This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello you guys, and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I am in Croatia still. I’m kinda like in this small village, but I’ve got this epic view of the Adriatic Sea. I’m here with my family – my wife and my two little toddlers.
They are two and three years old, but they are the cutest dang things. But also really difficult to travel with two toddlers. So I don’t know if you have children, but if you do then you probably have gone through what I’m going through now. My daughter’s at that age, the terrible two’s. My son’s past it, but I think he still kind of has a little bit of the terrible in him, even though he’s three years old.
So anyways, I’m out here but I am still committed to doing these episodes. So I brought my mic with me. I’m kind of travelling with my mic. I’ve got this RØDE professional studio mic with me, just toting it around with me. It’s pretty cool though, so I’m really loving doing these, and I hope that you’re getting a lot of value out of them.
Today I wanted to talk to you about finding your voice, and how you can go about finding your voice no matter what you do. So whether it’s– Whether you go out there and you write or you create a podcast or you create a vlog and you get on YouTube – whatever it is, right? Finding your voice is the key. I know for me it took me a little while to find my voice. When I started – first started blogging in 2014 ish, it was really hard in the beginning. I didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew is that I needed to start. So I started, and I kept writing – and eventually, ultimately, I found my voice.
When you find your voice, something kind of unique happens. It’s like an internal shift inside of you. Now this doesn’t matter where your business is at. Finding your voice is key. It doesn’t matter if you’re at six figures or seven figures – even if you’re just starting, eight figures – it doesn’t matter. There’s always benefit in finding your own voice, and communicating that voice to whoever it is that your audience is. Because they want to hear from you, and they want to know about you. People don’t want to just buy from a stodgy company, from a stodgy corporation.
They want to buy from real people. If it’s not a hotly innovative company like Tesla or Apple, they want to develop a relationship with the person, with you, okay? So for that reason, you need to find your voice. You need to figure out a way that you can actually connect with prospects by finding that voice, and figure out a way to communicate that voice to the audience that you are looking to serve, or that you are currently serving. So that’s really, really important.
But the question really comes down to like, how do you actually find your voice? Well the number one way that you could find your voice is to just get started. So if you want to be – kind of emulate what I did, I just got started. I just started putting my thoughts out there. Then there’s an internal shift that happens inside of you, right? You begin to find that voice, you begin to– You begin to find what’s inside of you that’s buried deep – that it just comes out with practice. With practice communicating.
So I know for me, for example – the blogging was a natural course where I knew I needed to start, because I was a super introvert. I’m not just talking about introvert, I’m talking about super introvert. The kind of introvert where you get made fun of when you’re a kid, and you become like this like really complacent adult, like not wanting to kind of upset other people or just– You just don’t want any kind of conflict, and that was me.
So I was really afraid of putting my opinions out there. I was really afraid of saying anything – to risk kind of being made fun of. Because I was made fun of a lot of my kind of – my youth, as a kid. Now just imagine having the last name Kanaat. So part of the reason why I wanted the anonymity, and why I started writing under the pen name R.L. Adams, is because I was kind of embarrassed of my last name. Now I know it sounds silly, but for those who have a name that can be misconstrued, as something that can be made fun of as a kid – or if you were made fun of as a kid or bullied, or anything like that – I was bullied extensively as a kid. Then you probably understand where I’m coming from.
So a last name like Kanaat, right? Can be misconstrued as “Cannot.” In fact, it’s often pronounced, “Cannot.” So this last name is of Turkish descent, so it has a meaning in Turkish. But as far as it goes in the English language, it’s– As a kid, it’s really, really not that fun. Because it was always Robert “Cannot.” do anything. I don’t know like maybe that actually served me growing up, right? Like I know that you always read these kind of studies where the popular kids in school don’t end up actually going anywhere. So maybe that was meant to serve me? I have no idea. I just know that there’s a lot of pain associated with that. So I – always, always afraid to have a voice, let alone find my voice.
I felt like my voice was actually stifled. What happens when you kind of start doing something, when you kinda start practicing something is – it evolves, right? So the voice evolves. For me the voice evolved from blogging. I found my voice as a blogger. I’ve been able to kind of leverage that and bring it over to this platform, and hopefully to other platforms as well.
When I was able to find my voice as a blogger, I was able to – when my business came crashing down not that long ago, because of that big dispute with my business partner– If you’ve been listening to the podcast kind of all along, then you know what happened. I’ve given you the broad strokes. When that came crashing down and I had to kind of put myself out there and become more of an extrovert and meet people and start Masterminding, and kind of going out there and collaborating with others – I was able to do that. I had a voice, right? But if I didn’t have a voice, I think that would’ve been hard, right? I would’ve been just kind of this guy floundering. Like I have been in the past, right?
So finding your voice is really important. It doesn’t matter where your business is today. Finding your voice and making sure that your voice reaches your audience is key. So how do you do it? So here are some action items, right? So if you have not started, I don’t care where your business is, or how successful you think you are or you are not. You have to pick some place to start. For me, the natural start was blogging. I know that this is hard for some people, especially if you feel like not a lot of people will actually ever read your blog. I once saw a shirt that said, “More people will read this shirt than will read your blog.” Fortunately for me, that’s not the case. I was pretty persistent. But it took time. Even knowing SEO, it took time to build an audience of millions of people.
But if you don’t feel like that’s the right avenue for you, and if you are not really interested in writing – I was interested in writing, so that doesn’t mean you have to be interested in writing. But if you are not interested in writing, find another platform – start a podcast, start a vlog, get on YouTube. A good friend of mine who I will definitely have – hopefully have on a future episode. He has preliminarily agreed to be on a future episode of this podcast with me. Is a guy named Stevin John.
He’s like my kid’s hero. He is – if you don’t know who he is – or if you have kids, maybe you do know. He is Blippi. Blippi is like a children’s character. He is so popular on YouTube. He’s got billions of views. He started with the tenet that – there are no great free children’s educational series. So he tried and tried and tried. I actually interviewed this guy for Forbes. I wrote an entire article about him. This was way back when he had just crossed the billion views. The reason why I reached out to him was because my kids love this guy. I would watch him, and I would be fascinated, and I would get enthralled in it. So I can see how it’s so beneficial for children. It adds so much value.
He was able to find his voice. He was – he told me everything that he did to create the character Blippi. He literally went through 800 sounding names. So he looked for a name that would come from the front of the mouth, as opposed from the back. Because he knew that children spoke from the front of the mouth. This all started when his nephew – his sister’s kid, basically – was searching for stuff on YouTube – and couldn’t find anything, and was watching all these like crappy series. Or these videos on YouTube that weren’t very good. He said to himself, “Like, I know I can do this. I can make something better.”
Man has he been successful. I mean talk about building a personal brand. I mean this guy – you can learn a thing or two from this guy. So I hope to have him on, and to have him tell you his story about what he did. But he put himself out there, he found his voice, right – and he created a massive platform. A huge, huge audience that he now sells to all the time, every single day.
So there is a lot of benefit in finding your voice. It doesn’t matter where your business is, like it can take you to the next level literally. If you’re at six or seven figures or whatever – eight figures, even going– It will take you to the next level. So remember, whatever has brought you here will not take you there. That’s so important to realize. So you have to just start. Pick a platform, decide on something. Then most importantly is, you have to be consistent. You can’t just start and stop and expect good things to happen, right? You have to start and keep going and be consistent.
So obviously that’s a hallmark of success. If you have already built a six or seven figure business, then you understand what it takes to be successful. You understand the importance of consistency. But I just wanted to put it out there and for you to hear from me, because sometimes we have to hear things from other people. It’s funny because even like I’m able to give advice to somebody who is so dang successful. But he appreciates the advice, because it’s coming from somebody else, right? Somebody else who’s not him. This guy has literally made a fortune. Probably one of the richest people on the planet. He takes my advice, because it’s coming from somebody else aside from him – and he has respect for me, which is terrific. It’s a mutual respect obviously.
So you have to kind of find your voice and realize that what brought you here is not going to take you there. So pick a platform, right? Maybe it’s email sequencing, like I talked about in the last episode? Maybe it’s the podcast? Maybe it’s a blog. Whatever it is, maybe it’s a vlog like Blippi. Find and figure out where you can share, and share consistently.
I don’t know if you can hear the birds, but I’m in a– But I’m in a like little village still in Croatia, and looking out over the Adriatic sea, and I can see Italy across the sea. It’s just incredible. But you can hear the birds chirping. It’s actually 4:57 am, and it’s very, very early in the morning. But I get up really early. It’s just because I love to create early in the morning.
So hopefully you find some value in this episode, and I hope that helps you. Again, please if you like this podcast – share, comment, subscribe on iTunes. I read all of the comments, so I really appreciate if you jump in there and do that. Until next time, I will talk to you guys soon.