"The fundamentals of marketing your business will never change - The Three 'M's, Market, Medium and Message."
Meet Johnny Walker. He helps executive job seekers get their ideal job, faster, for more money, without having to sell themselves. The Executive Edge program has been running for years now and has been road-tested by over 300 six-figure (and a few 7-figure_ executives and now comes with a 100% guarantee of your success.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Johnny Walker: Senior executives who are looking for the next career move are often disappointed by recruiters, frustrated by online application systems and ghosted by HR functions and it’s confusing and time consuming. The executive Edge program that I founded several years ago removes all the fear, confusion and disappointment by providing a crystal clear 7-step system for senior executives to use to get their ideal job, confidently and quickly.
2020 and 2021 threw a lot of curve balls into business on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past couple years, how can businesses thrive in 2022? What lessons have you learned?
Johnny Walker: Empathy with your market is critical. We have noticed a lot of executive job seekers are a bit “zoomed out’ and don’t want to learn via even more screen time. We have also noticed hiring managers are experiencing email fatigue, where previous water cooler conversations and just stopping by someones desk is no longer happening and email has taken up the slack, leading to email overload. Listening to our market and changing the way we get our offer across has helped us stay at the front of executives minds.
The pandemic seems to keep on disrupting the economy, what should businesses focus on in 2022? What advice would you share?
Johnny Walker: The fundamentals of marketing your business will never change – The Three ‘M’s, Market, Medium and Message. As long as you have a deep understanding of your customers (Market) and have a dialled in Message (Offer), then you can use the Medium (social media channel, email, live event) that is appropriate or performing best at the time.
How has the pandemic changed your industry and how have you adapted?
Johnny Walker: The move to work from home for executives has exposed weaknesses in middle and junior management remote communication skills and those executives I coach who can help mitigate that communication gap are very sought after. Those executives who can also design the future as well as navigate to it are very sought after. Organisation transformation has been expedited by the pandemic and not all executives have been comfortable with the old boundaries removed and new ones not yet drawn up (fully).
What advice do you wish you received when the pandemic started and what do you intend on improving in 2022?
Johnny Walker: I am fortunate to be well mentored and am used to listening for a living (I coach corporate executives on their career moves and leverage digital marketing to do it, so have a spreadsheet for everything!), but for me, patience was key. Not being too in a hurry to interpret the market. It was to volatile for a short-term trend to be extrapolated. Patience and listening or empathy were and still are, key.
Online business surged higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for 2022?
Johnny Walker: Online fatigue is already being experienced in the corporate world and I am confident we will see a hybrid approach establish itself in the workplace. Large flagship corporate headquarters may be replaced with subscriptions to smaller and more local to the employees, fractional offices, to support functional meet ups and collaboration. A networked approach to people management will become the norm, largely supplanting the command and control structure of many organisations.
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a screen?
Johnny Walker: I run an online business – so 4-8 depending on whether I’m working in my business or working on it. I am conscious to physically remove myself from the office for ‘big think’ or exercise and because replacing myself in the business as it grows, is necessary.
The majority of executives use stories to persuade and communicate in the workplace. Can you share with our readers examples of how you implement that in your business to communicate effectively with your team?
Johnny Walker: Stories are baked in to how we perform our marketing, including social proof and we also coach how to acquire and implement social proof to influence hiring decision in the executives favour. There is also a hard structure which can be used as a template for story telling, which has PHD theses written about it and even has its own Wikipedia page…we share that with our corporate executives to help them use stories to manage their careers.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as the real challenge right now?
Johnny Walker: Distraction. The variety of social media channels available make it easy to be distracted from focusing on the fundamentals. Right now LinkedIn is resurgent, TikTok is buoyant, but these are just channels. The Market and Message must be taken care of first. I am seeing a more humane leader emerge post-pandemic and empathy and kindness are competitive advantages. getting comfortable with them is not every corporate executives default position!
In 2022, what are you most interested in learning about? Crypto, NFTs, online marketing, or any other skill sets? Please share your motivations.
Johnny Walker: For me, online marketing is empathy. Empathy is listening to understand and included in that is some psychology. Cialdini’s book Influence is a bit of a bible for me. I’ll never stop learning how to be better in this space.
A record 4.4 million Americans left their jobs in September in 2021, accelerating a trend that has become known as the Great Resignation. 47% of people plan to leave their job during 2022. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. Do you think leaders see the data and think “that’s not me – I’m not that boss they don’t want to work for? What changes do you think need to happen?
Johnny Walker: Remote working and hybrid working have challenged executive communication and corporate thinking / strategy. Being able to listen to your team when they’re not physically present is harder and requires executives to learn new skills. Leading when the usual boundaries or parameters have been removed is harder, and executives are having to adjust to having much less of a track to follow. I don’t think leaders are in denial about the gaps, but they are afraid of them and don’t have easy answers to hand, which is frustrating them.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Johnny Walker: To be in more places at the same time. That way I could listen faster, learn quicker and reflect that more accurately, which in turn service more people. That and patience…as you can tell from my earlier faster, quicker, more comment, I’m still a work in progress!
What does “success” in 2022 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Johnny Walker: Success is both a business and personal thing as i founded the business to serve the corporate executive community and their careers and provide freedom for me and my family to choose how we live our lives. Success this year will be moving the dial on both of those goals by increasing the amount of people we serve and decreasing the amount of dependency the business has on me.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Johnny Walker for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Johnny Walker or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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