From a Mayan Tribe to PR & Influencer Marketing Expert — David Baker // ReCourses

Quotes

• “I grew up in Guatemala and my parents were medical missionaries so we lived with this tribe of Mayan Indians, we had no electricity, no running water, no roads. My introduction to marketing back then was with a real ‘Mercado’  where every Sunday morning, all of the farmers would come into town and trade the extra things they had.” - David “I learned to recognize one of the early principles of specialization. Back then, there’s a lot of things that I need that I can’t do for myself. I would go to the market on Sunday morning and trade all the extra things that I had for the things that I needed which is an early example of specialization. It is deciding to dig deep on something that you’re really good at and then exchange that for something that you’re not good at.” - David“I got into Communications here in the US because Language was really interesting to me. We spoke three languages in our home although we spoke English mainly. I just really love language and its connection with anthropology.” - David “I had this really unique opportunity to write some articles for other people that were running firms and that really appealed to me because doing the work of marketing came fairly easily but making the decisions around running the business of marketing was a lot more difficult for me.” - David  “All of a sudden I began advising other principals. What I found was they didn’t really need as much help with the mechanic or technical side of marketing, what they needed more help with was how to make better business decisions.” - David“Choosing ReCourses, I was trying to act a little bigger than I was. I’ve always been a one-man-band. It wasn’t until three years ago that I switched to my own personal brand and quit pretending around that.” - David“Back then, I bought a T1 Line and thought that if I could just build a website and write what people will find to be useful content or insight maybe they’ll give me their email addresses. I didn’t know I was already doing content marketing.” - David“Back in ‘97 I still have these emails and I started writing a weekly email. I don’t know how much of it I can claim as brilliance or simply accidental, that was the best decision I ever made and it was built on technology. Over the years, 38,000 people have signed up because they wanted to get that email.” - David“The revenue comes in a fairly equal bucket. One bucket would be royalties from five books, another comes from speaking either with my own events or keynoting at events that other people have and then the rest of it would be individual consulting.” - David“I was forced to build that muscle of understanding how to do valuations of a firm, how to do merger and acquisition work. As an expert, I don’t want to be in their face all the time. What I would rather do is to bounce in and out of the relationship at key, really opportune moments when they have a felt need.” - David“Here’s the sign of a great marketer. You figure out who your core customer was, their pain points, and be able to build products that not only address the lead generation phase, and added on products throughout the life cycle of the relationship and even if it lasts 20-30 years.” - Ben “There is no doubt in my mind that forcing myself to have a public point of view and being disciplined, I mean courageous and disciplined at putting it out there every week for all these years, that is the vast majority of what helped me build a personal brand.” - David“For me, the process is not to develop some sort of intelligence and then to articulate it. It never happens that way for me. For me, intelligence comes in the articulation so I write because if I didn’t write, I’d never know what I believe.” - David “When you’re doing any sort of content business. The key is consistency. The more consistent you are, the better you are at honing your craft, giving your potential audience more ability to consume and share your content, the more you are going to seem like an authority.” - David“The risk-taking that you’re putting yourself in, it leads to even better things. It feeds itself. The more you write, the more you’ll realize you’ll never run out of things to write about.” - David