The Janine Bolon Show with Dominic Teich - 99 Authors Project, Season 5, Episode 7

The 99 Authors Project – Season 5 – Episode 7 with Dominic Teich47 min read

Dominic Teich

Dom “Slice” Teich brings his fighter pilot background and applies them to guide pilots, athletes, business owners, and students with afterburner techniques that American fighter pilots use to ensure mission completion. As an Amazon best-selling author, business owner, entrepreneur, civilian and military instructor pilot, he knows that busy individuals and teams struggle with information overload.  

Since 2002, “Slice” has guided hundreds of students toward their goals. His blueprint is called Single Seat Mindset; an impactful group of 40+ fighter pilot guides with a combined experience of 700+ years. They share proven formulas and life advice to the insider circle community to ensure success and big goal achievement all while avoiding overwhelm, overload, and flameout. They dive deep into the productivity world to provide guidance through short, impactful steps.

You won’t find any other cutting-edge community like ours as we provide unique life experiences learned in the 3rd dimension.

Visit Dominic’s website here.

Transcript of the Show

Bryan Hyde
Welcome to the Janine Bolon Show, where we share tips from around the globe. As we guide practical people with their finances using money tips, increase their incomes through side businesses, and maintain their sanity by staying in their creative zone.

Janine Bolon
Hello there, Janine Bolon here and welcome to today’s show. As many of you know that listen to the Janine Bolon Show, we regularly set our purpose to one thing and that is to bring you amazing guests that can help you save your money, save your time, save your knowledge, and hopefully keep you sane as you travel through this great thing, we call life. Now originally, this program was split into four podcast shows that we were syndicated in October of 2021. The Three Minute Money Tip, The Thriving Solopreneur, The Writers Hour Creative Conversations and The Practical Mystic Show are now all bundled into this program. So be sure to subscribe to our show’s content on your favorite listening platform. We have uploaded over 225 episodes just for your education. So today, we are going to be highlighting a supersonic author. Now why do I single this particular author out? Well, that’s because he’s probably traveled higher and faster than most of us. Dom Teich or Teich is it? Dom Teich goes by the call sign Slice to his professional colleagues and today he brings his fighter pilot background to our show. He specializes in guiding pilots as well as peak performers toward cutting edge results in a no restrictions environment, we’ll get back to that in a little bit. With 20 years of civilian and military instructor time, he has created a number of products and services designed for high achievers to experience success through these short, impactful steps. Can’t we use a little bit of shortness in our daily lives today? The blueprint is called the Single Seat Mindset. And Dom has a community of pilot guides that have joined forces to help people who are ambitious to dive deep into their own personal productivity. Now, this group provides processes that aid big goal achievement, while also avoiding those things that we as business owners and solopreneurs suffer from, which is overload, overwhelm, and burnout. So Dom assures his clients as well as you, the reader or listener, that you won’t find any other cutting edge product or service quite like his, and he will provide life experiences and perspectives that are very unique for high achievers through a powerful group of fighter pilots. That guy, these guys have over 700 years of combined experience. And with all of that, hey, thanks for landing on our show, Dom.

Dominic Teich
Hello, how are you?

Janine Bolon
I’m doing fabulous. And I’m just thrilled that we have you for a few minutes today because I know you would rather be other places in here. And thank you for sharing your time with us.

Dominic Teich
You bet. And no this is where I need to be and this is where I want to be right now.

Janine Bolon
Right now right now, right here. So one of the things that we’re talking about is we’re talking to authors this year, mainly because there’s so much wisdom and information that they all carry around through their storytelling. And we started off with a 13 questions, but we’re gonna branch out from that. And that is talk to us about your name do you decide to you didn’t really use your full name on your book? Because you have a lot of different names floating around. So talk to us about that.

Dominic Teich
Yeah, so our culture, the fighter pilot culture, as well as other cultures within the military. And I would assume even some very tight knit civilian cultures have nicknames. Call it you know, on the baseball team, I had a nickname. You know, so, so tight knit groups I find name each other and in our fighter pilot group, we, I don’t know if we really earn a call sign. But typically, you do something dumb. And really, you pick up a name from that. So it’s, it’s much more of a story than that I’ve been called a lot of names in my life. Some are much worse than the one that I was given in my first combat squadron. But Slice stuck and a close runner up was another name that will go I’m glad I avoided that one, but Slice, fit and the combat squadron was the samurai in Japan so it kind of fit with like the ninja sword. The vibe there. So that’s the one that stuck and the one that I’ve had since then they haven’t changed it, luckily. But Slice generally in my aviation fighter pilot group, that’s how people know me and a lot of people probably don’t even know my first name. But Slice and then my last name Teich I don’t know of any other types in the military. So I and I don’t know I’ve never met another slice. So I have a very unique in regards to like search engine optimization, it was pretty easy to find myself at the top because there was no other names with those.

Janine Bolon
Yeah, way to keep it, way to make that happen for yourself, you know, beat some of my sweet people who are Joseph Smith and Karen, Karen Jones and stuff like that talk about struggles. Yes. So out of curiosity, why did you decide to write in that name as opposed to like having a pen name?

Dominic Teich
Well, so the books that we have and what we’ll get to that here. I know that most of your listeners, our listeners, and not watchers, but this is a picture of that book. The series is Single Seat Series. So I’m an F-16, instructor pilot. I’ve been an instructor and several other aircraft, but that’s the one that I’m teaching in right now. And it’s a single seat, jet fighter. And so the series of the name of the books is Single Seat Investor, Single Seat Wisdom, Single Seat Gratitude. So it kind of goes off that single seat mindset, which is our parent company. And I wrote in that pen name, specifically, because I’m a fighter pilot. That’s how we’ve published our books. That’s the niche we’ve kind of gone into, and Slice is my callsign. So it kind of it’s different, right? Like most people just use their name. And it also kind of catches somebody’s eye and kind of makes them think well, why why Slice right? And then that can, you know, it’s a, it’s a conversation starter. It’s also something that I didn’t really want to do, I didn’t really want to leverage my fighter pilot background, I was very resistant to that. I don’t know why. But that has really what’s it’s given us a lot of momentum. Because I’m not just some random schmuck on the street, that’s writing, I do have some credibility and a background that supports what we’re doing. So I’ve really leveraged the military background, as well as the fighter pilot background. And then my pen name, if you will, Slice is the is the name that I was awarded, or whatever you want to call it, given.

Dominic Teich
Well, I just wanted to let you know you’re not alone, I cannot tell you how many authors that I actually have interviewed that said the same thing, the thing that set them apart, that really gave them momentum for their book was the very thing that kept trying to hide under the carpet, it was like it was the one thing they didn’t want to share. And yet here they were writing that chapter or writing that next book or whatever. And they were like it was like pulling teeth. And when they finally embraced it, it was amazing how that’s what shot them forward. So I just wanted to let you know that it’s definitely a common story. So thank you for listening and doing that. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have what we have today, in your in your series. So just out of curiosity, did you happen to have a marketing background at all before you started writing your book?

Dominic Teich
I did not. And that’s actually one of the most elusive things that I’m still learning every single day I log in, I’m looking at ads and just how to get the word out there. I did take a, I believe I took a marketing class, and I minored in business management for my undergrad. So there was a marketing class in there. But as we probably all know, it’s so generic, right? If you’re doing marketing for Coca Cola, it’s much different than for me as the one of the one stop shop where I don’t have any W-2 employees. So I’ve got to learn it all myself. Leverage people like you and other people that will help out in that regard. So a lot of self-learning a lot of the on the job training, with myself taking you know, your advice and putting together I’m gonna give you a little plug here, your media kit, I don’t really do a whole I don’t do a whole lot of online training anymore because I generally have a vector. But I did go through your whole media kit thing and man that really helped me organize, you know, what is it that I do? So when somebody like you asks like, well, can you send me your media kit? I was like, I don’t even know what the heck that is.

Janine Bolon
What is this woman talking about? How do we go about doing that? We’ll talk a little bit in the greenroom after the show, we’ll give you some tips on that how to spruce it up just a bit for you. But thank you for the media kit, because I have a team of nine that has to take your content, your information and plug it out into all the different platforms. And so it’s necessary for people like us, but like you said, you are roughly a solopreneur. Yeah, you have a team with you. But you’re all kind of, I assume, independent contractors, since you don’t have a W-2 employee with you. So what would you change if you started marketing your book? Oh, I’m sorry, I missed a question. What most surprised you about the book marketing process when you first started publishing what was like the big surprise like whoa?

Dominic Teich
I think the biggest surprise the like the punch in the face for me was it wasn’t necessarily all of the intricacies of writing the book and getting it to getting it to publishing and hat holding in my hand. It was the day after that happened, all of the work that goes into getting the word out there. And that was just that was just such a punch in the gut because the Mike Capuzzi I’ll give him a little plug here. He’s the one that’s really helped me organizing and, and design and get my books to the finish line. But we published it just shy of Veterans Day last year, one of our books, and I was kind of new to the marketing scene there. And you know, on Veterans Day was a kind of a cool surprise. We hit number one best seller in three different categories. I couldn’t have done that myself. So I think the biggest surprise for me was, you know, you can try to do it yourself, you can have the best book in the world, but if nobody knows about it, they’re not going to read it. Right. So, you know, what do they say the Bible is probably the highest sales, you know, of any compilation of books, but it also has been around a really long time. So I think that was the biggest thing for me is that, you know, I wanted a break, I wanted a breather, when I published my book. And that is when I think it was, it was a surprise. So it felt like just a mountain of work that I hadn’t really prepped for. So I would, I would say, if anybody was writing a book, I’m like, that the thing that I would like piece of advice would be once you publish your book, the real work begins, and it is a grind. And if you’re not prepped for that grind, it’ll do what it did, to me, it’s just a big punch in the face, where I was kind of, you know, I wanted to sit back and just kind of watch the book sales come in, and, and have people in that it’s, it wasn’t that at all, it took a lot of work.

Janine Bolon
Right. And that’s something that and then after the launch, and after your grinding, like you said, there’s the continual marketing of your book and getting out there. And so definitely put in some time for yourself. I go on reading, reading retreats, after a certain point, but it’s actually in my calendar that I take off for four days. And I just go read, because I’m so done with my own content. So yeah, I understand what you mean by that. Is there anything that you would do differently with writing your book? Like, how would you recommend to somebody who’s in the process of writing their book? How would you recommend that they start marketing their book now?

Dominic Teich
So somebody that’s already either self-published or published a book? Is that what you’re getting at?

Janine Bolon
Well, no, they’re in the process of writing their book, because you were like, you left all of it till the end. And then oh, my gosh, that’s when the real work started for you. So what would you recommend to kind of help keep it from being such a punch in the face?

Dominic Teich
Yeah. So we have we, we have a book that we’re writing right now. So Single Seat Wisdom, Volume One is the one that we published last year, and people liked it so much. And it’s a compilation of 20 fighter pilot stories that we were able to get 20 more fighter pilots signed up to write volume two. And so I think the, the, the thing that is was kind of daunting is before you publish a book, you’re unproven, right? So you’re unproven. In your own mind, you’re unproven in the market, people don’t know what you have available. And so I think we, our proven concept kind of gave us some momentum. And it was very, wasn’t very easy. But it was a lot easier to get 20 fighter pilots to sign up because it was just like, dude, I’ve already done this book, you want to be a part of this? Here’s, here’s what it’s gonna look like. So to answer your question, somebody that is writing a book, it is a grind. I’ve had multiple people approach me actually going, dude, I’ve been writing a book for years. And for me, I’m an action taker. I think that after reading all of the books on, you know, business and, and, and what have you over the years, the one constant theme that I see with anybody that is successful, are the action takers, and they’re willing to fail, they’re willing to run down a trail, that’s the wrong trail, turn around and go find a different one. And because I’m an action taker, I was started to frustrate myself in the first couple of months, as I was compiling these years of notes for my first book that I wrote Single Seat Investor for my investing company. And I think the biggest piece that helped me was finding a guy like Mike Capuzzi, or somebody that, like you that could get, you know, hey, what is the process? What are the steps for this? Because there’s an, there’s not an infinite amount, but there’s so many steps to writing a book that you just never think about, if you’ve never done it before. Like, what’s the spine of the book supposed to look like? What are you going to put on the front cover? Funny story for your other listeners, it’s quite embarrassing actually. I published so on YouTube, you can see this but the Single Seat Investor book, this one was professionally done, right, the cover looks nice. All that looks nice. And I was like, well, I can just do this myself. So I tried it right? And here’s what my covers looked like. Pretty terrible.

Janine Bolon
A different color vase, and you can definitely tell that it looks like somebody didn’t even put it on Canva right. So that’s what I’m seeing there. Okay, go for it.

Dominic Teich
Those are they’re just little books that I wanted to hand out to my F-16 student pilots. So one is called Single Seat Scratchpad. Another one’s called Single Seat Gratitude, which are just they’re inspirational quotes, but they’re also just to remind people that when you’re down, gratitude is one way you know, adopting an attitude of gratitude is a way to get back on top. So even the backs they’re just the backs of these books are just terrible. They’re wordy. And so with that, you know, I the guy that helped me published my first book, Mike Capuzzi Single Seat Investor, he went back and redesigned. You know, we went back to the drawing boards.

Janine Bolon
Yes. Very much better. Yeah.

Dominic Teich
So professional photos.

Janine Bolon
Very crisp, clear. Yeah, yes.

Dominic Teich
Yep. So I now have unfortunately, I think to get to your question is, is, it’s when you’re doing this yourself, and you’re new, you don’t have endless money. So you’re very resistant to hire somebody to help you with your book, because it’s more money spent, right? And it did cost me some shekels to get my first book published, right. But once that momentum started, it does get cheaper if you want to do more books. But I would say, here’s a negative too, if you try to do it yourself, and it and it sucks, like mine, those books are now stuck to my Amazon profile, and Amazon will not take them down. So it’s kind of a constant reminder, for me, unfortunately, that I did that in the past. And I didn’t seek out professional help. So I think, to sum that up, if you if you want to do it right and not have to redo your work, hire somebody that’s done it before they can give you a template and hire somebody that that does it for your for your the niche that you’re in. So for me, mine was business oriented. So I hired a guy that helps other people write business books. If you’re obviously a fiction writer, you know, Mike Capuzzi wouldn’t have been the guy that I would have, would have gone after.

Janine Bolon
Exactly, make sure you make sure they’re in the area of your of your expertise or your genre. Definitely with that. So talk to us a little bit about the actual selling of the books, because I’m like you, I have four books, even though I’ve written eleven, and I have four that I hand out there. They’re what I do for my different companies, depending upon who I’m talking to. But we also have the books that we really do want to sell. And so what worked best for you, and how many books were you able to sell, and we’re asking a rough numbers, but what has worked well for you when it came to selling of your books?

Dominic Teich
So I think the initial push was a combination of things. So we did a PR blast. So we paid a company to do a PR blast online. And, you know, looking at those metrics that helped. I also sent it was on veteran around Veterans Day. So I sent, I sent all of the authors as well as about 200 of my friends, a copy of the book, as a Christmas present, and said, Hey, if you like this book, will you buy one. And so we got people, I mean, there were people that went and bought five or 10 copies. So that really helped like out the gate, we had a bunch of people that had a physical copy in their hand. And you know, this invokes the law of reciprocity where, you know, people are like, oh, they gave me one. So now, I’m gonna give another one. And then the other powerful thing with Single Seat Mindset, that company in the Single Seat Series books is, we don’t keep any of that money, we give it all to a Children’s Cancer Foundation. And so people get this, they get the law of reciprocity of oh, I, you know, I was given a book, I’m gonna go buy a book, but then they also know that when they go buy a book, any money that we make, we’re gonna give it to a Children’s Cancer Foundation. So, you know, you can ask somebody for $100 donation for the Children’s Cancer Foundation, or can you go buy this $13 book, and most people will shell out 13 bucks without thinking about because one they get, they get a book, they can hand the book to their friends. And then they also know that there, they’re kind of contributing to a Cancer Foundation. So it’s a little bit of a, it is a business. But we do give all of the proceeds away for that specific business. So that that kind of helped us that was the initial push. I think there was some Facebook, you know, having 20 authors in our first book, Single Seat Wisdom really helped because I now have 19 other fighter pilots, posting on Facebook and their social media sites and doing a lot of the advertising for me. So I think that’s where a lot of our leverage came from. And now that we’re doing Single Seat Wisdom, Volume Two, we have another 20 fighter pilots that are going to be put, you know, we have we have an astronaut. We have several Thunderbirds, I’ve got a guy that is a professional. He’s a fighter pilot, but he was a professional magician. I think he has several 100,000 followers on some of his social media sites. So that really helped us and that was just blind luck to me. It was it was I didn’t know the power of other people talking about themselves. Right. And so a lot of it was done. And that was a cool part of this book. I did a public speaking engagement. Around the time it was published that helped out I did I learned how to do Amazon advertising. I’m still learning the other thing too is that I’m I have some ongoing marketing either on Amazon, I’m kind of watching and tweaking how to do that. And so I’m still doing quite a bit of learning because this is only, you know, what do we maybe eight or nine months in at this point, it’s Amazon advertising for ongoing marketing, you know, a Catholic magazine. So we run a, we run an ad that goes to about 6,000 homes, you know, and people read these magazines, and I’m a Catholic, Christian. So they go, oh, it’s a Catholic magazine, this book was put together by a Catholic Christian, and, you know, it doesn’t cost very much, he’s given all the money to charity. So that kind of helped us as well. But honestly, I’m still an infant, I’m still in kindergarten, on how to market this.

Dominic Teich
But I would say if they’re, what were the most powerful things, I think, giving copies to my friends, and having at 19, and now almost 40, other people advertising it for me, because they have skin in the game, every author that’s, that’s written a chapter in this book, they have donated to this Cancer Foundation to be a part of the book. So they have money in the game, they’ve put the time in to write their stories and it is their story it’s published. So they are a published author of sorts, and they can hand that book out to other people. So yeah.

Dominic Teich
The last thing was that kind of helped me think like, wow, this is where is this going? It’s been frustrating getting to this point. You know, I had never built a website before. My website crashed like five times, because I’m a noob. But when I was talking to a friend, who’s in the police force here in Phoenix, completely unrelated to anything, he’s like, I was at my doctor the other day. And he mentioned Single Seat Wisdom, the book, and it was just so random, that the word’s gotten out, right. And I don’t know who I’m still new at this. We’re not even at the one-year mark. But those are, those are kind of the little nuggets of wisdom there. I’d say the ongoing marketing is a grind for me, you know. So

Janine Bolon
It’s one of those things that if you’re going to, if you’re going to do this, this is what’s required. And so definitely talk to us a little bit about these are my favorite stories. These are the epic failures, what were the epic failures when it came to selling your books? Because this is where we can kind of prevent the next author from falling in our traps. Right? You know, it’s like, whatever you do invest your money in something else. Not this because this, you know, did not work well. So what are some of the stories you’d like to share?

Dominic Teich
Yeah, so the first one I kind of hinted on already, there’s two quick little ones. But the first one was, I got a little bit cocky. And I put together two little books that I can hand out to my investors, right, Single Seat Gratitude and Single Seat Scratchpad. We’ve since fixed that, so my, that, you know, now looking at those old books even makes me laugh. It was it was a tough pill to swallow initially, when I looked at them, because I was like, oh, I did this myself. And then a week went by, and I looked at the books again, it’s like, these things really suck. And, and I, that’s the feedback that I got from people. And it was it was hard to hear. But that’s part of the learning process. And we and you know, I paid the money to have them professionally designed, and we redid them. So that that one was a tough learning process. And that kind of dovetails into hire a professional to help you, especially if you’re out the gate unless you are. I mean, I know that people self-publish their own books, right. But unless you’re like a professional designer, and you can do all of that there’s just so many little things that you won’t even think about, like where do I go to get an ISBN? Is that even important? All these little questions, you know, what, what do I how do I self-publish? How do I upload it to Amazon? How do I how do I get the word out? So I would hire somebody the other one.

Dominic Teich
And that was an epic failure was total luck. Janine, the first Amazon advertorial so I went through an online class, figured out how to set up my Amazon advertisement, and it worked. And I was like, man, I got this. This is easy, cheesy. Like I don’t I don’t know why people are having so many problems with this. So I spent the next week kind of doing a little bit more research and I did a second advertisement, the second week, and it was a complete dud, it cost me a lot of money. And I think I had one book sell on that advertisement. So the first one I would, I wouldn’t say it was complete blind luck. But there was some luck into it, because the first time but since then, I didn’t give up I have about six or seven different advertisements going and I’m kind of watching them closely right now. And we are we’re definitely making money on those. But the second one kind of funny is, at least for myself, now that I look back, I was like, I’m good at this. We’re gonna make a ton of money on this. And the second, the second advertisement was just such a dud. And it was just a punch in the gut. It was I remember seeing the metrics come in and kind of watching it. I was like this one book. The other one was doing so good.

Janine Bolon
But this book will not sell what is the problem people? Yeah, yeah. So what is the story that you’d like to tell on yourself that gets the most laughs from your audience? So many of us are asked to speak in front of people and, and we know the stories that we tell ourselves that get people laughing.

Dominic Teich
Yeah, so the, the, the origin to the entire Single Seat Mindset. So the website is SingleSeatMindset.com. And that’s kind of the offshoot to everything that we’re doing with this program. But if you read any of the blog posts, any of my stories in these books, it’s about epic failure along my entire path. And it’s, it’s funny now, but pretty much any story that, you know, we do, specifically me, it’s about how I failed. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that they look at a fighter pilot and they go, oh, that guy is successful. And you know, he works out and or whatever, you know, he’s cocky or arrogant or whatever cliches that people want to throw at that group, right? Because you get you get lumped into that group. But along the way, I had just complete epic failures along the way. I mean, I so in Single Seat Wisdom, Volume One, I wrote about how on my sixth set of basically dogfighting with my instructor pilot, I was a young guy, and I was extremely fit, I was biking 5,000 miles a year. I was I was in great shape on top of my game, and I just got dehydrated. And I actually under 9.6 G’s acceleration to gravity I, I passed out, so lights out, and I woke up, going at about seven or 800 knots, so close to 1,000 miles an hour pointing at the ground. And I recovered the aircraft barely. But I almost died. So that was my you know, a lot of and that that is a story that’s very common to our fighter pilot community. Because our jet, the F-16 pulled a lot of G’s. So, you know, being a new guy at my first combat squadron, I didn’t, I wasn’t doing the things that I should have been doing as a young guy. And I upset a couple of the older instructors. And it was very difficult for six months for me. So if I, I can look back and laugh at myself now. I have been given call signs that didn’t really stick in the past.

Janine Bolon
Right. Thank you.

Dominic Teich
Yeah, luckily, I was able to crawl myself out. But I think, you know, the things that I can laugh at myself now is just like, I look back and I go, man, that was really stupid. Why did I do that? And, and there’s a lot of people that have given me a ton of second chances. And I think the funny thing about it is that man, I I’ve messed up probably 10 times more than other people. And I think a lot of people are just fearful of messing up. So they they’re fearful of failure. And so they don’t take that first step. But because I’m an action taker, I do make a lot of mistakes. And I learned from those I have; I have endless stories about how I was just a complete idiot along my whole path. We all do. And I don’t mind talking about those because the program that we put together for young fighter pilots, it’s a 31 week program, they get a two to three minute message once a week while they’re going through training here, and civilians can use it as well. And I’ve been getting tons of feedback from it, but they sign up for it. It’s just an auto responder. And pretty much every story is about how I messed up how to avoid messing up. And then if you do mess up, here’s how you dig yourself out of that hole. And that’s kind of where I’ve been able to write that’s the platform that I’ve been able to stand on is I’ve messed up so much, it makes it very easy for me to write about that.

Janine Bolon
Yeah, as they say, we have a lot of grist for the writers mill on that one. And when people say, oh, wow, you’ve written 11 books, Janine. And I’m like, Yeah, I’ve made a lot. And that’s it. You know, we’ve made so many mistakes by doing the wrong thing or doing the silly thing. And you’re like, hey, whatever you do, let’s make sure you don’t you don’t go down that road. So I’d love for you to share with us. What was the biggest change that you’ve seen in yourself since you’ve started marketing your book, every author talks about the changes that they’ve seen in themselves?

Dominic Teich
Yeah, I would say it’s one word. Again, because I’m an action taker. I’m, I’m fairly impatient. Because I’m a fighter pilot. We, when we’re when we’re fighting, and we’re in that in that in the zone, if you will, we need to make decisions very quickly. So, I’m a very impatient person and I think the one word that comes to mind is patience. I’ve just learned to be patient with myself. And to know that I’m not going to put, I’m not going to, you know, be Simon Sinek tomorrow and publish a book. You know why, you know, I’m not I’m not going to be that guy because he didn’t, he didn’t do that either. You know, a lot of these authors I’ve been kind of reading their backgrounds and a lot of them, it seems like, you know, three 5, 10 years, sometimes 20 years they start to catch there. You know, it takes a while sometimes for people, myself included to kind of know like, what, what am I good at? What are people using? And what helps them like, what’s their pain point? And how do I help them? So I’m still searching for that. I’ve been keeping a lot of notes on you know, I just got a, an email last night just blew me away. He’s a army helicopter pilot, he somehow got a copy of my book. And he is in a rut, he’s, he’s had a lot of, I’ll spare you the details. But he has had a rut. And this book, it kind of lit the small flame to get him back on his feet. So I think that that is kind of the niche that we started out on. But I would say, being patient with yourself, you know, it takes time to learn this. I have not met anybody that’s been really good at it right out the chute. Right. You know, I think that maybe if you’re, if you are already a celebrity, right, like if you’re Steph Curry, and you’re an amazing basketball player, if you’re Will Smith, and you’ve been in the acting career, but those guys didn’t do that overnight either. They spent years getting to that point, I’ve spent 20 years learning how to be, you know, get a doctor’s degree and fighter pilot aviation. And so now I’ve got to figure out well, what’s the pain point that a lot of people have, that we can solve for them. And I think we’ve found it, it’s just a matter of being patient and letting it kind of congeal. So I mentioned earlier that I have an application in for American Airlines. I haven’t actually submitted it yet. But I started thinking, I’m like, man, if I’m a, if I’m a pilot for American Airlines, I see a kid in the air airport that you know, is maybe carrying some, I don’t know, some athletic gear, right? He’s got his hockey stick with him or whatever, that’s a super easy way to just for me to hand the book to them. Be like, you know, I, it looks like you’re a go getter. You’re an action taker, in some sort of sports, these stories will help you in one way or another. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Janine Bolon
Yeah. And some people would say, oh, that’s really good marketing move, no, like, excuse me, I’m an author, I want the next generation to have it easier, I want to make the world a better place one person at a time. That’s why I hand out free books is because anything I could do to make your job a little easier, you bet we’re gonna be there for you. So I asked this of every one of our authors, and that is what are five tips that you would give an author when it comes to selling their books like their a debut author, their first book out? What are some five tips that you would give them?

Dominic Teich
So I think it is personality dependent, but for me, because I I’m a I’m a doer, and I look at I set up a process, I put it in action, and then I debrief the process and go, what did I do wrong? Could I have done better? If you’re a person that has the other personality, where you maybe are not driven, but you do have a published book, you might need to hire somebody to kind of show you the process on how to get that going. But I think the first one would be patient. I make it a point to put it on my calendar to learn or do one marketing thing per month. And I say that because I have a real estate investing company, I have the Single Seat Mindset company that is fairly new that I’m working on. And then I’m a full time F- 16 instructor pilot, I have a wonderful wife and I also have four little children. So life is busy. So I just once a month, or once a week, or it depends on your schedule, just learn one new thing each month and try one new thing. I just did an advertisement for the Fourth of July; I spent a decent amount of money on it. And I’m still waiting for the results to come in. But I don’t think it was as good as I wanted it to be. So there’s just things you know that you test and you and you learn to see what works. So I’d say be patient, learn one thing a month, listening to marketing experts, like you, you know, taking quick your online course for your media kit. One of the things that hooked me because I’m fairly impatient was that I could do it, I could sit down and get it done in about two hours or an hour. So I just jammed through it. And that has helped me so that was kind of learning that was my one thing that I learned last month that really helped me but I’m you know, I subscribe to and listen to stuff from you and, read books or whatever, you know, listen to audiobooks. So listen to the marketing experts on that.

Dominic Teich
Human psychology has really helped me as well. So just kind of understanding how people are wired, what triggers them to buy things, and I’m not doing it to trick people. But you know, the law of reciprocity for instance, I give somebody a book, especially if it’s a parent, and they have grandchildren or a parent and they have kids and they’re like, this is awesome. I had a guy that’s been in. He’s been in multifamily real estate here since ’86, 1986, here in Phoenix, and he read the book and he was blown away. He said, man, this is so applicable to business owners, and this is a guy who doesn’t have money problems and he owns a lot of real estate and he even he liked the book. So I think, you know, just me giving him a book for free, that helps. So learning the psychology behind things.

Dominic Teich
And then, for me, I’m a pretty ferocious note taker. But organizing how I take notes. And going back, you know, I have one word document that are the little blurbs that I need, from books, from podcasts, from any emails that I received from people, I’m like, oh, that that might work. That’s kind of cool. And I take notes in the same place. And that way, anytime I’m going to build an advertisement or kind of get those creative things moving in my mind to get something going in the marketing sphere, I have the notes that are organized, because previously, for the last several years, it was just there all over the place, I didn’t know where to go, I wasn’t organized. So be patient, learn a new marketing process, once a month, listen to books, read books, listen to marketing experts, learn human psychology, and then, you know, be organized with your notes so that when you do sit down to do that, or you you’re talking to somebody about marketing that you have at least a logical thought process of like, well, this might work here. You know, have some little one liners that work that type of stuff.

Janine Bolon
Exactly. And then what is the primary thing that was your biggest reward about being an author? You know, we focus a lot on the negative here and so I wanted to definitely give you an opportunity to focus on what was the biggest reward and unexpected maybe when you became an author.

Dominic Teich
I think just handing a book to somebody, and then just watching their face, just be like, dude, I think, you know, I had a, an F-16 student, about three months ago, he was struggling. And I said, you know, I sat down with him and talked with him for about 40 minutes, because I’m a flight commander, Assistant Director of Operations, and I have those roles. So I was doing some coaching and mentoring. And as I’m wrapping up the conversation, I slid my own book across the desk. And just to see the look on his face, like, wow, this is your own book. And dude, I think chapter nine is what you need to read. And this, and just being able to hand your book out, you know, my kids have one. They know that dad’s an author, my daughter’s already writing, she’s nine, she just turned nine, but she wants to be an author. I think that’s been the most rewarding piece of it is, it is I’m not doing this for the money. If I was doing it for the money I would have already given up because I’m still learning it. Right?

Janine Bolon
Right.

Dominic Teich
So the purpose, it gives me a lot of I have a lot of passion for it. But I think it gives me purpose, I can roll out of bed. And when my feet hit the ground in the morning, I know, I know that this is doing good. I’m constantly getting feedback, there will be the people that are jealous or attack you, you have to get you have to get past that you have to look at the 500 good comments you’ve gotten. And you’ll remember that one bad comment, but you have to remember all the good and we’re doing much more good. And I would say we’re not really even doing any bad. If anything, it’s neutral, right? It’s not for everybody. But that’s been the most rewarding is it gives me a lot of purpose. And it’s so fun to hand your own book to somebody else and just watch their face.

Janine Bolon
It is it’s a delight, especially like were you were in a coaching session, so called you know, you were mentoring somebody, and to be able to literally quote the chapter you need to read and you can bypass, you know, these chapters, but you probably really need chapter nine, that says a lot that says a lot to that individual you have invested in them. So if you don’t mind, I’m gonna go back to something that was in your bio. And that is, I don’t think all of us I especially do not know what it means to have a no restrictions environment, because of my scientific background. So when you’re talking about helping pilots and peak performers get the results they want in a no restrictions environment. Can you define that for us a little bit more?

Dominic Teich
Yeah, so I think most people operate in a very 2d environment. So they, they’re, they’re walking on ground level. You know, one of the, I won’t give her name out or what her story is about, but she’s going to be in this next book, but she she female Thunderbird pilot, she’s writing a story. And she has her company, which it talks about the third dimension. So when we talk about no restrictions, a lot of people have, I think preconceived myself included preconceived notions about, you know, this is the goal that I want to get to. And this is the path that I need to take. We do it in the military as well. In order to be a general officer in the military. You need to go through these schools, you need to check these boxes, you need to, you know, be a squadron commander, be a group commander. There’s a path that’s laid out. However, no restrictions is for me, there’s never just one path down to get you to your goal and I think a lot of people get stuck on that path, and they just they put their own barriers on that path. And a lot of times, it’s frustrating and it is. You may have to turn around and go all the way back to start and just go down a different path or pull out your chainsaw and cut yourself a path to a different path. So the third dimension, as a fighter pilot has really opened my eyes to, there are other ways to get things done. And I constantly look at, you know, if I’m frustrated with anything, that is, that’s my pain point, whether it’s in my business writing a book, and I either need to hire somebody and contract it out, or I need to go is this the path? I need to talk to people, I need to kind of gel it out in my own mind. But in regards to no restrictions, you’re if you’re stuck on one path, and you think that’s the only path to get there, you’re restricting yourself. So in order to remove the restrictions, one, you might be putting your own hurdles in front of you. But you may need to just start on a different path or move to a different path or call a helicopter pilot and have him lift you to a different path, whatever you want to use.

Janine Bolon
Right. So that is awesome.

Dominic Teich
Yeah. Yeah.

Janine Bolon
The reason I asked that is because many of us that are authors are also mentoring people as well, you know, you can’t help but be a teacher, even if you don’t have that formal title as an author. And so one of the things I was curious about is, if we know of somebody who’s stuck, which one of your many books would you recommend that somebody like you were talking about? He was in a rut? Is it the Single Seat Wisdom? Is that the book that you would recommend?

Dominic Teich
Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that’s the that is the book that we’ve sold, I mean, exponential, the other three books, Single Seat Investor was done for my investing business to explain how the how and the why behind it, so somebody can sit in their rocking chair at home, you know, pull out a cup of coffee on Saturday morning and just go, what is this guy doing in this business? What does it actually mean to me? I’m not, I wasn’t really in the market for selling a ton of books, it was more to ease my own pain. As a, hey, look, I mean business. I’m a published author. And it’s all here in this book, and you can read it in an hour, and you can just have this and if it doesn’t work out, it costs me the cost of the book, and not two to three hours of my time taking me to lunch. And doing that.

Dominic Teich
The other one, Single Seat Gratitude and Single Seat Scratchpad. Those are just books that I hand out to the students that I hand out to people. You know, the gratitude one is really just, it’s one if if somebody did something really cool are really nice for me or whatever, I’ll just mail that to them. So those books, I just give out.

Dominic Teich
Single Seat Wisdom. And I’ll say it a second time Single Seat Wisdom is our that’s our flagship that really after, you know, getting the first several books published, that was the one where I go, this solves a pain point for a lot of people. There are short punchy, anecdotal stories that you can read in 10 to 15 minutes. And each chapter is so uniquely different, that has just a radically different perspective, because they’re all written by fighter pilots and military aviators. So there are different again, no restrictions. If you read these stories from these people, and some of the life I mean, there’s, there’s a story, I won’t give it away, because you’ll have to read it yourself. But there’s a story in our first volume. I had to read it about six times because I couldn’t stop crying. And I didn’t know that. And this guy I worked very closely with I don’t even know what about him. So these, you know, the Single Seat Wisdom series now, because we have volume two that we’ll be publishing close to Veterans Day again this year, spoiler alert, those books have been such a breath of fresh air, you know, they’re and we don’t have an audio version of them yet, because I’m new at all this, but we do have Kindle and you can buy a hard copy. They’re cool to look at. So for your for your watchers, right? Like this is a really cool coffee table book. The picture on the front is actually two F-16s, flying over a city on my second deployment. And it was custom painted by I think he’s a British artist. So that the book even means a lot to us as well that that picture means a lot. And it is it’s so helpful. Because somebody that’s stuck in a rut, they can sit down and in 15 minutes go, oh, that might get me out of the rut, that might remove a restriction that I put in front of myself.

Janine Bolon
Thank you so much for clarifying so much of not only your own story, but the stories of so many people that you’ve been able to gather around you to be able to build a book like that. I very much appreciate your time today. Thank you for joining us.

Dominic Teich
Thank you, Janine.

Janine Bolon
And that’s it. Dom has answered our questions and we got more information in store for you with his latest work which can be found on his website, SingleSeatMindset.com. We want to thank Dom very much for being our spotlighted author. And if you are an author or you know of an author and you’d like us to spotlight them, please visit our website at Authorpodcasting.com where you will find the 99 Author Project listed. We talk to authors of all walks of life as we build out book number 12 which is the Advice from Authors to Authors and that will be published in 2023. And this is Janine Bolon signing off with you today and all of us here at the 8 Gates that produces The Janine Bolon Show. We wish you a wonderful week and we encourage you to get your message, your story or your knowledge out into the world. If you don’t like what you see in the world today, well make it a better place just like these authors that we’re interviewing this year. We’ll see you again next week. And until then, keep sharing what you know with others, keep shining that light that is you and don’t forget today. Today, go out and do something for yourself that’s just plain fun. We’ll see you next week.

Bryan Hyde
Thank you for listening to The Janine Bolon Show. Be sure to subscribe to our show notes by going to www.theJanineBolonshow.com, where you’ll find additional resources as well as the opportunity to sign up to receive our program in your email each week. Be sure to visit our sponsor at www.the8gates.com.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *