, you know, I just don't think that he really gets enough credit for that. He beat legacy automotive, man. If you're anyone in branding, marketing, if you do any of this work, you have to have a sense of how profound and unlikely that is, right? Studebaker couldn't do it.

Paul Povolni (41:50.09)
Right.

Paul Povolni (41:56.863)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (42:02.173)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (42:10.635)
Right, right.

manny wolfe (42:15.128)
Who else? Tucker couldn't do it. DeLorean couldn't do it, right? This guy did it while also making us interplanetary.

Paul Povolni (42:19.422)
Right. Yeah. Well, and I think there's so many, right. And I think, I think there's several lessons there, both in, in Apple, as well as in what Elon Musk is doing is the value of an idea executed, you know, and you know, you were shared about marketing and branding and all of those things, bringing ideas into reality because ideas are worth everything and nothing at the same time.

manny wolfe (42:34.846)
Yeah, right.

manny wolfe (42:46.582)
That's right. That's right.

Paul Povolni (42:47.57)
You know, because if, if you don't execute on an idea, it's worth nothing. You can have the best idea ever. But if you don't execute on that in a good way, and sometimes an imperfect way, and in a bold way, it's worth nothing. And people have got probably million dollar ideas, uh, saved on, on their Apple, Apple notes or Evernote or Notion or whatever they know on their, their Moleskine or whatever million dollar ideas that they've never executed on.

manny wolfe (42:53.854)
Right.

manny wolfe (42:59.817)
Yeah, that's right.

manny wolfe (43:10.171)
Right.

manny wolfe (43:13.674)
Yeah. Right.

Paul Povolni (43:15.81)
that they've never made reality. And I think, you know, Steve Jobs had an idea. Now he couldn't create the stuff himself, but he put himself around people that could. And he's like, I wanna do this. I wanna take music and I wanna put it in a thing about the size of a pack of cards, you know? And that's, you know, the iPod. And that's why we call them podcasts. For all of you young ones out there, that is where the original term podcast comes from, a little iPod.

manny wolfe (43:22.913)
Right.

manny wolfe (43:31.271)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm. That's right.

I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Paul Povolni (43:42.53)
But he made it a reality. He took that idea and made it really happen. And as you shared, marketing, branding, sales, it executes on ideas. But they need ideas, but they also, the ideas people need execution.

manny wolfe (43:44.193)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (43:54.282)
That's right.

manny wolfe (43:59.642)
Yeah, yeah, it's like beans by themselves are good, but not complete and rice by itself is good, but not complete. You put them together, you've got perfect protein, right? It's the same idea. So

Paul Povolni (44:10.322)
Yes.

manny wolfe (44:18.286)
I kind of lost the thread of where I was going with that. But I totally lost it, Paul. I'm sorry. Can you get me back on track?

Paul Povolni (44:26.638)
Well, no, you were talking you were talking about Steve jobs, you know, executing Elon Musk, you know, he put you know, his goal is to put us on another planet he executed on the car. Yeah.

manny wolfe (44:36.798)
We were talking about, yeah, yeah. So we were talking about how marketing has the potential to really literally change the world. And just a shout out to all the sort of get along, go along guys and the Johnny come latelys and the wannabes saying you wanna change the world means precisely dick. It means nothing, right? Your bold claim that you wanna help a million entrepreneur, whatever, do it.

Paul Povolni (44:59.179)
I'm sorry.

manny wolfe (45:06.678)
do it and then come back to me. It means nothing to say it. We all applaud your heart, but without the marketing, without the messaging, without the positioning, without the branding, you got nothing. You can get in line behind me and all of my million dollar ideas that never made it, saw the light of day. And so the struggle for me to get from where I started to what I do now was one of

Paul Povolni (45:08.494)
I'm Ryan.

Right.

Paul Povolni (45:15.028)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (45:20.748)
Right.

Paul Povolni (45:24.691)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (45:35.49)
primarily making peace with the fact that this work that I'm so attracted to and that I see as being Ineffable and so elegant You know like the piece of sushi that you eat and you go wow, that's delicious Never thinking for a minute that it's 900 years of refinement to get to that level of simplicity Right. That's what attracts me to it

Paul Povolni (45:57.918)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (46:04.32)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (46:04.51)
I mean, the artist in me is attracted to that. The pragmatist in me loves the fact that this is how ideas come into the world. And so for me, that's where I want to sort of put my creative energy. That's where I want to spend my time is that there's a nexus there. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Paul Povolni (46:12.199)
Right.

Paul Povolni (46:17.868)
Yeah.

Right, right. And so that professor, you know, from Marketing 101, suddenly started speaking a language that you're like, wait, I understand that. And I relate to that. And I that he is talking words that I like, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna Yeah, he say good words. And so that I that was the trigger for you that kind of made you be like my people, you know, he's he he's taught. Yeah.

manny wolfe (46:25.107)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (46:29.483)
Yeah.

Yeah.

manny wolfe (46:35.89)
Yeah, right. He say good words.

manny wolfe (46:44.114)
Yeah. Yeah, it really was. I'd like to say that from there, it was just a straight shot into doing the work I do now. But my life has not been like that. I was, I had a, right, yeah. I was running a.

Paul Povolni (46:56.146)
Yeah. Not many people's lives have. Yeah. It's, I can't find anybody with a straight, straight path. Um, and if, if they exist, I don't want them on this podcast, cause this podcast is about the misfits that have not taken the traditional route that have had some bumps and dips and highs and lows and, and some discoveries and head smacks.

manny wolfe (47:08.915)
Yeah, right.

manny wolfe (47:18.858)
Well, I'm in the right place then.

Paul Povolni (47:21.397)
So yours wasn't a steady road from marketing 101 to what you're doing now.

manny wolfe (47:24.762)
Right, no, I found myself single with a very young child. I found myself locked in an insane struggle with that child's mother. I mean, just cataclysmic kind of a struggle. I found myself trying to run a painting company, like a house painting company, a construction outfit.

Paul Povolni (47:47.079)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (47:48.454)
all of those things at the same time, while my interest was being totally captivated by the marketing and advertising stuff that I was learning. And I think most of us can relate to that idea that there come certain places in time where even if you've heard the stuff before, you hear it in a way that just is like a light coming on. I like to think of John Belushi and the Blues Brothers, the scene in the church.

Paul Povolni (48:09.676)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (48:14.878)
When the light comes through the band. That was the moment for me. That was it. It was hearing this guy talk and then getting into what it takes to, he put it this way, you'll know this. The new kids don't know this. First of all, the new kids think that no like and trust is a new idea.

Paul Povolni (48:14.958)
Mm hmm. Yes. So what was that moment for you? Yeah.

manny wolfe (48:44.458)
And you laugh because you know it came from Ada. For those of you listening, attention, interest, desire, and action. This has been around since probably one of the first ideas put forth in formal marketing, the discipline. So he talked about stuff like that, and he talked about the immense amount of work that goes into creating a meaningful USP. To me, that is just.

Paul Povolni (48:45.934)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (48:57.054)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (49:09.592)
Hmm.

manny wolfe (49:12.434)
irresistibly elegant. I can't not sort of go there, even if I wanted to, because of the sushi thing, right? Because I love that. I love elegance and simplicity that took immense work to create.

Paul Povolni (49:14.527)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (49:22.157)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (49:29.278)
Yeah, yeah, right, right.

manny wolfe (49:31.774)
Yeah, I love that. That I think I was I was sort of came into this world, 110% artist. And over time, as I grew, I incorporated pragmatism and I incorporated these other things. And for me, there's the artist in me is fed and the pragmatist in me is fed and doing that work. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And so.

Paul Povolni (49:53.162)
Mm. Right, right, right.

manny wolfe (49:59.706)
as I was running my painting company, you know, I would focus on brand positioning to the exclusion of getting jobs. And then it seemed like everything I was doing, I was thinking about it from how can I make this or how can this thing sort of carve its own place in the world? How can and I didn't really even realize in a lot of cases what I'm talking about is positioning, branding and marketing. But.

Paul Povolni (50:10.887)
Uh-huh.

Paul Povolni (50:27.47)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (50:28.574)
That's been something that has been for me like a little sore in the roof of my mouth all my life. And it would go away if I'd stop messing with it, but I can't stop messing with it. And logos, by the way, for my logo guy here, they are the equivalent of sushi to me. They are the equivalent of Japanese characters, kanji. In America, an A is a sound.

Paul Povolni (50:38.107)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (50:49.964)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (50:54.111)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (50:58.1)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (50:58.182)
And we connect it with other sounds to make meaning. In Japan, the kanji has a whole story, all reduced down to this simple, beautiful, elegant little glyph. And that's what a logo is, right? Done right. A logo is a visual representation that if you nail it, it includes everything you stand for, and everything you are, and everything you're promised to your clients and customers. I just.

Paul Povolni (51:04.842)
Hmm... Well...

Paul Povolni (51:10.554)
Right. Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (51:22.167)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (51:28.562)
If I find something more elegant and more sort of intriguing than that, you'll know because I will no longer be doing this work. So for me, it's like. It's it's. Yeah, it's been a passion that I've only in the last 10 years really started to be able to make money. But it's been something that has been with me my entire life.

Paul Povolni (51:35.402)
Ha ha ha!

Paul Povolni (51:51.583)
Yeah.

Yeah. So who are you helping now and how are you helping them?

manny wolfe (51:58.982)
Interesting timing on that question, because I'm helping still the coaches and experts and entrepreneurs and online kind of service providers and things like that. And I want to move into, and I think I'm quoting you here, getting into bigger rooms and helping bigger teams with more interesting problems.

Paul Povolni (52:12.352)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (52:20.438)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (52:24.182)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (52:24.626)
Now I feel like I'm paraphrasing you. I think I heard you. Yeah, I heard you say it, but you said it more elegantly. But yeah, so I want to move into more. So Seth Godin makes a really clear delineation between direct response marketing and brand marketing. And I want to see if I can move more into brand marketing.

Paul Povolni (52:27.102)
It sounds good. It's a good paraphrase. Yeah. Get into bigger rooms with bigger problems. Yeah. Get into bigger rooms with bigger problems.

Paul Povolni (52:45.139)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (52:49.898)
I'm not leaving direct response behind. It's an incredibly potent tool, right? It's like a sniper rifle. Whereas in that analogy, brand marketing might be more like a constant carpet bombing. But yeah, so I mean, I help, you know, these experts to get awareness, notoriety, and most importantly, I think clients.

Paul Povolni (52:50.177)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (52:56.599)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (53:09.869)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (53:15.401)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (53:19.426)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (53:20.834)
And one of the things that I find really interesting about that work is you have very little room for error with people like that, because they have very little budget to give you, right? There's not a lot of like, oh, let's test and iterate. Whereas with brand marketing or like creating a brand promise story or something like that. The assumption is that the people who are hiring you to do that understand this is a process.

Paul Povolni (53:28.506)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (53:35.744)
Right.

manny wolfe (53:49.214)
You know, whereas in the internet marketing world, you get one shot and one kill. That's it. And if you get the kill, maybe they make enough money that they can then help you move them to the next level.

Paul Povolni (53:54.326)
Hmm

Paul Povolni (54:03.882)
And do you feel that's where they're messing up, is understanding that, or what do they, how do they define their problem? How do they define, when they come talk to you, when you're getting into those bigger rooms with bigger problems, how do they talk about their problem and where are they right and where are they wrong?

manny wolfe (54:15.433)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (54:21.706)
Well, if we're talking about the sort of coaches and experts segment, they tend to be sort of unwitting victims of magical thinking. And I'll start at the very beginning. The assumption that almost all of them come into the space with and hang their shingle with is, I have a high degree of proficiency in my skill set.

I have committed and sort of said to the world that I want to serve other people with this skill set. And creative types, more than any other type as far as I can tell, are sort of susceptible to that idea, that sort of false correlation that wanting to be of service is enough. And I don't say this cynically because it would be easy as you know to say this cynically.

Paul Povolni (55:11.383)
Mm.

manny wolfe (55:19.786)
they run into an invisible brick wall, which is called marketing. And the foundation of that wall that's underneath the ground is called branding and positioning. And they don't have any idea about these things. So if I was to say where they go wrong first, it's the sort of naive expectation that because they had the audacity to claim to the world they wanted to serve, that the world would beat a path to their door.

Paul Povolni (55:31.178)
Hmm Yeah

Paul Povolni (55:47.158)
Hmm

manny wolfe (55:48.046)
Right? And I can't stress this enough more for your listeners than you. I do not say this cynically because I was one. And because I can just relate. I just know what that feels like. And the news flash, if you're listening, is like we said earlier, about ideas without marketing and execution to get them to the world. It means precisely nothing that you want to do that. And I hate to say that to you. You've got to learn how to get yourself.

Paul Povolni (56:11.756)
Right.

manny wolfe (56:17.798)
in front of people. And they have to be the right people. And you have to, here's, okay, here's, that brings me to a more sort of like blunt force trauma observation about these people. The hating marketing, hating the idea of selling, hating, and it's always hate, right? That's the word they use overwhelmingly.

Paul Povolni (56:20.05)
Right. The right people. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (56:34.167)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (56:45.067)
Right.

manny wolfe (56:48.266)
At its most benign, it's a misunderstanding. At its worst, it is a pernicious sort of set of invisible chains that I promise you will keep you exactly where you are. There is no way to do art without commerce. And if somebody hasn't said that to you already, I'm happy to be the one to say it. You can't.

Paul Povolni (57:03.259)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (57:14.595)
You know what I mean? You can, I mean, yeah, you can go. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Right. That's right.

Paul Povolni (57:14.767)
Yeah, you can do it, but that's where the term starving artist comes from, right? You can do art without commerce, but you've got to be funded somehow. Somebody's got to buy the eggs and bread.

manny wolfe (57:28.582)
Yeah, exactly. And so I would say that's their biggest kind of blind spot. And then from there, the next one is, I have a couple of analogies I often use for this. The one that cracks me up the most is the analogy of you're in this car and you're gunning it, and you're going faster and faster and faster, but in exact proportion to how fast you're going, the wheels are shrinking.

Paul Povolni (57:37.894)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (57:58.842)
Right. And so you're just, but you're not moving at all. And this is where you see the shiny object syndrome. This is where you see the desperation. This is where you see like I have every time I open my phone up and go on social media, I'll see the same sort of usual suspects who haven't figured things out yet. But they're asking for every free download. They're attending every workshop there. You know, it's like the it's like the.

Paul Povolni (57:59.763)
Oh my goodness, yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:04.361)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:23.839)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

manny wolfe (58:27.586)
practical version of the perpetual student system, or perpetual student syndrome. And I went to school as a guy in his 30s, I went back to college and I saw perpetual students everywhere. Right, yeah. And so I kind of knew what to look for when I came into this space. And then...

Paul Povolni (58:31.027)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:35.026)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:43.965)
Always learning and never executing, yeah.

manny wolfe (58:54.946)
I'd say those are the big problems. If we're talking about problems that if you change these, your situation will change, those are the ones. And then we can go, yeah, go ahead.

Paul Povolni (59:03.602)
Yeah. So what are you, what's a, well, I was going to say, what's, what's the first head smack that you pull out of your arsenal, uh, to get them set right.

manny wolfe (59:13.534)
Mm, I am increasingly direct in my communication with clients. Yeah, yeah. Well, so for me, one of my positioning journeys was to allow myself to be who I really am rather than thinking I need to shoot for the middle. You've seen people fall for this at every level, I bet.

Paul Povolni (59:20.066)
You're getting too old to hold back, right?

Paul Povolni (59:33.741)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (59:39.562)
Ryan.

manny wolfe (59:42.61)
Shooting for the middle means you get nothing. It means you get nothing, unless you're Procter and Gamble. If you're Procter and Gamble or any other kind of company like that, and if it's 50 years ago, you can market to everyone. But you cannot market to everyone now. You just can't do it. And

Paul Povolni (59:45.911)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (59:51.071)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (59:59.532)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and Procter and Gabel has, has offshoot businesses that are very industry specific, like as, as a corporation, they're generic. Then they have all these things they've purchased, you know, for billions, that are very specific.

manny wolfe (01:00:06.726)
Right, right, yeah, right.

manny wolfe (01:00:15.874)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. Somewhere along the line, they saw diminishing returns from the same output. And they had to solve that problem and ask those questions, like, what's going on here? And so they started what we now call market research. But market research wasn't always a thing. In the beginning, it was like,

Paul Povolni (01:00:34.591)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:00:38.078)
Mm-hmm. Probably wasn't an organized thing like it is now. It might've been at some level, yeah.

manny wolfe (01:00:43.698)
It's hard to say for sure, but let's talk Henry Ford. You can have any color model T you want as long as it's black. And why? Well, there's two reasons. One is it saves time to only paint one color. And the other, which I just learned is really cool, black dries four hours faster than any other color.

Paul Povolni (01:00:47.597)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (01:00:51.33)
Black.

Paul Povolni (01:01:06.82)
Come on now. What? Okay. That's awesome.

manny wolfe (01:01:07.106)
Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. And I can tell you from as a guy who was a painting contractor, black does dry the fastest. You expose it to light, it dries. You expose it to heat, it dries like that. But the interesting thing is Henry Ford knew that if I save 10 hours of production time on every car, I can make more cars. Then his problem was I've built this system.

Paul Povolni (01:01:29.749)
Oh wow.

manny wolfe (01:01:34.066)
I've revolutionized the world. I'm making these cars at, let's I don't know what, 100 a day, 10 a day, whatever it was now, I've got to sell them to everybody.

And so his kind of thing was, you know, it was really kind of easy because all you had to do was prove the car was better than a horse and everybody wanted it. But now you got every car imaginable and every color imaginable with every sort of feature imaginable. So how do you compete now? And this is where I think you and I like to work.

Paul Povolni (01:01:46.798)
So his kind of thing was, you know, it was really kind of easy because all you have to do is put it to the part of the other person. Right. And everybody would. Right. Now.

manny wolfe (01:02:14.986)
You compete now by creating a meaningful, emotionally driven story.

Paul Povolni (01:02:15.012)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right.

manny wolfe (01:02:21.618)
I am a Volvo lover, as you know. Anybody who's my friend knows this, but I love Volvo. And I love them for reasons that are entirely about the story. 100%. I know objectively they're not really that different than a Mercedes or a BMW or an Audi. Not really. But like mine, I have a new flagship sedan.

Paul Povolni (01:02:30.709)
Mm.

Paul Povolni (01:02:34.396)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (01:02:44.77)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:02:50.358)
by Volvo. It's got all the bells and whistles. And my favorite thing about it is that I can see the design DNA from 100 years back. That's what I love about it. Yeah, and so it's a story, right? It's this story about who are we? What do we stand for? Why would you either love us or hate us? We don't care if you're in the middle. We only care if you love us or hate us. And so this is a car for people who don't.

Paul Povolni (01:02:58.875)
Oh wow. Wow.

Paul Povolni (01:03:03.468)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:03:17.738)
need to be flashy, but who demand the highest quality. This is a car where you can feel the lineage, you know, in the design touches. Those things to me, I gotta tell you, when I bought it, I was shopping around in all the luxury vehicles. They pulled that car up to the front of the lot, and I said out loud, I'm done, this one's mine. I didn't drive it yet or anything. But the only difference between me and the normal consumer is I already know what I'm doing in my head. I know how the influence is working on.

Paul Povolni (01:03:21.48)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:03:26.944)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:03:39.042)
Wow!

Paul Povolni (01:03:48.063)
Right.

manny wolfe (01:03:48.222)
And I'm okay with it. But yeah, it was like game over. Let's write the paperwork up. I'll take that one. He's like, do you want to drive it? I was like, yeah, I do want to drive it. But, you know, like it's going to have to disappoint me at this point because I'm sold. You know, and yeah, go ahead. I got nothing. I was going to fill, fill dead air.

Paul Povolni (01:03:55.66)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:03:59.351)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:04:03.026)
Yeah, yeah. And translate that to the, go ahead. I was gonna say translate the, well, translate that to what you tell those, the folks in the bigger rooms. What do you tell them when it comes to story?

manny wolfe (01:04:19.858)
Yeah.

So I'm so glad you asked that question. I just had a first call with a prospect yesterday. And he has a website, I think I got a pretty good shot of landing this guy. He's got a website for primarily vintage American cars, but just vintage cars in general.

Cars that, and he didn't have the words for this until we had our first call, but cars that evoke Americana, cars that feel mechanical to drive, right? Which more and more, we don't really have that until you get up into the really high level sports cars. And so these things that were once so like...

Paul Povolni (01:05:00.539)
Mmm, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:05:07.116)
Right.

manny wolfe (01:05:13.97)
When I think about it, I just I envision it like a distilled nostalgia that gets so condensed that it's like an infinity stone. You know what I mean? It's just it's an ingot. It's rich. And so he was talking to me and he was saying, you know, I'm asking him, like, so what are the what are the heartbreaks in your community?

Paul Povolni (01:05:27.554)
Hmm. It's rich. It's yeah. Yeah. Yeah

manny wolfe (01:05:41.662)
What are the things that you see everybody hating? And so, well, the encroachment of big corporations into our thing that we love. The big corporations feel soulless and the whole thing here is about that experience. The soul within, like I put the words to him like this, I said, do you mean driving with the top down on Route 66, right? And he's like, yes, that's it.

Paul Povolni (01:05:52.782)
Mmm.

Paul Povolni (01:06:08.65)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:06:10.782)
You know, he's like, I would never want to drive a Prius down Route 66. And so, right. And so you can start to see where now we're shifting from the idea that I'm a marketing guy who can maybe help him grow his website to this is a story that we need to tell. And when we tell this story, right, man, you know, it'll be like, what is it like iron ore to a magnet? Because those people, car people,

Paul Povolni (01:06:15.72)
Yeah, just totally different feeling. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:06:29.571)
Brian.

Right. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:06:37.331)
Right.

manny wolfe (01:06:40.518)
are car people, you know what I mean? Like they are, and they, like any group of people, they always respond to, like what I think of as like a fixed point. And that fixed point is a story. It's a story about why we love what we love, why we should be celebrated for this, why we should celebrate this, and why we should reject...

Paul Povolni (01:06:42.559)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:06:57.182)
Yeah, yeah.

manny wolfe (01:07:10.378)
What isn't this?

Paul Povolni (01:07:12.286)
Right, right, right. Cause yeah, driving that vehicle. Go ahead.

manny wolfe (01:07:14.546)
And so that's a good example of the larger way that I believe successful marketing has to occur now. If you want the mushy middle, you're competing with the biggest brands on Earth. You're going to get just ground into a paste.

Paul Povolni (01:07:32.811)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (01:07:36.066)
There won't be enough of you left to spread across toast, right? You don't compete with Procter and Gamble. But, but you can get a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million dedicated diehard fans. And that even for even if you if you see yourself as wanting to build a company.

Paul Povolni (01:07:36.268)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:07:39.766)
Ha ha

Paul Povolni (01:07:43.763)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:07:55.404)
right.

Paul Povolni (01:08:01.641)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (01:08:03.194)
Even a million diehard fans will take care of you for life. I mean, sorry, even 1,000 diehard fans will take care of you for life. And so how do you find that 1,000 people? Well, they're not in the middle. They self-identify as being toward the edges. Right? You know?

Paul Povolni (01:08:06.91)
Yeah. A thousand. A thousand, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:08:21.666)
Ryan.

manny wolfe (01:08:22.742)
I love Volvo's, but I can tell by looking around my neighborhood that other people aren't as excited about them as I am. Right. So where do I find people I can relate to? That's the kind of like that's the gross oversimplification of how you need to sort of approach any new brand initiative. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:08:30.232)
Mm.

Paul Povolni (01:08:44.51)
Right, right. Yeah, who will love this? Who will want to identify with it? Who will want to imagine themselves in some sort of a ultimate situation or beautiful or photos situation, like driving down the I-66 with the top down, like in their mind, they...

manny wolfe (01:08:50.431)
Right?

manny wolfe (01:09:04.661)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:09:10.166)
they're doing it, but they're probably seeing themselves as this other character that's doing this, that's living this moment, that's being in this moment. You know, just like wearing a certain pair of shoes or carrying a certain kind of purse or having a certain kind of hat, you know, immediately almost gives you a self-deception of I'm that character, I'm that person, and those feelings flood you.

manny wolfe (01:09:14.582)
That's right. That's right. Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:09:21.001)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (01:09:32.01)
Yeah.

Right.

Paul Povolni (01:09:37.362)
Um, those, those chemicals in your brain starts start triggering. It's like, I'm having a moment of being that person or live in that life or, or whatever that might be. And so when you can get people that would feel those feelings around your product and service around that car, around that vintage car, you know, and find those people that they love the idea of driving down the road with their hair flowing in the wind, even though it's, there's a, there's a bald spot there, you know, but just that idea of dry, you know, they, they just.

manny wolfe (01:09:39.787)
Right, yeah.

manny wolfe (01:09:47.68)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:09:53.793)
Right.

manny wolfe (01:10:00.642)
Mm hmm. Yeah. Not in their self image there isn't. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:10:07.462)
Not in their self-image. They totally see themselves as some Adonis, but the feelings that are associated with that. And finding that is so key, is finding people that wanna live the story that your product can deliver.

manny wolfe (01:10:21.522)
Right, right. And one of the things that's so elegant and so elusive about the art that goes into that is, and I'm getting better at this, this has been something that I struggled with too, is the research, right? Because those people probably are already out there, and if they're not, you may have chosen a bad product or idea, really. I mean, if you have to convince people they want your thing,

Paul Povolni (01:10:45.761)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:10:49.894)
rather than saying this is the thing that speaks to the need you already have, you're going from an elevator to being Sisyphus, right? You can take the elevator up if there's already a pent up desire and you've got to find it and it's going to be in the margins, it's not going to be in the middle. Or if you try to create something that you have to convince people they want, now you're pushing the boulder of the mountain.

Paul Povolni (01:11:02.688)
Explain that.

Paul Povolni (01:11:08.706)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (01:11:18.294)
Right. Which isn't impossible, you know, because, you know, I think, I think you'd, you'd use the example of Ford, you know, and he had once said that if we had asked people what they want, they would have wanted a faster horse, right? A popular quote, but, you know, people didn't think they needed a car, you know, people didn't think, you know, the horse is fine. I can feed it grass. I don't have to feed it gasoline, you know? And so, you know, I think even with the iPod is

manny wolfe (01:11:20.456)
Nope.

manny wolfe (01:11:28.354)
Set a faster horse, right? Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:11:36.317)
Right.

manny wolfe (01:11:40.816)
That's right.

Paul Povolni (01:11:45.154)
You know, people already had MP3 players. People already had CDs with a big old book. I remember, you know, you travel with this book of CDs, you know, let me listen to a new artist, you know, flipping through this book, trying to find a CD to pop into your Walkman. Yeah, while you pop into your Walkman. And then MP3 players were out there and people were like, ah, it's okay. I could put a couple of, I could maybe put 20 songs on there, but then how do I get more songs on it? You know, do I really need that? CD play is just fine.

manny wolfe (01:11:47.435)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (01:11:53.467)
I remember that too, yeah.

manny wolfe (01:11:57.73)
Yeah, well driving.

manny wolfe (01:12:08.732)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (01:12:13.278)
you know, I don't need some technical thing. It doesn't have the same quality, blah, blah. And so I think that pushing the boulder up the hill while it takes effort, I think when you crest that hill, that suddenly you find that people like, now we can't live without it. Like imagining now only having 10 songs in your pocket seems like such a foreign thing. But it took a while for that adoption and a lot of pushing and a lot of marketing and a lot of branding and a lot of...

manny wolfe (01:12:13.862)
Mm-hmm. Right.

manny wolfe (01:12:21.538)
Mm-hmm

manny wolfe (01:12:31.05)
Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:12:43.144)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:12:43.318)
But it was a tough sell because nobody really had asked for that. They weren't looking for that.

manny wolfe (01:12:48.522)
Right? So then if we wanted to sort of, down that little door you just opened, now we talk about the strategies that go with, so there's a curve. Right? And the beginning of the curve is early adopters. And early adopters are those who want to be seen as being first.

Paul Povolni (01:13:02.719)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

manny wolfe (01:13:12.066)
it fits their self-image. They get massive social value out of being like, oh, yeah. Yeah, I got the iPhone 22 or whatever. And it's like, shoots laser beams. You don't have one? Our laser beams are two colors. And then so in the startup world, everybody, not everybody, but.

Paul Povolni (01:13:14.271)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:13:20.738)
Right, yeah. And then you're going to have the Android users that say, we've had that for years anyway.

manny wolfe (01:13:38.634)
Typically, it's like, go after the early adopters. Let them do the marketing for you. And everybody forgets about that massive dip between the early adopters and the first mass market adopters. And that's where they die, exactly. Why? Because it's a completely different approach for the early adopters and the mass market. You almost need two fully different ideas.

Paul Povolni (01:13:45.108)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:13:48.834)
Right, right. And that's where brands die. A lot of businesses die in the dip. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:14:01.151)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:14:04.428)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:14:04.574)
In fact, I would say you do need two completely different ideas, one for one and one for the other.

Paul Povolni (01:14:11.038)
Well, remember the early Google glass? You know, I mean, that was a brilliant, unbelievable piece of, yeah, looking so promising and then of course it got a term associated with it from the people wearing it, you know, that, you know, that, that wasn't very complimentary and wasn't on their marketing of, uh, of, of the wearers of that. And so it kind of died. Uh, a great idea died because the market just wasn't ready for it. And now.

manny wolfe (01:14:14.123)
Yeah, yeah.

It's looking so promising, yeah.

manny wolfe (01:14:26.162)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:14:30.835)
Right.

manny wolfe (01:14:36.183)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:14:38.634)
I think they've just come out with something new that looks more like real glasses. And I think there's going to be all kinds of issues with that as well, of people taking them where they shouldn't take them. But still, you know, but sometimes things, it's a great idea at the wrong time, you know. And so, you know, the internet, you look at the internet in the 90s, you know, great idea, but people weren't ready for it.

manny wolfe (01:14:42.824)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (01:14:53.706)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:15:01.642)
They were like, we don't need the internet, you know, or how do you use it? What's it for? How is anybody going to make money on the internet? I remember some of those newsrooms and how does anybody even make money on the internet? You know, Amazon wasn't making any money and, you know, and all of that stuff. And so I think there is that, that time where it does dip, you know, you, you launch something, um, you might have some early adopters that jump on it, but then.

manny wolfe (01:15:04.417)
That's right.

manny wolfe (01:15:08.403)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:15:25.622)
you know, something happens to where it's, it, it fades away and then it re-emerges as something totally different and you need a different story associated with it at that point.

manny wolfe (01:15:33.478)
Yeah, yeah. To get back to being Sisyphus versus taking the elevator, it's true. In fact, most of the time, the really revolutionary stuff is pushing the boulder up the hill. And so I just wanted to put the caveat on there that while I agree with everything you said, every single part of it, for anyone listening,

You're inviting unnecessary suffering if you think that you can be the Sisyphus. It takes massive resources and massive ingenuity and quite frankly, massive brilliance, massive brilliance. The kind of brilliance that tends not to only come from one person. Like one person will start it and then it grows in a really, really nurturing and creative environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So for most of us,

We want to find, and this is a direct paraphrase from Seth Godin. So if I sound smart, I credit it to him. But we want to find these little threads of opportunity and take them out and enlarge them. Depending on what your goal is, if you want the next world changing corporation, more power to you. I wouldn't know where to start with something like that. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:16:46.602)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (01:16:55.55)
Yeah. Right. And I think you're absolutely right. If you want something that is going to be, you know, a little easier, a little more satisfying, um, is find a problem and figure out how to solve it profitably. And that's as basic as it gets is fine. Find a problem.

manny wolfe (01:17:10.782)
Yeah. That's as basic as it gets.

Paul Povolni (01:17:14.886)
And find a way to solve it profitably. And so if you can find that, yeah, it's definitely a lot easier and you'll find satisfaction in it, you'll find profitability, you'll, you'll get your, your awards, you'll get your, uh, you know, whatever. Um, and certainly that, that is a recommendation for a lot of people is sometimes all you need to do is find the problem you solve and then solve it profitably for others, it is, you're gonna, you're gonna have a hard track. If you push that boulder up the hill.

manny wolfe (01:17:23.103)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (01:17:41.162)
Um, you're going to sometimes feel like you're doing it alone. It's going to be a struggle. Um, but it's going to be worth it, but no, it's not going to be easy. And you're going to have some bruises. Uh, you're going to build some muscles too, but you're also going to have some scars and pains and blisters. Um, and you know, and not everybody makes it up. You know, the something happens, life happens, circumstance happens, culture happens.

manny wolfe (01:17:47.766)
Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:18:04.331)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:18:06.33)
and suddenly your feet are knocked out from under you and that ball that crushes you. So it is, it's a super high risk, high reward. But if you could find a problem and then learn how to solve it profitably, that really is what is a great way to launch a business, start a business, grow a brand, get clarity on your brand is figuring those things out.

manny wolfe (01:18:28.018)
Yeah, absolutely. I just want to be respectful and, yeah, check on time.

Paul Povolni (01:18:30.826)
Well, man, yeah, I was just seeing the time and this has been amazing. I've really enjoyed this and we haven't even scratched the surface. We didn't even talk about the towel of the unbreakable man. Um, and so, uh, if people want to get ahold of you, how do people get ahold of you?

manny wolfe (01:18:41.825)
No?

manny wolfe (01:18:47.41)
I am not hiding. So it's just Manny Wolf on Facebook is a really great way to get a hold of me. I wanted to leave one kind of thought with the listeners because we're talking about this. Really, it's like we just boiled things down to problem solving, right? And in the last month, in sort of setting up my processes and systems so that I

Paul Povolni (01:18:50.063)
hahahaha

Paul Povolni (01:18:54.593)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:19:17.13)
my marketing agency, my income dipped because I was focused completely for the month, completely on, you know, you got to build these things. You have to build the things guys. And so for me, if there's not pretty steady revenue and ideally revenue, that's kind of going up. I get a little, you know, twitchy and I was just, I've really

Paul Povolni (01:19:23.594)
Yeah. Right.

Paul Povolni (01:19:38.25)
Yeah, yeah.

manny wolfe (01:19:40.606)
put in place a process of capturing those anxiety thoughts and talking them through with myself. And the revelation I had was, every time you do the same things, you get the same outcome. Like, historically through your life, this is proven. You didn't make a lot of money this month, but it doesn't mean that you're not going to be able to do it.

Paul Povolni (01:19:54.059)
Mm-hmm.

manny wolfe (01:20:04.086)
that the pooch is screwed, the shark is jumped. You know what I mean? It just means that you strategically changed your focus. And so what I sort of worked through with myself that I'd like to share with your listeners is your whole life has been, whether you know it or not, a series of you solving problems you didn't think you could solve. And it's really important to take that. If you're.

Paul Povolni (01:20:07.795)
Ryan.

Paul Povolni (01:20:26.99)
Mm, that's good. Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:20:32.086)
doing the self-employed thing, if you're trying to build anything meaningful, all it is, is solving one problem after another that you don't know how to solve. And so when I realized that I didn't have to know the answer when I was looking the problem in the face, that gave me a tremendous amount of peace and a tremendous amount of peace from looking at historically, unequivocally, it's not opinion, it's fact that I've had thousands of these.

Paul Povolni (01:20:42.815)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:21:01.914)
Yeah.

manny wolfe (01:21:02.098)
And I've solved every one. And so we're in the business of problem solving, as coaches, as marketers, as branding experts, as whatever we're doing. And especially you and I in this industry, that's what we do. We solve problems at the end of the day. You want to imbue them with creativity. You want to imbue them with nobility. You want to do all these things. But at the bottom of it, you're just solving problems. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:21:08.648)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:21:19.562)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:21:30.482)
Yeah, man, that is so good. Such a great way to end it. I mean, we are all here. If you're here, you have survived your worst days. And, you know, and so thank you so much, Manny. This has been amazing. I know there's so much value that people can just pull out of this conversation. You're definitely a misfit. You do have a cool name. And people look him up, check out Manny Wolf. Be sure to follow him on social media.

manny wolfe (01:21:38.079)
Yeah, that's right.

manny wolfe (01:21:50.644)
I'm out.

Paul Povolni (01:21:58.17)
and follow his adventure. And this has been fantastic so much. So much thanks to you and have an amazing day, man. And look forward to chatting again.

manny wolfe (01:22:08.682)
Sounds good, my friend. Thank you. Bye.

Paul Povolni (01:22:10.391)
Take care.