The Janine Bolon Show with Michael Whitehouse - 99 Authors Project, Season 6, Episode 1

The 99 Authors Project – Season 6 – Episode 1 with Michael Whitehouse28 min read

Michael Whitehouse

Michael Whitehouse is The Guy Who Knows a Guy. In 2014, he came to Groton, Connecticut knowing no one at all. A year later, after diving into networking with both feet, he was a major connector in the local community. In 2020, he went global and began connecting entrepreneurs, investors, speakers and others around the world to people they need to know. He offers his services as a networking concierge, making connections and building strategic alliances around the world. He is the host of a variety of podcasts including his new Neurodiversity Superpowers podcast.

Click here for Michael’s book.

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
Hey, this is Janine Bolon here and welcome to today’s show where we bring you quality content on saving your time, saving your money, saving your knowledge. While we hope that you’re staying sane in this topsy turvy world of ours or is that staying sane purchase already a lost cause. The Janine Bolon Show is a syndicated program of four podcast shows that were combined in October of 2021. We were running Three Minute Money Tips, The Thriving Solopreneur, The Writers Hour Creative Conversations and The Practical Mystic Show. They had been running since 2017. And we’ve produced over 300 episodes interviewed over 200 guests, and today we will be spotlighting one of our authors that is contributing to our twelfth book, The 99 Author Project, it happens to be Michael Whitehouse today he is The Guy Who Knows a Guy. And in 2014, he came to Groton, Connecticut, knowing no one at all. A year later, after diving into the networking with both feet, he was a major connector in the local community. And by 2020, he went global and began connecting entrepreneurs, investors, speakers and others around the world, to people they needed to know. He offers his services as a networking concierge making connections and building strategic alliances around the world. He is the host of the Daily Morning Motivation podcast and The Guy Who Knows a Guy interview podcast, he also happens to not only be a friend of mine, but he helped me save five hours a week, you can go to my YouTube channel and see that video where I just absolutely love Michael Whitehouse, because of the amount of time he has saved me due to one tip of his. Thank you for being on the show today, Michael.

Michael Whitehouse
Thank you for having me.

Janine Bolon
You betcha. So talk to us a little bit about The Guy Who Knows a Guy, this book that you wrote, what’s the story behind that? What started all of that?

Michael Whitehouse
So The Guy Who Knows a Guy, the purpose of that book was to make me an author. Because at the time, around 2015 2016, I had about a decade and a half of business experience, I’d run my own store, I’d done sales and all these things. But my job title was print salesman, I was working for a local print shop, and I was selling printing stuff. So I knew all these other things you could do with print and marketing, whatnot. But all anyone could see me as was like the guy who could print their business cards and take their orders for letterhead and, and stuff. And they wouldn’t, they were not open to the conversations about marketing and this knowledge. So I said, well, if I take all this knowledge, and I put it into a book, then I will be an author, an author is a higher rank title than salesman. And then I will present as an author instead of as a salesman, and I will have more esteem and get into more interesting conversations. And I never found out if that worked. Because just before I finished the book, I got hired as a marketing manager for a startup. And that was the end of that, and my next job, the publisher, and now I’m a networking concierge. So Alas, I never got to find out if the book itself would carry my esteem.

Janine Bolon
Right? But hey, people can go to your website and get it from you. That’s the thing that I love is that you’re more than willing to pass it along to the next person to help them out. So that always drives the question that I ask people, which is did you have a marketing background before you became an author? And you kind of were like yes or no, you were more in sales, weren’t you?

Michael Whitehouse
Yeah, and I did have some marketing background. I understood social media fairly well. I understood some marketing principles. I did not know how to market a book. But I never wrote the book to market it. I mean, I knew how at the time was CreateSpace, which later became Kindle Direct Publishing, I knew how to self-publish a book, partly because a friend of mine who I met through, how else, networking, one of her things is that everyone should write a book, because she pointed out CreateSpace, the minimum is 24 pages to publish a book. And he gets an ISBN number, it’s on Amazon. It’s a real book. Well, as real as I guess, if he has an ISBN number, it’s a book, right? So you publish a book, and then you’re an author, and an author is an expert. So everyone should publish a book if they know anything. And I said, oh, I can write 24 pages. And I went a bit past that the book was originally 76 pages and the revised 100 pages. But so I leveraged it that way, because my intention was always to use it to make myself an author. And apparently, I’m not too bad at writing, because I got a lot of feedback from it that it was the only entertaining book on networking that ever read. And I actually ended up getting business from it. When one particular story is funny that I would give the book away at raffles at chamber commerce events. And so woman won the book and she took it home to to her husband who wasn’t much of a reader, but she read some of the laugh out loud parts and he laughed. He’s like, okay, let me see that thing, because it’s not very thick. So, and then he read it. And he’s like, I want to talk to him. Because he got that magazine, I might want to advertise in there. Ended up getting an advertising contract for because we had a conversation, because he read the book. So yeah, if you, if you take the number of books I have sold and divided by the amount of money I’ve made from the book, I have made somewhere to the tune of $300 a copy. But that’s from selling the copies.

Janine Bolon
Right. And I think that’s what a lot of authors are definitely coming into understanding is that there has to be something more than just a book for them to be able to actually make a living off of writing. So if you were to start, like, say today, and you would start marketing your book today, what is some changes that you would make in the way you presented things? Or would you just keep things pretty much the way they are?

Michael Whitehouse
It worked well for what it was. And for its purpose. And it’s funny, because I basically rolled out the book backwards. So I didn’t start as The Guy Who Knows a Guy and then write a book and, and build it out. I wrote this book; I called The Guy Who Knows a Guy. I, I think my mother came up with the name, I think. So it’s a book on networking, I came to Groton, Connecticut in 2014, knowing nobody, and started just jumped straight into networking, ignorance on fire, went to every networking event, I could talked to everyone I could. And because I had nothing to offer other than the connections I was making as I did this, basically. So I wouldn’t waste people’s time I started making introductions. And because I didn’t really own a business, I didn’t have any money I didn’t, I just had these connections. So I started making connections, I started making pretty significant connections, mayors, owners, CEOs of local companies who didn’t know each other, and they were really glad to get them that was valuable. And then I said, well, I seem to be more connected to most people around me, I might as well write it down, and write down how I did it. And then I’d have a book. So that gave me the book, The Guy Who Knows a Guy.

Michael Whitehouse
A friend of mine, who’s a marketing person said, well, you should have a website. I was like, okay, well, I have a, I have access to a platform where I can put websites for the cost of the URL. And so I got the website Guy Who Knows a Guy.com. And now the book had a website. And then everything else I did when I scrolled out, I’d be like, oh, I should maybe do some coaching. Well, I put a coaching page on the Guy Who Knows a Guy website. I kind of wanna do appearances and speaking, not that I was terribly effective at the time, but no one did that. So I created appearance page on the website, I said, I should do a podcast, which I call the podcast? I guess I call it the Guy Who Knows a Guy. So I got this website, and I can make Guy Who Knows a Guy.com/podcast. And so it kind of grew out from there. And as I was giving the book away at raffles, if you run the chamber commerce, who would you rather have the author of the Guy Who Knows a Guy, or the Guy Who Knows a Guy himself? Well, they started calling me the Guy Who Knows a Guy to basically make themselves sound better, which I’m totally fine with. And that became kind of a nickname, which is secondary to what I did, because I was still, you know, a salesman, or magazine, publisher, or whatever. But when the pandemic came, and it sort of cleared the table off, I thought, I’m gonna lean into this, the Guy Who Knows a Guy, as a brand, but it started as the book the book expanded to be me.

Janine Bolon
That is fascinating. Because I can tell you, with all the books that I’ve written, that kind of is exactly how it spiders when you start off with an idea. Like I wrote this little book called Author Podcasting. Next thing I know, you know, is like, like you said, it just expands. You just keep adding pages and adding pages as you as you build out your business. And there you go. So what process did you try that was like an epic failure when it came to selling your books? I know you never really originally intended it to, to sell. But we all have those horror stories. And I invested $7,000, $10,000. You know, everybody has their investment story that just flopped. Do you have one you care to share?

Michael Whitehouse
Well, so I don’t have a catastrophic money investment story because the thing about being broke for most of the time off is if you don’t have money, you can’t spend it wrong, because you can’t spend it at all. That me out of the really catastrophic. You know, I spent $7,000 on this thing. I did have a little adventure with audio recording as an audiobook. Because I said, oh, I like reading and speaking and talking. Basically put a microphone in front of me, I’m happy, I’ll do whatever. And I could read my book into the microphone, and it would be an audiobook. So apparently, there’s something else in the process other than just reading the book into the microphone. I think, I don’t know because I’ve never I had the attention span to figure out how to get on Audible. So there exists an mp3 of my book. And I then tried to put it up and said, I don’t have the time to figure this out because it needs like this much in the leader in the trailer or something. And I don’t even know what it needs because I haven’t been able to focus enough to do it. So I’ve just used it as a lead magnet, in which I say if you get my book on my website, it will then say, if you’d like the audio book, reply to this email, and I’ll send you the the mp3.

Michael Whitehouse
Which I did, I did the interesting experience recently with my Google Drive was filling up and I took the biggest files and downloaded them to my hard drive and then deleted them. And I didn’t realize my audio book was as big as it is because it apparently made the cut for biggest files that needed to be downloaded and removed. So I went to send some of the audio book and I’m like, where is it? Where’d it go? Oh, no. I had to search through all these files to find it again. But yeah, so I ended up kind of pivoting it because I think it’d be cool to have the audio book on Audible, but not cool enough to put in the amount of effort it’s gonna take to figure out how to put it up there.

Janine Bolon
Right. And it is. There are so many moving parts now. It’s ridiculous. It is so, no, I totally understand your pain on that one. So what story do you like to tell about yourself that gets the most laughs from your target audience?

Michael Whitehouse
I think this the the story, the expanded version of the how I came to Groton story is what gets a lot of get some chuckles because the full version, the way I normally tell the story is that I came to Groton knowing, knowing nobody. And so I started going to networking events, went my first networking event the day before I actually moved here. And it was ignorance on fire, I went to any networking event, I could find, I’d go to a see if I remember my pattern now.

Michael Whitehouse
I would go to a ribbon cutting, hair cutting, line cutting, business before hours, business after hours, business during hours. I would have shown up to the opening of an envelope. After telling that story enough times, it gets some laughs as long as I can remember it.

Janine Bolon
As long as I can remember the story. Okay, so just out of curiosity, because people are gonna want to know this. And I’m dying to know. So I’m asking that question. And that is, okay, so you went to all these networking events, what did you have like a Google spreadsheet where you tracked everybody? How did you track everybody and do follow up so that you could do the interviews? Did you have some secret sauce?

Michael Whitehouse
I wasn’t that organized. No, I had, I had no system at all at that time. So at that time, back in 2014, all I was doing is meeting people. And it was pure instinct, I’d meet someone and then I’d be like, oh, you know who you should meet? I talked to someone recently. And often my connections are based on recency, even to this day, although I have more systems in place. That the probability of me making an introduction to someone who’s not a client, because now people hire me to make introductions for them, they get introduced because they’re on the whiteboard in front of me constantly. And I’ll always remember them. But for a random person I happen to meet, the probability of them getting introduction drops precipitously, after 48 hours, because I don’t necessarily remember that I met them because I meet so many people. And so the same thing would happen. I’d be at an event, I’d meet someone, I’d meet someone else, I’d meet someone else, I’d say, oh, have you met that person over there? I just met them 15 minutes earlier, but they match what the person I’m talking to is looking for. And that’s how I’d make a lot of those connections. And then oftentimes, it was someone worth following up with I take their business card home, I would send them an email, I would say hey, let’s set up a, almost said virtual coffee, a live coffee, this was back in those times. We drive out and meet each other and as my calendar hurts just thinking about this, I’d like drive 30 minutes and then talk to him for 45 minutes and drive 30. Like every meeting took two hours. It was crazy. Crazy in these these back and forth times and the way we lit a fire and roasted some dinosaur meat.

Janine Bolon
I just think about the amount of time we spent in our cars going to meetings. Yeah.

Michael Whitehouse
Yeah, I listened to a lot of podcasts. A lot of podcasts back then it was like that they hadn’t invented stirrups for horses, yet it’s rode bareback to these meetings.

Janine Bolon
Of course. So what was the biggest change that you’ve seen in yourself since you became an author? You know, like you decided you needed to become an author and you started doing this marketing. So it was kind of the biggest change you’ve seen in yourself?

Michael Whitehouse
I think becoming an author was the beginning of taking on an identity that wasn’t just a ne’er do well entrepreneur, because for the first few years I was literally just a story, a dreamer or being like, I’ve got ideas. They weren’t good ideas. They weren’t actual businesses, like, I know some stuff and maybe I can teach it to somebody. There was no, forget avatars. There was no business plan. I didn’t know my offer I like; it was a mess. So, so I kind of drifted from job to job, all of which I found through networking, of course. And you know, I sold cars, I sold printing, I then became a magazine publisher. But becoming a, an author started to solidify a brand, a personal brand, not so businessman, but a personal brand of I wasn’t just some salesman, I was the Guy Who Knows a Guy. At the time, that didn’t mean anything, because I couldn’t make any money from it. And I had connections, but I was well connected in southeast Connecticut, which is a lovely place, but not the commercial center of the world by any means. You know, the commercial center if you’re building submarines, but I wasn’t actually networked in the submarine world. So I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t connected in New York, I wasn’t connected in Boston, I wasn’t connected in Hartford, I was just connected down in this local area. And as it turned out, that was a practice run. That’s where I honed my skills. So when the pandemic uploaded me to the internet, and I started connecting to really significant, you know, people who have multiple commas in their bank account on a regular basis, because they’re, they’ve got 10s of 1000s of clients and their authorities in their field and they’re a big deal. I knew how to provide value to them by making connections and doing all these things I practice. And so it’s kind of a progression from becoming an author, becoming the Guy Who Knows a Guy, developing this identity and then the pandemic providing opportunity to be saying, I’m going into that. Yeah, this, this guy knows a guy thing, maybe I should just do that all the time. That’s how to be like a sideline thing that’s, that supports someone else’s business. But let’s see if I can just be that.

Janine Bolon
And that really is when you got some traction on it. I know that from having watched you over the course of those two years, as you were really coming into your own on that.

Michael Whitehouse
I was an overnight success. So it took me 18 months to get to profitability. Overnight. In the scale of business really 18 months to 18 months from I should pursue my entrepreneurial path somehow to starting making revenue five months away from six figures is actually pretty quick.

Janine Bolon
It is, and you did very well at it. So one of the things I like to ask all the authors for this book is what are the top five tips that you would give authors for guarding their books, and you were like, Hey, I can’t really tell anybody about how to sell books, because I didn’t do that. But you had a better way. You had your five tips for what? Go ahead and share that with us.

Michael Whitehouse
Yeah, so I have five tips in no particular swirl order. But that are around this idea. Because my that didn’t market my book in the traditional sense of selling a lot of copies. I use my book to market me and use it as leverage. But so the five tips, the first one is build a community around your book. And the second one similar that is make your book the beginning of the experience, not the end. So it’s not just a matter of sell your book, they read your book, okay, that’s nice. But build a Facebook group, build the telegram, get people talking about it, get people into the world. If it’s fiction, get people writing fanfic, if it’s, if it’s the I’m the Guy Who Knows a Guy group on Facebook is a private group of all the people, I only invite people I’ve met into it. I’m building the Guy Who Knows a Guy community around that. The third thing I’d say is leverage your book for other platforms, stage, podcast, et cetera. You know, when you say I’m an author, it sounds more impressive than I’m a whatever else, because authors, even though people know you can self-publish a book, there’s still that esteem of oh, an author. Because just because you can doesn’t mean you do, so it still puts you into an elite class. For at least the people who have tried. For the books make great gifts that people keep people throw away business cards, they don’t throw away books, because you know, what kind of a monster throws away a book? And if they do, do you really want to know them anyway?

Janine Bolon
Really, really.

Michael Whitehouse
But if you give away you know, if you whether self-publish or not, if you give them a copy of your book, one, it’s always going to be there. And they’re gonna be like, oh, I remember your name, because there’s the book right there. Never read it. But there she is. And they might even read it. The book might contain your story, and your ideas and all these things that make you say. Because I’ve gotten books from people that I had not gotten around to reading for six months, nine months, 12 months, and then I read it and I’m like, oh, I didn’t realize this person was that interesting. I need to reconnect with them. So book is like a little sleeper agent that you can

Janine Bolon
It really is.

Michael Whitehouse
And the fifth one is use your books are conversations you couldn’t have otherwise. And that’s because getting to that sleeper agent that it can tell those stories that you might not otherwise you know, you could if there’s someone you want to connect with, you could mail them a copy your book. And they might read it or at least the first 10, 20 pages. And that might have your back. So like my the first chapter, my book is my backstory, how I became the Guy Who Knows a Guy. So if I send someone my book, they could read that and get to know me or listen to the audio book or the ebook or whatever. But it’s a way to open up that conversation and get it started that you might not otherwise be able to without a book.

Janine Bolon
And that brings us to the other thing is what’s the one thing that you most misunderstood about being or becoming an author? Was there any conception that you had that you were like, wow, I totally had that wrong.

Michael Whitehouse
I think once I became an author, it demystified it a little bit for me. And I didn’t have too many mishaps as I started writing, because I had some a friend who said you should write, here’s why, here’s what’s gonna happen. So it’s pretty straightforward. I also avoided the more complex side of it, because I wasn’t professionally published and didn’t go through that whole process, which kind of missed out on probably should get published someday by a professional publisher. But it sort of demystified a little bit, because once I realized how easy it was for me to become an author, I realized, oh, anyone can become an author. And some people sent me that and that definitely people sent me their book I look at and go, oh, yup any one can become an author. There’s actually there’s a chapter in my book when I talked about why did I write a book I don’t tend to make money on. And in it, I say, this book could be the phrase, I have a baked potato 150,000 times between two nice covers. And it would be almost as useful as the book you’re reading for my business. Because I’m an author. I’ve got the title, author. It turns out Apparently some people liked my book and reading it has made them like me more, which is kind of cool. But but it’s, it’s really made me realize that the I used to be like, oh, an author. Wow. How do you become an author? I can’t imagine. And it took me until I was 36 to actually write a book. So even though anyone can do it, and anyone can upload to Kindle Direct Publishing, doesn’t mean anyone does.

Janine Bolon
Right? It still it still is a label that gives you cachet. I don’t care. How, just because there are so many people that do have I think, incredible stories. And I asked them to write it down. And they’re like, no, I never could do that. And I and I just It saddens me a little bit because I know that if you got the impetus to write a book, then that means there’s somebody out there that wants what you have to offer. There’s somebody out there asking, and you’re the one that supposed to deliver that message. So with all that being said, though, what is the primary thing that has been the biggest reward for you about being an author?

Michael Whitehouse
So once I got into the entrepreneurial space, and I’m a bit of a coach, and certainly in that coaching space, I feel like I’m, I at least have the minimum qualifications to run with the big dogs. I have a podcast, I have a book, I have a website, there’s certain things you just you assume at a certain level, you know, what’s your website? That you have one. What’s your book about? Yeah, if I meet someone at certain events, I could ask question, what’s your book about without them having mentioned they were an author, and they’ll just tell me what their book is about and afterwards be like, wait, I didn’t say I was an author. I’m like, yeah, but you obviously have a book you coach at this level, you must have a book. So it’s, it lets me feel like I’m at that level. You know, I can, I said run with the big dogs. Now. I may still be a small dog running with big dogs, but I can at least run with the big dogs because I am an author. I do have that credential. There’s certain things like that, you know, the bare minimum things business card, website, Facebook page, that everyone should have. But the next level up is you should have a book. Because if you can’t fill 24, 50, 75 pages with your knowledge, and you’re in the knowledge field, and you’re a coach or some kind of expert, if you can’t fill 75 pages with expertise, you might not be an expert.

Michael Whitehouse
You might need to go back and do learn a few more things regarding that. So any last bits of wisdom or nuggets of gold you want to share with us before we go today?

Michael Whitehouse
I guess I’d share the advice that Lisa Saunders gave me when she first told me that you should write a book. If you have knowledge, most people if they are professionals on a business could write a 25, 50, 75-page book. It’s not that they don’t have the knowledge it’s that they haven’t sat down to do it. And it can be as simple as sit down and start writing. And, you know, I did it on Google Docs, I didn’t even use layout software, like I did Google Docs and exported to a PDF. And that’s where my book came from. Now my wife designed my cover, I couldn’t do that myself, you should see this. The cover I made looks like it was something that the 80s. But, I have said the cover. But for the book itself. It’s just I sat down Google Docs; I started writing and I kept writing. And I kept writing. And I ran out of things to write, and I said, I’m done. And I published it. So if you have expertise, if you have knowledge, experience, even if you’re, you know a carpenter, or you’ve got stories to share, you’ve got yeah, it could be funny stories. It can be educational stories. You’ve got something to share, put it out there, even if only 20 people read it. Those are the 20 people who needed to read your story.

Janine Bolon
That’s exactly how I feel about that. Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today, Michael, I appreciate it.

Michael Whitehouse
Thank you for having me.

Janine Bolon
And that’s it. Michael has answered our questions and he has got more information in store for you. Let me tell you, so please make sure you visit his website which is

Michael Whitehouse
Guy Who Knows a Guy.com.

Janine Bolon
And thank you so much for being our spotlighted author. If you are an author or you know of an author that you would like us to spotlight please visit our website at AuthorPodcasting.com where you will find the 99 Author Project listed. We talk to all authors from all walks of life as we build out book number 12, which is Advice from Authors to Authors. That’s due out 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 and 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 to go out there today and just 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.

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