Fireside Chat with Chris Voss: The Home Services Hustle

Let me tell you a secret I learned the hard way in the wild west of home services marketing—if you don't know how to negotiate, you’ll either leave money on the table or spend a lot of time convincing when you could be persuading people. 

That’s why sitting down with Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference, wasn’t just a career highlight—it was a revelation. Because negotiation isn’t about winning, it’s about creating alignment.

It’s not about lowering your price. It’s about raising your perceived value.

In our Fireside chat, we connected the dots between FBI negotiation tactics and the real-world trench strategy of all-American essential home service advertising. Chris and I unpacked the invisible power of “no,” the illusion of compromise, and why “that’s right” is a sign you’ve hit gold.

If you’re in the business of getting people to buy, you’ll want to understand how those two powerful words change the game.

Chris said something that really stuck with me:

‍“You don't rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation.”

In marketing, too many folks are only set up to lose. They just don’t know it yet. 

It’s not enough to just build a brand. You need to build a movement to grow. In essential home services, it’s our job to ethically and empathetically persuade our buyers on things they don’t really understand. We have to make the unknown and intangible more valuable than the money they have to trade with. 

Sales is a dance. Closing is ju jitsu. Negotiation is the golden thread that closes that gap to close more deals.

I share how we use pattern interruption and positioning power to shift the conversation from price to purpose. How we turn objections into origin stories. And how empathy isn’t some fluffy duck buzzword—it’s the sharpest tool in your kit.

If you're tired of tire kickers, shrinking margins, and marketing that sounds like everybody else, then this conversation will tickle your fancy. It’s tactical, it’s raw, and it’s got enough “aha” moments to make your head spin.

👉 Watch the full interview here – and discover how to negotiate like your livelihood depends on it. Because in essential home services… it does.

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Gabriella Santi: Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining us. I'm Gabriella Santi from the Black Swan Group. We are negotiation coaching surrounded by peers on a journey of transformation. Today we have a special guest, Wizard Ryan Chute, an award-winning Creative Strategist. He helps small businesses become big brands at Wizard of Ads®. 

Ryan grew up on a retail pirate ship, a disturbingly transactional world, wheeling, dealing, offers, and gimmicks. His early career in retail and automotive was filled with friction, deception, and general skullduggery. 

Before we start the show, we want to share that registration is now open for our live events, specifically our two-day event coming up in Lewisville, the Negotiation Mastery Summit, March 16th to the 17th, 2025. Registration will be scrolling below in the links will be dropped in the chat. Please ask your questions in the chat box below. 

Please help me welcome Chris Voss and Ryan Chute. 

Chris Voss: Gabriella, thank you very much. Alright, this is gonna be a really interesting show today on Fireside. I am really happy to talk about how we're getting into this and also let you guys know a little bit about this two-day Negotiation Mastery Summit in Louisville, that's coming up next March. And so what we're doing here on the strategy is that, you know, the immersion of the two-day events, I mean, there's no substitute for how much you can get out of the live two-day immersion. 

Pretty much the two-day live-in-person immersion is probably worth about six months' worth of practice. And so what we decided to do this year is bring a larger group in together once, and we're going to create an environment where you're gonna be surrounded by an immersed in a large group of like-minded negotiators. The energy should be amazing. I'm really looking forward to how much more negotiation energy we generate, and we're gonna do it in Louisville.

Now, I don't know how many of you guys have heard, but the Black Swan Group is also launching a bourbon called The Difference™. Never Split, Always Share. It'll be the first Business Bourbon™ in the world. We've been in and out of Louisville a couple of times getting the bourbon, taste-tested, launched, and perfected. And it is so much fun to be in Louisville. It's an interesting and different place. We decided we're gonna hold a Negotiation Mastery Course there now. You may get the opportunity to taste a little bit of bourbon while you're there. It's a fun place to be. It's got an amazing history. Like, why is bourbon- how did it end up in Louisville? What is it about Kentucky that caused all this to happen? 

So we're really looking forward to the Mastery Summit in Louisville in March. And as it turns out, it's gonna be on March 16th and 17th, 2025. So, oh, look at that St. Patrick's Day. What kind of celebration could we get into if we're doing negotiation in the bourbon capital of the world on St.Patrick's Day? So looking forward to that a lot. Couldn't help but talk about that 'cause I'm so excited about it. 

Now, Ryan, Chute the Wizard of Ads®. What's that all about? And how in the world is Ryan collaborating with me and the Black Swan Group, and what are we doing as we're moving forward? The first co-author book, uh, yeah, Steve Shaw Real Estate, very much along those lines. But this is in a different niche, and Ryan is an amazing, interesting guy, incredible background, which we're gonna get into. And why does he think negotiation is worth studying separately? Because he understands sales, and he understands marketing, which we'll get into.

But let me welcome in Ryan Chute, and let's take a short discovery investigation on who this guy is and what's behind him. If we could please bring Ryan up now so everybody can see him. 

Alright, so first I want to talk about you. You grew up doing all kinds of stuff. You got an amazing blue collar, figured it out, can do background. How far off am I on that? 

Ryan Chute: No, you're pretty, pretty spot on, Chris. You know, I grew up surviving, you know, performing my whole life and doing stuff to get through the day and make a buck and pay the bills. 

Chris Voss: So very practical beginning, it sounds like it resonates very much with the whole concept of you gotta find out what works and start getting results early on. You're very much a figure-it-out kind of guy. 

Ryan Chute: Well, you know, I guess probably the easiest way to figure things out is to screw up a whole lot. And that's what I spent a whole bunch of my life doing was just banging my head against a wall.

I grew up in a toxic work environment and with bad bosses and questionable business practices, and all of the things that you think you're doing right to do what you need to do, you know, in sales, in business, you know? 

It was just a bad work environment, a lot of verbal and emotional abuse, weaponized fear, shame, and guilt. And I mimicked and mirrored that behavior. And by the time I had gotten fired twice for it in different ways, I started to reflect on my life and wonder if this isn't success, what in the world is? Because operationally, I was crushing it. I had absolutely no problem in actually doing the thing managerially-wise, growing the business, and having success. 

It was just the people, the connection with people, the way to get people to do the thing that you want, not just comply, was really what was in my way and has slowed me down, you know, until I got it figured out. 

Chris Voss: So you felt a lack of connection and deep down inside, it just didn't sit right with who you are?

Ryan Chute: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Voss: All right. So, how do we find each other to start with? How in the world did you and I end up in a conversation? 

Ryan Chute: Well, you know, being in sales my whole life, back in the earlier days of sales, I was studying Jim Camp and other negotiation tactics, you know, get to yes. And start with no. And it's like, what's the right solution here? 

Your book comes on the scene, and it's obviously a fascinating book. You're talking about all of the really, really, just truly interesting things about business, but you put them in such practical terms. You're using science not as an intellectual weapon, but as a useful tool to get the job done. 

And that's really my style. People like to complicate things just so astoundingly much. So I read the book a bunch of times. Formatted and formulated the concepts around that and introduced those into my own businesses, and certainly with the clients that I work with.

Then you're putting on an event in Nashville a couple of years ago, and you and I met there, and your whole team was there. It was fantastic. It was just an absolutely sensational event to experience at, you know, a much, much deeper level, much more intense level. And then, our friend Nick Nanton got us together, and I said to Nick, he was saying, “Hey, look, Chris is gonna be writing a book with a bunch of people, and do you want to do a chapter?”

And I'm like, “No, I don't wanna be a chapter in somebody's book. I really want to write a book with Chris, though. So if there's ever a chance where the two of us could collaborate on our frameworks and put them together and put them to use. For the industries I serve, then I'm all in.”

And Nick’s like, “Yeah, nah, that's never gonna happen”. He blows me off, and seven months later, I get this text message from me. He is like, “Hey, Ryan, I got that thing almost done with Chris”. I'm like, “All right, well, let's go”. And then you and I had a chance to reconnect, not long ago. I guess it's been a few months now. And we've jumped into a couple of endeavours together with some really, really cool stuff going on in the bourbon world, and collaborating on a book together to serve the home services industry. So I'm super excited about the path that we're on here to do what we're doing today.

Chris Voss: Yeah. So am I. I mean, we gotta suddenly, and it's a great thing about working with Nick Nanton, is we got a, we got a bunch of collaborations going that are all fun. Like with Nick, you can always count on it being a lot of fun. I'm gonna go back to a separate thing here because, uh, and this is one of the reasons why I think we're collaborating, why we met each other in the first place. But you've got a lot of sales success, sales experience, successful in sales, successful in marketing, and still you viewed negotiation as an additional, complementary, separate, but complementary, supplemental, complimentary skill necessary to enhance the already substantial marketing and sales acumen you had.

Ryan Chute: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, negotiation. I've said for a long time, and so many people really kind of struggle with this, Chris, but I've always said, look, sales and closing are two different things. Negotiation is a crucial component of closing. Sales is a dance, you're figuring out who these people are. You're creating common ground. You're building common ground. You're figuring out what their actual needs are. 

But then you have to, at some point, flip a switch and go from dancing to Ju jitsu and take the weight that you got from that sale, that momentum that they've given you, the juice that they've given you, to be able to serve them at the highest level and find the best solution for them. And you have to close, you have to negotiate, you have to do all of the things necessary that aren't classic to the sales process itself. 

It's not the warm and fuzzies as much as it is the getting to the more tactical empathetic components. The tactical empathy, the closing, the actual asking for the sale, all of those things that get us over the threshold, over the curb.

Chris Voss: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. And I'd like to point out the dance, if you will, and tell me, please, tell me if I'm wrong. You know, the ju jitsu analogy it's to the problem. I mean, because if it's, if you're a ju jitsu, it almost, if you're hurting the person, then it's not gonna maintain a long-term relationship. And I know that you're about long relationships. 

Ryan Chute: Well, that's exactly it. It's never an adversarial situation. It's never me against the customer. It's always me against the solution or the situation at hand in solving the situation and getting the situation done.

Now, is it necessary for a customer to give themselves permission to say yes to the sale? And, and the answer is yes, and it's equally as much our job to get them to not comply, but want to, it's like you said, the difference between going from “you’re right” to “that's right” is really the crux of this whole thing. 

When we can get them over to the idea of the solution and buying into that, we've won. It's really the ju jitsu comes from the weight that we gain. You know, I imagine it is ju jitsu because we are leveraging the weight of the other person that they provided us to pin down the problem and solve it.

Chris Voss: Yeah. Yeah. It's very,  I would say, if and I could be wrong with the paraphrase. It's very much guiding the other person, a counterpart, guiding them to a good place, and then also helping them avoid mistakes, so that their fear system, their amygdala, is gonna kick into gear. If fears catch you off guard and stop you.

Ryan Chute: It sure can. Oh boy, it's one of the most potent things in your body that's telling you to stop or change direction or hesitate or hold back or run away. No, it absolutely is. And look, that's why they call us wizards at Wizard of Ads®. And I’ve taken on the moniker of Wizard Ryan Chute, is that it's the old man in the woods. It's the guide. It's the person that's gonna take you down the path of the dark and gloomy or the high road and know-how to surpass and get over and get past the pitfalls, roadblocks, and the sticking points along the way.

Chris Voss: Amen. And so, who principally does the Wizard of Ads® work with?

Ryan Chute: Well, the larger group works with any company that has a courageous business owner at the helm who's going to make the decisions themselves. We don't work with committees and groups. We don't work with boards of directors or any of those things, mainly because all of that gets just watered down. Good ideas go to die in a cul-de-sac of committees, so we really just kind of avoid that situation. We're looking for a longer purchase cycle. We're looking for a usually a higher average ticket. We're looking for companies that are gonna at least be able to 4x their growth, if not more. And, in a lot of cases, we're chasing far more than a 4x return. 

I personally have zoned in and localized on home services. I, I really, really enjoy the trades.  I do some work with professional services. I do some work with retailers, but my efforts and energy are all oriented around the home services space; HVAC companies, plumbing companies, that kind of thing.

Chris Voss: Good ideas go to die in the cul-de-sac of committee. 

Ryan Chute: Yeah, yeah. 

Chris Voss: That's a great phrase. I love the way you turn that phrase. 

Ryan Chute: It is so sad to see such exciting ideas. Look, we're cheeky. You know, I'm not a writer, I'm not a media buyer, but I can promise you that we do things that freak people out, you know?

Right. Now I've received three text messages from a guy this morning, saying, “Man, I've got three complaints about this and that, and the other thing.” And it was like, and he sends me the text, and these people get dramatic about how they're talking about drinking two-month-old milk just to get the thought of the ad out of their heads and things.

That tells me that his ads are working, because who in the world actually sends somebody a message about their ads? A radio ad. Or a TV ad. Making people feel, matters. 

Chris Voss: Wait a minute, did you say drinking two-month-old milk to get the what? 

Ryan Chute: To get the ad outta their head.

Chris Voss: That's pretty good. That's an ad. That sticks. That's an ad. That's an ad that stays in there, huh? 

Ryan Chute: Yeah, we're literally entertaining the idea of how we can bring that complaint in as an ad in the future. Yeah. Some of these people are just fantastic. So it's like, no, we'll actually bring it in. And the only person who will know that secret is the guy who actually sent in the verbose and colorful imagery for us to be able to play and have fun and make him a part of our tribe 'cause that's, that's really what this all comes down to is creating long-term, loving relationships through some form of feeling, some form of humor, or laughing or crying, or even making them angry. It all works. 

Chris Voss: I'd say you've got a very playful approach to all this. 

Ryan Chute: Oh, very. Yeah. Yeah. We want to have fun, as Nick says, “this is all about having fun.”

Customers, especially in home services, Chris, like customers don't come to a radio and go, “Oh, I heard an ad for a hot water tank. Let's go buy a water tank today, honey.”

Something has to break first. And if they don't already have a guy, their guy has to let them down, and something has to break, and then we have to get the phone call. The best thing that we can do is be in their brain under know, like, and trust, in that long-term, chemical memory, building up that McMansion in the chemistry of the brain, one brick at a time, one ad at a time, one truck wrap at a time. So that they think of us first when the hot water tank does inevitably breaks.

Chris Voss: So what is it about the home services people involved in that you are clearly attracted to?

Ryan Chute: I am. Yeah. You know, home services people are less twitchy, they're less reactive, and have generally a much better attitude about their outlook at business. They run profitable businesses. A lot of them are trying very, very hard. But look, they're blue-collar people. They're salt of the earth. They're sincere, they're honest, and they have a heart of a helper right out of the gate. And all of those things just speak to me. 

It's just such a refreshing change than the cesspool of so much that I've seen in retail. And I pick on retail. There's been an incredible amount of incredibly good human beings that I've met in retail over the years. But it's counterbalanced and offset by just such terrible, terrible behavior and attitudes, at every level of the organization that sets it apart. 

Chris Voss: Yeah. Fortunately, it certainly has a reputation. A lot of retail is very stereotyped to be, you know, transactional and exploitive. And for me personally, it rubs me the wrong way.

Ryan Chute: There, there is a better way that they just look, people live in survival mode and thriving mode, and most often, Abraham Maslow talks about it himself in his own, in his own works, that 65% of people are trying to get to the mid-level called the ‘Belonging’ of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

That means that they're either fighting their way out from the bottom, from subsistence and general security needs, or they're trying to desperately hang on and keep up with the Joneses in belonging mode. And that's all just survival thinking. 

It's led by the board of directors in our brain called the Ego, and all of these voices are telling us, “don't do that thing and do that thing, and, oh, that guy's trying to steal your thing, and Oh, that guy's trying to talk to your wife” and all of the stuff, right? “That guy's trying to take your job.” 

And that gets at people right from the business owners on down. And it doesn't matter if they're rich or they're poor, it matters that they don't act like survival survivors. And struggled to think with an abundant mindset. And, um, the blue collar world just tends to kind of lean into that a little bit more positively and has a little bit more of an abundant, grateful mindset.

Chris Voss: So you are a student of human nature. 

Ryan Chute: I really am. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. 

Chris Voss: You're throwing out Maslow, you're throwing out different things here and there. Practical thoughts. Where did this come from? 

Ryan Chute: A struggle of my own self-reflection. Really. I didn't want to be a bad boss. I didn't want to give people a hard time. I wasn't looking for compliance. I was looking for motivation. And for years, I struggled with how do I inspire, not just get compliance, because compliance just leads to defiance; and defiance just leads to slowing down profitable growth. So it was a lifelong journey of the challenges that I've had.

You know, I just got diagnosed in August with ADHD, and I reflect back at that and go, “Wow, look at all of the things that I did that I can attribute to that“. I don't believe that ADHD is a disorder or disability in any way. I believe it's a superpower. And ultimately, it's about using your brain in the way that it was built.

I'm not trying to say that I'm the victim here. I'm going to absolutely not going to be the victim. I'm going to figure out how to put this to good use. And once I kind of unlock some of those things, I've been able to put them to pretty darn good use. 

Chris Voss: Yeah, interesting. And what some people might refer to as a disability ends up being a superpower.

Ryan Chute: Well, and it is both, you know, depending on how you look at it. Not unlike Henry Ford saying, “If you think you can and you think you can't, you're right."

And there's a study done in, I think it was Stanford years ago, about prison inmates, and the ones who were most likely to repeat, offend were the ones who always blamed somebody else. It was always somebody else. It was always some other situation out of their control that they couldn't do that had them get back in prison. Where the ones who are truly successful and people you know, that I've met and know, who went on to become astoundingly wealthy people, incredibly successful, deeply giving to their communities. They were the ones that complete and total extreme ownership.

Like Jocko Willink says, “They just completely owned that.” They were the person who was responsible for this, and how they were gonna fix it is by fixing that. 

Chris Voss: So you're an innately curious person. 

Ryan Chute: I really am.

Chris Voss: Because you're throwing out a lot of sources that you have learned from. And learning and living a better life are clearly core values for you. 

Ryan Chute: Absolutely. You know, I have a lot of principles. I hold myself to a standard. I think one of the biggest problems in this universe today is that people don't abide by a code, by an honour code that has them inconveniencing themselves for the convenience of others. And that appears in so many different ways. But fundamentally, that's really the difference between values and beliefs. 

A friend and partner of mine, a Wizard of Ads Partner,said, “Ryan, your beliefs are completely useless. Did you know that?”

I was like, “Wow, that's an interesting way to start dinner.” And he goes, “Look, your beliefs are interchangeable.” We both believe, and I think we can both agree, Chris, that freedom and responsibility are both good things, or justice and mercy are both good things, but they're also paired opposites.

Niels Bohr, said back in the 1920s, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, “Sometimes the opposite of a profound truth is an equally profound truth.” Well, it really just depends on what side of the table you're sitting on. If I'm the accused murderer, I want mercy. And if I'm the victim's family, I want justice. But as the victim's family, if I murdered the murderer, now I want mercy. Right. So it really just depends on the side of the table you're sitting on. The people who truly bring value to this universe are the people who are willing to do something inconvenient for the convenience of others, to benefit others.

And that's really where honor lives in my mind, and I think there's a huge opportunity to that because if you want to be valuable to clients, to your wife, to your kids, to your communities, then you have to do something valuable for them. And that means you're sacrificing or suffering in some way for their benefit, for their lack of sacrifice and suffering.

Chris Voss: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot that I love all of it. The first thing that springs to mind,  Michael Mogel, a friend of mine, runs an organization called Crisp Video out of Atlanta. Started as marketing for lawyers, but now it's just business development, and Michael says, “You test your core values or are you willing to stick to 'em when it costs you?”

And you talked about the convenience of others and the inconvenience to yourself when it costs you to do it, that's when it's a value. And most people, they'll stick with their values and tell cost 'em, then they abandon. Right?

Ryan Chute: Absolutely. And, rightfully so, because we're trying to cope with life. We're trying to run our businesses. We're trying to, like, we always have the excuse, we always have the reasoning behind it, but that's not, that's not where value lives. That value only lives when it costs you, and not just cost you in money, but money, energy, and time. The three treasures of human existence. Live in all three, not just in whether or not you had to write a check or do a refund. 

Chris Voss: Right, right. So, the great, the great customers, the clients that you are looking for in a Wizard of Ads®, because you want a long-term relationship? You want people that, first of all, share the values of long-term relationships and actually having a positive impact on other people's lives, not exploiting them. So, how did you get the what? Yeah, I keep interrupting you, I apologize. I don't, I'm I'm not letting the thoughts bake adequately as they seep through the complexity of the neural connections that is the Wizard of Ads®. So, how did you stumble onto starting this company? 

Ryan Chute: Well, 20 years ago, three books came out from Roy H. Williams, called The Wizard of Ads®, the Magical Worlds of The Wizard of Ads®, and The Secret Formulas of The Wizard of Ads®. And they were all Roy H. Williams’ works about marketing, about motivation, about communication, about leadership, about sales, and advertising, in all fairness, as well, and Roy is quite legitimately an astounding genius. And he built an entire campus in Austin, Texas called The Wizard Academy that teaches small business owners how to do these things when they don't have huge budgets or the ability to hire other people and really to explore this universe in a completely different way than anything you'd be taught at business school or marketing school.

And in 2015, he wrote in his MondayMorningMemo.com; a memo that he's been writing for 35 years, never missing a Monday in 35 years. And, and he said, “I'm thinking about stepping back from the Academy, not doing as many classes. I'll still be around a bit, but this, this may be the last one.” So I'm like, "I gotta see this man in action and meet him".

And, I went out and just bought the course and spent three days with him and 35 other people, and just had a life-changing, transformational experience. Something I'd never expected. I'd grown up in a transactional world. I understood transactional selling, the grind, and the effort incredibly well. Really good at that stuff. Made lots of money for me and infinitely more for other people, and it kind of got to me. So I kept on going to classes for the next two years. I'd go to every class that was available at the Academy. And I just invested in myself and explored, and just went down this rabbit hole. Kept on reading the memos, kept on rereading the books. I have three books at home that are all just marked-up textbooks now at this point in time, 

I think it was about August, it was around my birthday in 2017, I said, uh, sent a three-word email saying, ”can we talk?”

And, we talked and talked and talked, not with any necessarily perspective that I was gonna be a partner or anything, but he did invite me to become a partner, and I was happy to say yes and to step into the world. And that's when the real peek behind the hurt curtain gets there. You're not just getting the courses that you see, kind of the entry level stuff that you get at the Wizard Academy, but the much deeper stuff that you get when you start showing up to meetings and listening to the ways that these connect to strategy and all of the ways that we can help our clients today. 

He had had some great successes in home services. I'd gotten to know some home service folks. I really liked them. I was also trying to dip my toe into retail and automotive, some of the other places where I'd had lots of experience, and just found the disposition to be exactly what I wanted to be in the home service space. So I just kept leaning into that. And over the last, gosh, seven, eight years, I've built a pretty healthy agency within the Wizard of Ads® that helps these home service companies really, really grow. 

Chris Voss: Wow. Yeah. That's cool. You love immersion learning. You love to dive in all the way and just get as deep as you can.

Ryan Chute: I do. Yeah. It takes, you know, I struggled as a kid reading and, you know, I always read to learn, read to understand, as opposed to read to graze over it and just get that superficial thing. I struggled in school, as well as in high school. I did very well as a mature student, but the pace was different, and the content was interesting. And as I started continuing down different rabbit holes, I went down the weirdest places. Again, it probably has to do with my ADHD, but I do end up down these very deep, deep holes that all of a sudden I'm pulling myself out of and applying to what it is I'm doing. And that's fun for me. I really enjoy it because it allows me to help others to give and to provide. And when other people win, I win. You know, I learned that a long time ago, that when I just stop worrying about myself and start worrying about how I can help other people succeed, I'll do my best for them and do what I can to get it over the curb and knock it outta the park.

Chris Voss: Nice. I love it. Yeah. Very cool. Alright, so I'm gonna take a step back real quick for a moment. First of all, I'm gonna, everybody that's listening to us today, besides the Negotiation Mastery Summit, you know, Ryan's talking about the deep dive, the immersion, learning, getting as much as you can, taking the time to invest in yourself.

Black Swan Network on Fireside, when I'm not on, we have a show that's on once a week, and the Black Swan Team has got some extraordinary trainers, I mean, coaches and trainers that are helping people work miracles. 

Now, once a week, an hour-long dose of learning Q&A. Sandy's on, Sandy Hein. We just ran a negotiation summit for women in Phoenix. Sandy's an extraordinary teacher and coach. Derek Gaunt is a superstar trainer and coach. Troy Smith. Troy, a phenomenal former San Antonio police officer, hostage negotiator extraordinaire, and Black Swan Coach, even better, Nick Peluso, is on. Don Fielman is in the entire cadre of coaches on the Black Swan Network on Fireside. Now, this is a ridiculously inexpensive way to get a weekly dose, because negotiation is a perishable skill. How are you maintaining your skills? How are you keeping your skills from slipping? At the Black Swan Group, one hour a week, you need that dose because what does it mean that for the negotiation skills to be perishable? When you wake up in the morning, are gonna be the same? You're gonna be the better, or you're gonna be worse? And your communication skills. Any skill camp called negotiation, a human performance event, just like a sporting event. And just like any sporting event, just like working out, when you miss the workouts, you deteriorate. You gotta do skills maintenance.

Black Swan Network on Fireside is a ridiculously inexpensive, frequent way to check in, get some live Q&A, just like the live Q&A that we have here. Please allow us to help you get your skills prepped, keep 'em maintained. Continue to train with us. Get ready for the full experience of the Negotiation Mastery Summit in Louisville, March 16th and 17th next year.

In the meantime, make as much of an impact as you can by continuing to feel that this is an art, this is an endeavour. It's a supplemental skill to whatever it is you do now, whether you are, uh, in marketing, whether you're in sales, whether you're trying to have a better relationship with significant people in your life who deserve empathy, everybody deserves empathy in their life.

Who doesn't? So join a Black Swan network on fireside. Keep your skills as sharp as possible. Pray for the immersion that's coming up in Louisville in March to continue to move your life forward. Ryan is a classic example of how much more interesting life can be on a learning journey when you feel you're worth it.

And, you know, wear the holes. He was extremely successful in sales, and something about it ate at him. It wasn't a transactional life. Made a lot of money. So what? It was still insufficient. And then he runs across the Wizard Academy and becomes a Wizard himself. He, I, you know, I think he even probably got, I think, the Wizard Beard.

You know, that's a wizard beard. Uh, you, if you were to climb to the top of a mountain and look for the guy in a cave sitting by a fire who was gonna give you knowledge and wisdom, he probably looked a lot like Ryan. I expected it very much looked like Ryan. So before we move into the q and a, Gabrielle, what did I leave out that I should be telling people about either the Black Swan Network on Fireside or the Negotiation Mastery Summit in Louisville in March.

Just the dates March 16th to the 17th. You got everything else done. March 17th sticks out in my mind. What day is that again? St. Patrick's Day. St. Patrick's Day. There have been some famous sieges that occurred on St. Patrick's Day, so we'll do the opposite. We'll have some famous stuff going on on St. Patrick's Day in Louisville, and we'll be saving lives in different ways. Alright, I bet we've got some pretty interesting questions for Ryan.

Gabriella, who we got teed up to ask the Wizard about his wizardry. 

Gabriella Santi: First up is Michelle, so I'm bringing her up right now. Michelle, you should get a request quest. 

Chris Voss: Alright, Michelle, as we get started, you gotta, you gotta tell me where you are in the world 'cause we get people from all over the world signing in. So where are you today, Michelle? 

Michelle: Hi Chris. Hi Ryan. I'm calling in from Phoenix, Arizona. So good morning from Phoenix. Good afternoon to those on the East Coast or other parts of the world.

Chris Voss: All right, what do we got for Ryan? 

Michelle: I was curious. I first heard of your book, Frictionless, from the Black Swan email that I received, so I was curious, uh, when writing your book Frictionless, did you come across key areas where friction can be positive? For example, when driving a vehicle, when the tire, the road could be positive for forward momentum. It could also be positive when putting on the brakes to save a life. So when gathering all your materials, it's possible you came across pros and cons. Can you share an area in the workplace where friction can be positive as well as an area of operation in the workplace or in relationships where it's negative?

Ryan Chute: No,  that is an absolutely fantastic question. And, I do believe that there's, there's a whole follow-up book to that, but the little teaser that goes into it is the last chapter of the book that really talks about where friction matters, because friction does matter. There's a few key areas.

For example, there needs to be friction in your business between the finance department and the accounting department. Your accountants are there to count the money and make sure it's all going in the right spots. But if we left the business up to the accountants, they wouldn't spend any money, and we wouldn't have the delightful customer experiences that we need to be able to deliver above and beyond the average buying experience.

Okay, where the finance department is going to go find that money and find ways to be able to get that money and spend that money, that tension between accounting and finance is absolutely necessary for you to have a healthy and successful business, because they both need to tug on it. Where they, accountants, are the sentries of the vault.

The finance people are the warriors who are running out into the field, risking their lives equally. So there needs to be a tension between sales and marketing, right? So many sales departments I've seen say that sales is, sorry. Marketing is the anti-sales department.

It's the place where good ideas go to die, and they then come up with some other ridiculous thing that has nothing to do with sales. And I think that's much more of a disconnect between. What marketing is doing and what sales is doing should have some congruence. But what I've learned as a sales guy stepping into the marketing world is that the things you say in marketing are astoundingly different than the things that you say in sales.

And I always thought they were basically the same thing. And come to find out they're not. You know, marketing is looking to make people feel and get them into a mindset of giving a company a try, a brand a try, stepping into the experience. Now, those experiences all have to be true, and the marketing has to be honest for it to be successful in the long term and sustainable.

But it can also do it in such an astoundingly divergent, than what sales thinks is right. For example, we talk about our staff and our knowledgeable staff and our background-checked employees and our kind-hearted nature and that we really do a better job than all the other competitors in town and all of those things that everyone says or could say, which make them table stakes. And when we get those table stakes off the table, and really just start bringing something completely unpredictable to the game, now we have this tension, but it's a good tension that helps serve us. The last place that I would say that friction is really, really important is in what I call the antimotivators.

I believe that there are motivators, demotivators, and anti-motivators. I invented the word anti-motivators, and I only know that is because it keeps on giving me a little red line underneath the word every time I write it. 

So the anti-motivator is the motivation that comes from within with a negative resonance, that has us get off our butt and do something, fear, shame, and guilt that we employ on ourselves versus fear, shame and guilt that's been weaponized externally from a boss. A boss can bring up a problem that he has with an employee and say, “What should we do about this? How do we solve this problem? How do we address this situation?” We don't weaponize it by saying, “You are the problem. If you don't get your poop in a group, you're gonna have a problem while working here”. So it's not what you say, it's how you say it, but that friction internalizes in us and that friction brings us up to a new level, a new expectation for ourselves, which is just as important.

So yes, there, there are absolutely points in time where friction is necessary, but is there a way that we can create that friction with elegance and with empathy, with kindness, with humility,  so that we can get the thing that we're actually trying to get to, which is either motivating a person to do a thing or grow a profitable business both profitably and through high growth.

There's no point in growing a business that doesn't make any money, right? So all of these things have to work together, and it's usually a dualistic kind of situation that you're dealing with. You know, what are the yin and yang, part of this whole thing? 

Chris Voss: Wow, that was a heck of an answer. Thank you. Lots to think about. Michelle. Thank you for the phenomenal question. And Ryan, thank you for that in-depth answer. One of the advantages of being a member of Fireside is you're probably gonna wanna go back and play the video to listen to that again because there was a lot there. And I love our Fireside membership because you, anybody who's a member, has the opportunity to go back and listen again. There was a lot there. That was awesome. All right, Gabriella, who have we got next? 

Gabriella Santi: So we had a question submitted in advance. So one of those was:

Ryan, you have mentioned working with passionate founders and partners. What are the core values you are looking for in anyone you work with?

Ryan Chute: Yeah, I think that's super important. We don't really care how much you are making. We don't care if you're a sub-million-dollar operator or a hundred-million-dollar operator. We're looking for a person with character, man or woman, the gender is not relevant to us, race is not relevant to us. 

The human being is, and if you're just a genuinely good human being, looking to serve other good human beings and do something of consequence in this life, then we're in.

I believe that the purpose of a leader is to protect and defend. And that's super important that we say that “protect and defend” a happy, healthy, wealthy culture. So I'm looking for people who are innately doing that and instinctively doing that. And as I'll tell you, when I see that, I often see a person who has the world at their fingertips. The way that they go about doing that is through what I call the mission statement, because I really have a problem with mission statements in general.

I think that most of them are complete nonsense, but a mission statement, one, studied and realized that it's an internal purpose-driven thing, not an external thing to announce to the world. You realize that it, everything that we ever do or ever think about in our core values and our purposes and our visions and all of those things boils down to three big buckets, helping people when in a trustworthy and grateful manner. And that means different things to different companies and different things to different people. But it ultimately always boils down to those three thematic buckets. And when you do, you start to realize, geez, I can really change lives by simply having a mantra that pushes us forward to take that hill, whatever that is, and whichever department you're in to win the day, to win the sale, to win the hiring, you know, event to win the, you know, wife over, whatever the case might be. That's what I'm looking for in people. I'm looking for people who are there to be a willing participant in that, and act with that humility to really go forward and care for others. 

Chris Voss: Amen. I love it. I love it. Excellent. All right, Gabriella, what do we got now? 

Gabriella Santi: Our next question is for Ryan:

It seems like there are so many important elements to ads. What are the key elements that you believe are successful in making a great ad? 

Ryan Chute: Ooh, you know there's an awful lot of ways to make ads. One of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that creativity is artistic for sure, but also strategic.

The best ad that has ever been written is the ad that gets remembered, not just for the ad, but for the brand that's in the ad. And that always gets informed by the strategy. So the best ad is the ad that speaks to the strategy, that's going to take you where you're looking to go. 

Now, some companies want to be the high-price provider that's going to deliver an overabundant value proposition. Others wanna be the low-cost provider. Other companies want to be the company that has the best customer service, like Zappos. Other organizations that demonstrated higher duty of care through the way that they've modelled their business, some want to do highly customized solutions, while others want to produce as much volume as possible very profitably, but share in the efficiency of that with their clients. But win in the overarching volume. All of those come with a different strategy. 

Gosh, there are so many. I'll give you an example of a wonderful ad campaign that we ran, continue to run to this day in, in Pennsylvania. This is an operation that does all three home services. And the big problem in his hometown was that his brand is “HL Bowman”, and there is, I believe, an “FK Bowman” in town that also does HVAC. I don't even think they're related, but they're in town. They literally had to differentiate between the two of them. Well, that was the challenge of the ads. So strategically speaking, what we needed to do was differentiate the “HL” from the “FK” and in doing so, we created a 1950s camp cartoon superhero who comes in to save the day, but also says “HL Bowman” eight times in every ad.

Just because he is silly and fun and everything else. It allowed them to really dig deep into the reinforcement of this character, which we then reinforced on the trucks. Now his logo is back from the seventies, it looks like a clip art graphic that was done. We didn't wanna change that because it fed the charm of the whole thing that we were going for. We just lean into the assets that we have. We didn't change the names, we didn't change anything else. We just went after it and did what we needed to do to differentiate ourselves in that scenario. That served them exceptionally well. So the best ads are always gonna be the ads that are based on the best strategies, creatively. The devices that are wrapped around are actually fairly easy to build once the strategy has been determined. 

Chris Voss: Well, you know what I find really interesting about that answer too, is that the elements you touched on earlier are, first of all, how do you make it memorable? Sometimes it's just repetition, but you made it fun, also. I mean, you said you had a superhero, right? And it was probably a little campy, a little fun, a little playful. And that way, people didn't feel like they were getting beaten with it. They were just having, they were having fun with it at the same time. Even if they realized that the purpose was to repeat it a whole bunch of times, they didn't mind because it was fun.

Ryan Chute: Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's the thing about it, Chris, in advertising, no different than in training, the whole reason why you're having, your summit, your negotiation summit, the ongoing training here on Fireside, all of this is because frequency is absolutely critical for the brain to do what the brain does.

If we think about the brain in its simplest form, we've got the upfront memory that's got about seven seconds worth of retention. It's holding that ad for a few moments. The doom scroll on social media until, until you know, two thumbs away, and you're done. If we can do something that hooks and anchors, not goofy hooks, but just like anchoring a thing in that says, oh, wait, there's something to pay attention to there, and then we do that at frequency, we can get back into that midterm memory; that's about seven days. That seven-day memory gets raced like a. Like a PC got defragged in the good old days. All that information gets condensed down with sleep, but then it gets into the back part of the brain, the chemical part of the brain where we're holding the information and we're building up this, this little McMansion. 

Well, if we don't have any emotion, what we don't have is the mortar that's gonna keep those bricks together. And the best you're gonna have is a brick shit house that's gonna sit there and kind of not be very big or impressive. The flip side of it is that we have mortar in there, and the mortar is allowing us to build a McMansion, a great big, huge, real estate in the chemical area of the brain because we have the mortar to make it big and tall and strong. 

When we have those things, those are the things that are gonna keep us very, very significant in the mind of the customers for the time they need us. Because right now, they don't need our service, but eventually they will, and they'll remember that real estate in their mind because we had the mortar and emotion to bring it together.

Chris Voss: I love that. I love, I love that explanation. I love the analogies. Very blue collar, very understandable, practical, applicable. So in the interim, because it'd be a while before we get the book out, people who are fascinated by you wanna retain the Wizard of Ads for Services resonate with you. They feel like the core values line up, the industries that they're in, is exactly what the industry you like to work with, the people you like to work with. How do they follow up with you? 

Ryan Chute: Look, I'm more than interested, I'm more than happy to introduce them to the right Wizard Partners. I can quickly dissect who they need to be if they're, they're listening and they're not in that industry right now. We've got people that can help across the board, and I can make those introductions quite easily for them. But, for home services, professional services, by all means, reach me on social media across the social media channels at @wizardryanchute. That's my handle on all social media.

My websites are ryanchute.com and we've also got wizardofads.services as a URL. It's specialized specifically to the home service and professional service space. 

Chris Voss: Amazing. Amazing. And we're coming around the clubhouse, turn here, final bend to the home stretch, what would you really like to have people remember? Seems like you have some guidance you'd like to give them. What is the recipe for a successful, interesting, wonderful life with a higher purpose?

Ryan Chute: Yeah. You know, I think that there's a lot more out there that we can find in ourselves, and when we do, we can serve others at a much higher level. Ultimately, the first place that leadership takes place is in ourselves. And, when we get ourselves right, it makes it a lot easier for us to serve others and to deliver on the intentions that we had when we opened our business, when we married our wife, when we had our kids, when we joined those community groups that we care about. Work on yourself. And, it's gonna make a big difference how that translates out.

People pay me for writing their ads and getting their strategies right, but getting out of your own way will get you there faster. And that's part of this process as well. 

Chris Voss: Yeah, a lot of introspection, a lot of, a lot of self-discovery,  listening to the voices in your head that say that there could be a better way, or if something's not. I love it. Phenomenal. 

Thank you for being on with us today. 

I'm gonna remind everybody, first of all, you know how Ryan and I were talking in the first place, as successful as he was in other areas, he wanted more complementary skills. Negotiation, Never Split The Difference. Ryan is, like a lot of people that we run across, who were really good at marketing or sales, and then they found it, Never Split The Difference, kind of filled in the gaps. It didn't, it, it didn't replace what he already knew. Uh, the negotiation skills added to it. 

So how, how do you add to it all? 

Guys, I'm telling you, I'm gonna be shameless here. Again, I want you to subscribe to the Black Swan Network on Fireside, want to help you continually get better week by week by week.

Listen to the other coaches. They have wisdom and insights that I don't have, that supplement what I'm talking about. Derek, Troy, Sandy, Don, Nick. They will all bring you different aspects to the same ideas. That'll be complimentary to anything I say. It's gonna, you're gonna do well listening to them.

Join Fireside and get ready for the Negotiation Mastery Summit. In Louisville, March 16th and 17th. If you've never been to Louisville, you're going to get a kick outta the place. It is an interesting, fun place to be. Phenomenal history. One of the reasons why bourbon is there, they got a water there that only exists in Kentucky, and my understanding is, Scotland and Ireland, which there was Scotch and Scottish, and the Irish ended up there and they said, “Oh my God, they get the same water here.It's unique in the world”. Louisville's an interesting place. Join a Black Swan group in Louisville in March. Immerse yourself. Get a two-day immersion to really launch your skills up to the next level. 

In the meantime, stay curious. Keep learning, investing in yourself. Pursue a life. That helps others, and at the same time, you make a pretty good living 'cause there's nothing wrong with making a lot of money, it's just how you make it. Is it blood money, or is it making the world a better place? You can do really well, making the world a better place. Ryan, thank you for being on today. I'm looking forward to all of our collaborations in the future. They're gonna be a lot of fun. 

Yes sir. Appreciate you. Alright man.

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