Why Answering Questions Makes You A Leader

In today's episode, we explore the true meaning of "providing value." Our guest, Tony Whatley, shares a powerful truth: real, human connections online make all the difference.
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Here's what you'll learn:

• Authentic chats online beat fake ones, always.
• True power isn't just about money; it's about influence.
• Giving more than you take makes you a leader in any group.
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Don't miss these golden nuggets of wisdom.
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Meet Tony Whatley. A genius in business with over 20 years of experience. He's made websites, written a top book, and helped many. Tony's journey from starting businesses part-time to teaching others the way. His goal? Help you be your best.

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Key Takeaways

• Establishing Influence and Impact - Financial success alone does not guarantee influence or the ability to make a significant impact.
• Organic Engagement Over Automation - Automation tools might seem efficient, but they can appear disingenuous and can lead to a loss of genuine human touch.
• Positioning as a Leader in Communities - Being active, supportive, and giving back in online communities can position someone as a leader.

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Deep Insights from an Expert: Tony Whatley isn't just a guest; he's a seasoned entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, sharing wisdom from his journey.

Mastering Influence: Discover how to go beyond financial success to establish genuine influence and make a lasting impact in your community and beyond.

Redefining Leadership: Understand what it truly means to be a leader in online spaces and how you can position yourself as an authority.

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More About Today's Guest, Tony Whatley

Host of 365 Driven Podcast | Business & Executive Coach | Author of Side Hustle Millionaire | Occasional Comedian

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Tony Whatley is a 20+ year serial entrepreneur, business coach, best-selling author, podcast host, and speaker. He is Co-Founder of LS1Tech, an online automotive performance community which grew into the largest of its kind. This website grew to over 300,000 registered members and 150 advertising accounts, and was later sold for millions, in only 5 years. Amazingly… it was just his part-time business!
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Tony shares his mindset and business strategies within his Amazon #1 best-selling book, Side Hustle Millionaire, and teaches people how to startup, scale, and exit their companies.
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With his previous oil/gas profession, managing $100M+ international projects, he consults small businesses on how to benefit from his expertise in processes, systems, and leadership. His purpose is to help people gain the knowledge and courage to take action. He strives to help others become the best version of themselves.
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When not performing the work that he loves, you can usually find Tony and his wife Lisa travelling the world, or racing cars.

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A Transcription of The Talk

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Mark Drager: When you're on these social platforms, when you're in this network answering the same questions all the time, are you just keeping a document where you can literally just be like copy, paste, copy, paste shortcut or are using automations with like Phantom Buster to make sure that you're auto liking all of the people you want to follow or anything like that.

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Tony Whatley: I don't do any of those types of tools. I think they're disingenuous. I think there's a lot of fakery going on out there. I think there's a higher value for people that are actually organic and helping people on an organic level. I think that too many shortcuts and automations, and things like that, you start to lose touch or you know, have your hand on the pulse of your community and what you're kind of serving. I'd rather be the one that's doing things organic, you know, I'm not trying to make $10 million a year, I can do pretty well with 10% of that. So you know, you got to think about your business model. Like if it's important to build your face and your personal brand, which most of my clients now, this is where it kind of shifted Mark, about two years ago, I started getting high net worth clients. They have the problem of income solved, they're financially successful. But what they lack is influence, what they lack is impact.

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So yeah, we all have impacted our close circle, or proximity, or family and maybe extended friendships. But how do you impact thousands of people, if not millions of people? It's their influence and impact. So they were coming to me with this problem, like, Hey, I got plenty of money. But I want to put my name out there because I want to give back. I want to understand how do you grow this audience? And, you know, what's it like writing a book? And do you think that I could write a book? And what's a podcast? Like, how do I get on that? Like, I think that would be interesting.

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And so I've been coaching a lot of these people that had seven and eight figure businesses on how to put their voice out there and how to become comfortable becoming the character that they need to become to be able to carry that story, because a lot of us have really successful stories in the background. But we also hid behind the logos of our companies, right? And so you think about this, there are a lot of companies out there that have been multimillion dollar companies, but you don't know the CEO. You don't know the face. But they have things to say, they have things that they want to share. They have a legacy they want to create. So they're kind of stumbling, like baby deer, trying to figure out how do I do this? Like, I've never had to do this before. They've been resting on the revenue figures of their company versus themselves and putting themselves out there and making themselves uncomfortable.

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It's all about just creating the content, putting it out there, doing things organically. And if you have your profile pages on your social media set up properly, it's going to have your website, it's going to have maybe a short description of what you do. And so when you're always serving people, they get curious, they creep. You know what they say, creeping on Facebook, I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole. They will creep you. If you're the one that's doing things that's getting attention, attention is currency. We hear this from a lot of influencers. Attention is the new currency. If they see what you're doing, and they go down the rabbit hole, clicking your links and seeing what you're all about, they may come to realization like, "I need this service," or they're gonna put it in the top of their mind for when their friend someday down the road goes, "Hey, do you know a business coach?" Yeah, this Tony guy, like, I think you should contact him. I really liked his content, I read his book, listen to his podcast.

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So your objective is to be top of mind on the referral or the necessity of that consumer.

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Mark Drager: So what I hear you saying is give first, though, so that makes sense from a value point of view. So find people who need help, find people who you can be an authority of, and you can help answer their questions no matter where they are on their own journey, or how far behind they are. Take the time to respond, give value. Makes sense to me. How does this look in the day to day though? Because for myself, I'll spend anywhere from, you know, an hour to two or three hours, maybe on Reddit. I'm the person who's on social on Instagram, seeing what people are doing. But I'm not a commenter. I just don't want to get into it. And so does this just come naturally to you? Do you just enjoy this? And what does this look like on the day to day?

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Tony Whatley: I think when we're using social media or anything on the internet, you're either a consumer or a creator. And if you're thinking about business and how to create more leads or more profit, you got to be on the Creator side. So yeah, we can get on Instagram or TikTok and scroll forever, and be in sensationalism and kind of escapism. That's okay if you want to scratch the itch of just entertaining yourself or filling some time void. But if you use it intentionally, which you shouldn't be doing if you're in business, you should put some time, think about that, like, hey, if I see a question and I know the answer, it literally takes me two seconds to type that out. Why not put that answer out there? Why not just keep kind of feeding that pipeline of potential leads? Because this works even in paid groups like Facebook groups and different groups. Like one of the first paid groups I joined was Lewis Howes', everybody knows who he is. I saw a lot of people asking questions.

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And also, we could talk about the negative side of people joining these kinds of groups too, but they're doing things wrong, and they never get traction. But how to serve those groups, as you see people asking for questions and referrals and like, what would you guys do in this situation? And if you have a genuine answer, answer those things because Lewis Howes was not in his group every day answering these questions. His moderator team was not in there every day answering questions, but people are still asking questions, so why not answer those if you have the answer? And so what happens is you start to position yourself as somebody that's helping and supporting and giving back to others. They're not really ever asking anything in return. You're not making your own posts and asking more than you're receiving. Basically, you just kind of position yourself as a leader in these groups by doing that, and I did that with the RTC Syndicate.

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You and I, we were at Mullet's book launch event last year. And Andy Frisella's group, same thing, I joined that. I saw a lot of people that were early in entrepreneurship, people that were asking questions that were very basic, but not many people are answering because most people are, like you said, they're scrolling, they're not really participating. And so I would be the one that answers questions. And by doing that, I ended up being one of the speakers at one of their large events that had 1500 people in the audience. I was a speaker at their event because I was willing to contribute and give rather than always ask for something.

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Mark Drager: That is so interesting because I've actually noticed that and seen that, and I never thought of it in this kind of strategic way. Where if there's a closed group, so think LinkedIn, you know, a paid group, a mastermind group, a membership group, whatever it might be, certainly there are the people who are maybe the paid staff, they're the people who are running it. But then there's always this middle group, the unofficial ambassador, you know, the person who shows up to everything, helps with all these things, continues to step up. And in my experience, I've never seen the organizing group or the organizing party come down on those people and say, "What are you doing adding more free value to my membership and helping me grow stuff?" And it creates this kind of weird middle class where you not only are able to support the people underneath you, but you are able to rise kind of to the top amongst the very many people in the group and start to form tighter bonds as that go-to person with the organizers themselves.

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Tony Whatley: Like I said, there's a negative aspect to this, too. I see a lot of people do this wrong. So I want to raise people's awareness of what not to do when they join these groups. Some people will join these groups because they don't have an audience, they don't have a following. And so they treat these paid groups like their audience, they pretend that's their following. And it's not the case. Because when people are paying to be in a group, they don't get to choose what you post in there, right? It's just nice content. So the people that do it wrong will go in there. And they're always trying to create posts, they're always trying to create those engagement posts, they're always trying to do things, they're always trying to, you know, kiss ass and like, make, you know, like, "Oh, this person is so great. We spent 15 minutes on the phone together." And, you know, we're like, nobody likes a kiss ass. Nobody likes the person that's using that as their audience. Like if you go to their personal profiles, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. And they're not even posting any content on their own feed, but they're in these groups like posting constantly. That's annoying. Everybody finds you annoying. Like that's not the right way to build authority or influence in a group.

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The best way to do it is not to treat those people like your audience or your captive audience, because they're paying to be there. Answer their questions, just be the one that answers everybody's questions. And when you do have a genuine question that you would like some feedback on, share that but don't go in there and try to post every single day pretending that's your audience, because usually, that will annoy the owner of the group like, "Who is this guy? Why is he paying to come in here and act like this is his audience? Like, that's weird."

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Mark Drager: You're like hijacking it almost.

Tony Whatley: Exactly, don't do that. We see those characters every time there's a turnover with new members coming in. And we have to, you know, as a group, if you're a strong group leader, you kind of set the core values and the culture of that group. And you'll find that your members will police themselves because if they see somebody doing that, they'll just call each other out like, "Bro, this isn't your audience. Why aren't you posting this valuable content on your own timeline and creating your own engaging posts on your own timeline? Why are you doing that in here? So spend more time answering instead of trying to talk."

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Mark Drager: So Tony earlier, I asked you, you know, what does this look like on the daily and I am curious, like, do you schedule an hour or two? Do you go on walks or exercise? And you're spending time with networking? Do you have a calendar where each day of the week you do different things? Or is it way more informal? Because you spend time in these groups? I'm just wondering about the CEO. I'm wondering about the listener who already has a jam-packed schedule. And is there a way to outsource this? Is there a way to create structure around this? Is there a way to fit this in? Like how do we make this something that isn't just kind of on the bottom of our to-do lists?

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Tony Whatley: Well, I think it always comes back down to what your priorities are. Because we can all say we don't have time. But everybody that tells me that, I tell them to pull up their phone and show me their calendar. And then they kind of look at me with a deer in the headlights because they don't operate from the calendar. So time management, task management is largely a basis of your discipline, and are you living by a calendar? Because if you're not managing time on a calendar, that means you don't respect time. And if you don't respect time, time is not going to respect you. So you always got to think about, am I really not having enough time, or am I doing a piss poor job of trying to manage my time? Let me give you guys an example. We were on a call with Ed, my lead. We mentioned him earlier. And someone asked him like, "Hey, who's your social media team? How do you schedule that kind of this tactical question you just asked me?" And he kind of blew everybody away. He goes, "When you guys see a post on social media, and the responses, that's me." This guy's got a billion-dollar net worth. He's involved in 30 different companies, big companies. He's got teams of employees. But he will tell you that if you see him interacting on Instagram or Facebook or anything, that that's him because he likes to be personal, he likes to be the face. He likes to make sure the quality control and the way that he responds and treats people is up to his standards.

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Some of us do find a little bit of enjoyment in doing that, well, some don't. So it's all about your priorities. And it's going to be different for everybody. But here, I'm going to speak to the people that know that this is important, especially social media, putting yourself out there, building a personal brand. Like some of you out there know, that's very important, but you're not doing anything about it. You're just thinking, "Oh, I was too late, you know, I missed that bus." And maybe, "I'm too old. Or maybe, I'm too skinny, maybe I'm too fat. Maybe I don't communicate very well." Like all these excuses, right? But if you know that it's very important and that you could actually benefit from a personal level or fulfillment level or your business could increase because you're willing to put yourself out there, then you'd have to ask yourself the question, "Why am I not investing in myself to put myself out there? If I'm a bad communicator, like I was in 2015, I hired a speaking coach, joined Toastmasters. I made videos every single day for over a year as I was improving."

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Because as you're learning public speaking skills and communication skills, you're not going to get on a bunch of stages until you have skills. So we carry these little cell phone devices around in our pocket. Everybody knows those things. That's your virtual stage, that's your content outlet. Like you and I, Mark, we do a lot of content. We're teaching people, we're on video. It wasn't easy for you to do that at the beginning, it wasn't easy for me to do that. So if it's important to you and you know that it can improve your life and your business, then it becomes your duty as CEO to be able to put yourself out there, and it's not easy to do. But the ROI, the return on that, is so much more powerful than you. Really, you don't understand it yet.

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Mark Drager: Yeah, it's funny when I look back on my career because I own an agency. And as the person who was mainly leading strategy conversations, leading all of the pitches, leading all of the objection handling for thousands of projects with hundreds of companies and 29 industries, I've been doing this now for 17 years. I didn't realize when I jumped onto video how much all of those boardroom conversations actually helped. And the more I was podcasting, the more I was networking, the more that I was going to when I went really heavy into Clubhouse when it was a thing. One of my team members said, "Mark, the meetings you're leading with clients are so much more enjoyable and entertaining. Like, I've had clients tell me they love coming to our meetings because it's casual and it's cool." So for any leader, I just want to stress the fact that your skills and what you're capable of doing will not just be for online or for a network. But it will also bleed into the way that you lead your team, the way that you present, the way that you pitch. You can actually develop these skills over time.

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And then lastly, to your point, if anyone is really interested, there's a video on our old YouTube channel Phantom Media, before we went through a rebrand, the agency was called Phantom Media. And if you go back, there's a black and white video there. It's only about 10 minutes long. But my friend Evan Carmichael, who is someone who has millions of subscribers on YouTube and does all of these thought leadership academies and helps people present better on camera, is an introvert. He was like an engineer, not well-spoken. He kind of trained himself. There's a video there of him and I where he, I think, was 90 minutes. Imagine spending 90 minutes one-on-one with him on camera, where literally, he just went over and over and over again. In 90 minutes of me presenting, all I could get through was the first eight seconds of a video. And it was over and over and over again. And he would just be like, "Don't say that. You lost confidence. Look to the camera better." Just like over and over again. And we cut it down to just eight minutes. And it's just me doing it over and over again. That's hilarious, over again. And I posted it just to show, like, no one starts anything good.

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Tony Whatley: No, no, I mean, give you an example, when I first started doing these videos, I was taking a consulting role for a natural gas company, and I had my tie on. And after work, I'd be sitting in my truck. And I said, "Okay, it's time to do my video." And I had my tie on. I was trying to look all business at you, right? At the time, I put the phone on the little holder on the dash, and if somebody's watching this, listening to this, they'll probably relate to this, right? But the phone on there, push record, tried to share some kind of message or a tactical takeaway or maybe some encouraging advice. But if I saw one human in the entire parking lot, that could be five rows of us, just one human on the other side of the parking lot, I would quit recording. I would just wait for them to kind of get in their car and go away. So I was not comfortable putting myself on camera or doing these kinds of things. But I understood the importance of it when you're done purpose-driven. And when you have a big mission, it requires you to grow to become the person that carries that story, that message. And if you're not doing things that are challenging you to become a better version of yourself and making yourself really uncomfortable in the pursuit of improvement, then your purpose isn't big enough. And so I'm just highlighting the fact, yeah, now I don't have stage fright. And now I've done hundreds of hundreds of interviews and top 1% podcasts, all these things because I made myself uncomfortable because I knew that this would actually become a more beneficial activity that's going to show some kind of return over time.

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Mark Drager: Let's assume that the listener might be anywhere from having done this already and being super experienced to maybe they're not really into it. But they know that the opportunity to grow business through these groups, through networking, through exposure, just help me connect the dots so I can understand how we go from me spending time either in a real network, answering questions, but mostly online, answering questions. How does that turn into sales opportunities?

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Tony Whatley: So what happens is you get into these groups, you start to be known as the person that's got the answers or the one that's connecting. You don't always have to be the answer; you can be the connector. A lot of the famous books and things that we read out there, like we talked about Napoleon Hill, Thinking Grow Rich, a very popular book, it's kind of like the granddaddy of all personal development books other than the Bible. What you don't realize is Napoleon Hill was not a wealthy man, he was not a successful man, he was an editorial guy, a journalist type. And he was willing to go out and find the titans of these different industries and bring them together to create these books. So he was a connector. And so if you feel like, "I haven't made millions of dollars, and I'm not super experienced, or I don't have this education," you can build authority and influence by being the connector, by building the network and putting the right people in the same rooms that would make some kind of a great outcome.

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So you can either do this by authority or by being the connector. What happens is when people do need your services or the product that you're selling, they're going to remember you because you're really top of mind. It's almost like free advertising space. When you think about this, if you're always creating content to educate, inspire, or encourage people, it becomes free advertising in cyberspace. Always think about social media as kind of like a tiebreaker between decisions. And most people think, "Okay, well, I don't have 1000 followers, I don't have 10,000 followers," and they're so fixated on the vanity metric of followers. But what really matters—I'm a business coach. Okay, so let's say that someone out there is going, "Hey, I'm gonna hire a business coach, I need to get this thing together." And so they're gonna get referrals from their friends. And so what's next, we go back and we're looking through these referrals to see if anyone kind of pops out on us or vibes with us, or I like the way that person speaks. Or, you know, we're always looking for that alignment. So what happens is they go to your social media, and the big ones are always going to be the Twitter, the Instagram, and YouTube. Those are the three big ones like we could talk about LinkedIn and Facebook on a lower level, but the Titans are always gonna be Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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Mark Drager: I think many listeners would be surprised you're not adding TikTok to the mix now?

Tony Whatley: No, because it was too easy to gamify getting the big followers. I think it's still there. But I think TikTok will come into its own in the next five years. I think it'll be held at the same regard. But when anytime there's a new app, like you talked about Clubhouse, where you and I connected for the first time, it blew up. We got 30,000 followers in the first two months. So it was very easy to get that algorithm to have the big reach initially. But now it's kind of the valve's turned off. And so it's kind of like they didn't really earn the 30,000 followers in the heat of it when everybody was already there, right?

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And so it gets held to a little bit lesser regard. When you build this audience, yeah, that's cool. But the thing is, is what your customers are looking for is the tiebreaker. So if they go to your Instagram page and they say, "Like, Coach A has not made a post in three weeks, kind of sporadic, is even in business. You go click their website, it looks very amateur, like, wow, this is kind of whatever. I mean, I heard good things about him, but it looks like he's just kind of half-assing or treating it like a hobby." Then you go to like a Coach B, and they're posting every day. They're helping people, they're answering questions, even if they only have 1000 followers, right? They're still active. So that's what they're looking for is the activity.

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So when you create this post, and you feel like, "Oh, man, only got 10 likes. It's a waste of my time. This is terrible." You're missing out on the tiebreaker strategy, because if they happen to land on your page, which is evergreen content, and they're seeing that you're active, and you're actually doing something that's going to carry a lot more weight than somebody that posts once a month, once or once every three weeks and things like that. So that's why we do it. So it's a tiebreaker thing.

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Mark Drager: Tony, we're up against the clock. Thank you so much for joining us. I do have one last question for you. What would be your number one tip for myself and for the listeners? What would be your number one tip or strategy to sell more?

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Tony Whatley: I would say that the biggest regret I have is not hiring a speaking coach and joining Toastmasters. It's a nonprofit to teach you public speaking skills. Now, some of you may be thinking like, "I never want to be a public speaker." But what Mark and I are doing right now is public speaking. And you hear his vocal inflections, the pauses, we don't say, "um," and all these distractions, things that make you seem less certain or less confident or less knowledgeable about the things, those are all bad. They're never going to close sales. So even if you're standing in front of a boardroom or trying to talk to your team, and all these different things, communication skills are number one. And most men really struggle with that, because most men speak in what I call "dude speak." They just have this monotone voice, and we just kind of keep this one cadence and one volume, and there's no range in our voice. And we just kind of talk, and it's boring as hell, like nobody wants to hear that. You're not entertaining, no matter how much you've achieved, you're not going to entertain people. So there's always the entertainment aspect that we need to focus on. But that's also learning how to speak with influence, whether that's in person, or on video, or from a big stage or from a podcast. So invest in those communication skills, even if you suck at it, because that's the humility at the push aside, and it will return benefits 10-fold, 100-fold over the course of your entire life.