Visualize Value

Jack Butcher

Growth Summit 2022

Join founder, Jack Butcher, for a live design workshop.

Timestamps

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:32) - Origin Story of Visualize Value
(05:10) - Learning Visually
(06:10) - Agency Example
(08:04) - Benefits of Communicating Visually
(12:01) - Writers vs Calligraphers
(15:58) - Visual Logic
(20:15) - Consistent Branding
(25:57) - "Good design is what's left"
(29:39) - Making Boring Interesting
(32:26) - Selling Products Faster
(35:56) - Delivering Epiphanies
(37:37) - Examples
(44:49) - Digital Tools
(46:09) - Physical Products
(48:19) - Final Takeaway

Transcript

[00:00:00] Aadil Razvi: All right. This man has spent 10 years working in the Fortune 100 advertising in New York City as a creative director for multi-billion dollar brands. He then figured out how to transition to highly specialized and fun consulting and a product business that scales infinitely called Visualize Value. He makes millions a year with an audience of over 500,000 people.

Please welcome the irreplaceable, unignorable, Jack Butcher. Please show some love in the chat for our guests today, the Butcher.

All right. All right. Welcome, man. Great to have you.

[00:00:34] Jack Butcher: Thank you, mate. Great to be here. I appreciate it.

[00:00:37] Aadil Razvi: Absolutely. So you can go ahead. Jack is actually gonna be sharing his screen and walking us through. I actually don't know what, so I'm excited. Live demonstration here.

[00:00:45] Jack Butcher: Good times. Let's do it.

[00:00:51] Aadil Razvi: It's the little up arrow.

[00:00:58] Jack Butcher: I see the last square. Yeah. I'm getting that.

[00:01:03] Aadil Razvi: If you are familiar with Jack's work go ahead and drop something in the chat here. Or if it's the first time you're hearing about him or first time experiencing, drop that in the chat.

[00:01:12] Jack Butcher: This working.

[00:01:15] Aadil Razvi: It is working screen size.

Oh. No, it looks good. Perfect. My screen was small. Looks good, man.

[00:01:21] Jack Butcher: We're going full screen. All right, cool. Let me know and I'll take it from the top.

[00:01:27] Aadil Razvi: Top.

[00:01:29] Jack Butcher: All right. As you mentioned in the intro, basically spent the first 10 years of my career in advertising at various scales. Little tiny boutique design studios all the way up to huge advertising conglomerates where you're working with big global brands.

And after about eight, nine years in that world, tried my hand at building my own agency. And it went reasonably well, but I realized it was just a different version of the thing I'd already been doing.

And then stumbled into this project that is now called Visualize Value, which was largely informed by all of the work I was doing in those corporate environments when I was basically constructing pitches to sell work into those big businesses. And a lot of that skillset really comes down to being able to condense the story, being able to communicate concepts, being able to essentially explain someone's business.

Back to them in a way, like better than they understand it. And the common thread that I picked up over that decade was these visual representations of ideas that I would insert into these keynote presentations, documents, the things that we would use to sell in the concepts we were trying to produce.

Being in a room and watching people's like eyes light up when they get something. Really, there was a huge correlation between that and your ability to like really crystallize and visualize an idea. And, 10 years after, well after 10 years of doing that, I managed to figure out how to just specialize in that very specific visual style as a consultant.

And since I've grown it into a product business and a brand and media company, it's hard to define what it is now, but defined really by this simple black and white aesthetic that aims to take complicated ideas and simplify them visually.

[00:03:31] Aadil Razvi: Something you said that really stood out, Jack, being able to explain someone's business better than they even understand it. I think that's the crux of your visualizing value here.

[00:03:43] Jack Butcher: Yeah. And I think that process is really the way in the same way, like great writers I think have this ability to articulate something in a much more high fidelity format than you think about it or talk about it.

It's just taking the time to really distill it to its essence and look at it and see what needs to be there, what doesn't need to be there, What is the point you're actually trying to communicate? So putting things through this filter is actually like a really interesting exercise to get to the core of the message.

In the same way that writing something down, you can stare at a blank page or you'll vomit words onto a page and then you can go back and cut into it and refine it and just clean it up. This exercise really helps you identify what it is you're trying to say so I just wanted to set up, I think there's 10 slides in here or so that speak to why I think visualizing value is an advantage that you can, take advantage of and whatever your role is, whatever industry you work in, it's really just another string in your bow of communication, as it were.

So this is, this statistic is highly disputed and I've done poles on a few different live events and generally it comes in a lot higher than this, but a lot of most people identify it as visual learners. And I think that really goes back to, if you want to get really meta and philosophical about it, language is a newer technology than site, like the things you look at are informing your opinion about your environment way faster than

reading three paragraphs of what's going on around you. So there is this like lagging feature of us understanding visuals and looking at things before we listen to them or we read them. So if this is true, 70% of the time, you're missing a huge chunk of your audience. Whoever's listening, whoever's watching, whoever's sitting on the other side of the table from you.

So without a visual component to your message, you're like the effectiveness of your communication goes down significantly. Just to set, just show an example of one of the really early consulting clients of visualize value was a it was like a, they're like a full service eCommerce agency, so they do everything from

three PL, fulfillment, delivery, all the way through to digital marketing and media, email, it's just like a full service partner for people who have a great product idea but can't execute on the fulfillment side. And they used to pitch by walking into rooms and just explaining what they did and

Someone's ability to retain that or to contextualize that, especially if you're looking to hire somebody because you don't know how it works or what to do, is really difficult. So this is one of our first consulting clients sitting in a room with them for a week or two, and just distilling everything that they do into this sequence of visuals that lets them unpack their process and point at all these different

basically logic sequences. So you're getting into someone's head and this is often really effective or most effective I guess in businesses that are, they have an intangible skill set, like they don't sell chairs where you can say, here's the product, do you like the look of it? Is it comfortable?

It's more of we have these 20 people working together to produce this result, and it's really intangible for the person who's paying for that result. So what this does is creates a bridge between those two people. Does that make sense?

[00:07:53] Aadil Razvi: Yeah, certainly.

[00:07:59] Jack Butcher: The idea of being able to reach this point where you have an asset that represents what you do.

There are loads and loads of different benefits, but trying to distill it into a short list, you can charge more because you essentially eliminate all of these objections throughout and you can convey the depth and the nuance in your service, how you think about this stuff, what goes into it, which I think for a lot of people helps them justify a higher price.

Or if they're able to communicate all of the things that are going into the service they're providing, then they feel more comfortable charging relative to how complex that is. Time is another one, so you explain less, but what you also end up doing is creating these assets that work without you. You can explain it once, record your narration of this sequence and it becomes this asset that works.

You can send it out as a video, etc. Print it out. Ease of say, I talked a little bit about that, but it's, I hear someone once told me, their response to something that I produced was when you're in a bar and there's a sign on the wall that says, No shirt, no shoes, no service.

No service. It's like a sign that just articulates what the rules are or how this thing works. And you can do the same thing for your business if you get to a point where you can articulate something visually. Differentiation is an obvious one. A lot of the people you're competing against aren't gonna be thinking about it this way.

And then confidence, this is something that I think I learned by doing this, is I felt way more confident going into a room if I'd worked through this process of distilling something into a visual and it was on the wall behind me. It's a great prompt and a great container of all the thinking that you've done, that you can, like, when you look at it, it speaks back to you.

So I just fell in love with this process of distilling an idea and then having this asset. I could walk into a room with that spoke for me, but also reminded me of all of the thinking that went into producing it.

[00:10:16] Aadil Razvi: One thing that Ethan mentioned in the chat here, Jack, is he learned from your own, your course, that people process visuals.

He said 15.6 times faster than words, and that really stuck with him. That kind of speaks to like that ease of use that, that you're talking about.

[00:10:35] Jack Butcher: Yeah, that's that's a great point. I did have a slide for that in a different presentation, and this idea came to me early on in the process.

A few people reached out when I was just doing the Visualize Value social posts. A few people reached out and said the, so early on I would take like famous ideas and quotes and contextualize them with visuals just basically add a visual to further explain the thing. And I had a few people reach out and say, I can recall the visual, which then helps me get recall the quote, if that makes sense.

So the visual represents the concept in a way that like bridges, it bridges someone's mind to get to the idea. And some of these visuals the quotes are almost interchangeable when they're talking about the same things. So the visual is like, representing this idea at the conceptual level, and then you can if you do it really well, you can rewrite the idea from the visual.

Does that make sense?

[00:11:45] Aadil Razvi: Yeah, no, that, that makes total sense. Yeah, gets me really excited. My question to you I feel like I'm not a designer. I don't relate to myself as a designer, and I'm sure a lot of people in the audience either think of themselves as some other role, a marketer or a founder.

Is this for designers or is this like a way of thinking for people other than designers? Would love to know your thoughts around that.

[00:12:08] Jack Butcher: Yeah, it's a great question and I think to be a hundred percent honest, it's hard to empathize with the idea that everybody isn't a designer in some regard, right?

I think the word has been there's definitely a skill set to making something look polished, right? Like the idea of being able to, the sorry, let me go back a little bit. The comparison I feel like I wanna make is writer versus like calligrapher. So anybody or the vast majority of people can pick up a pen, make a mark on a piece of paper that communicates the thing they wanted to say.

Not everybody can write with telegraphic levels of detail. And the stroke goes wide at this point, skinny at this point, and flicks up in this beautiful curve. And that's the myth that I've been trying to dispel all this time is that this is not a, there's obviously a spectrum of talent that exists on the design side as it relates to something being aesthetically pleasing.

But there's also the whiteboard and the dry erase marker communicating a concept rather than writing 50 bullet points. And I think people overlook or confuse the idea of polishing up a designer artwork something with the ability to make marks on paper to communicate an idea. The TLDR is, no, it's not just for designers, but the idea I'm trying to get across is, everybody is a designer in a sense

like you have to process things, put things together, solve problems, and then communicate your line of thinking as a result of solving those problems. And that is the design process, right? Like your set of tools and your ability to communicate that. Your vocabulary is one of those things. Your writing style is another one of those things.

And then, design or visuals or shape making, mark making is just another one of those things. And it takes time in the same way that writing, speaking doing anything in a compelling way takes time. But I think the notion that design is a career is definitely. I think there's more nuance in that discussion, right?

You can be a computer programmer that's an amazing writer, and that's gonna advance your ability to communicate your ideas as an engineer, but you wouldn't describe yourself as a writer. So I feel like it's a skill versus a job title.

[00:15:05] Aadil Razvi: Yeah. I can really hear that it is for sure. I really hear that look we're all communicating, we're all designing whether or not we're bringing intentionality to it. And so what you're really sharing with us here is like how to bring intentionality to what we're already doing in some way, shape, or form. But yeah, please continue.

[00:15:26] Jack Butcher: Yeah. So in trying to like reverse engineer this and that also, caveat a lot of this with I didn't know I was doing this for about eight or nine years.

This was just like an instinctual thing and it's been a process to like basically look back at that and x-ray it and examine it and try and deconstruct how it all works together. But what I've believe I've proven is the common thread or the way of thinking you need to hone to be able to produce ideas like this is to think logically.

And this is really that design engineer, like how things work line of thinking or way of thinking. So on here, there's just a couple of example. This is not everything, but think about how ideas fit together or how a statement is made, you can reverse engineer some visual logic out of that. So a couple of examples here.

There are sequences, transformations, recipes, hierarchies, and comparisons. So I'm gonna show some visual examples of a lot of these, but it's almost like putting yourself above the language and trying to abstract away the words and think about what the language is trying to communicate, like what the relationships are between the objects and the descriptive words in a sentence, and how you would begin to translate that to shapes tha

a good way of evaluating whether or not you've done it is if you could translate the quote into a different language and it still makes sense, right? I'll put some more context around this and show some examples, but that's like retroactively, that's how I've come to understand what makes a design compelling and interesting and like additive versus just a pretty picture that accompanies an article, for example.

That's the difference between a diagram that communicates something and a you know a stock photograph that is just based on a keyword related to what it is you're writing. So I'm not sure how web 3 literate or interested we are in this webinar here, but this is an example of one of the most popular visualize value graphics, which is this comparison between a JPEG and an NFT, which is, there's five visual elements on this page here.

Four of them are exactly the same, but then there's just this one element that packs so much this, it carries so much meaning the ability to leverage symbols that people already have, like meaning associated with is such a like it's a concept that I'm like really trying and drill home.

What I'm talking about this is that verified check mark means something to pretty much every, anybody who's ever been on the internet, right? And your ability to leverage that as a icon to communicate your point is a massively powerful and underrated thing. So this would, this graphic, I posted this maybe March of last year when the NFT market was just like going absolutely nuts and rode that wave of the zeitgeist explaining it to people who really didn't understand what was going on.

But this, going back to the last slide, this is a comparison between one thing and a different thing that sets this context. And you can begin to draw comparisons using these visual symbol.

[00:19:33] Aadil Razvi: One thing I'm just gonna call out on that one, Jack, is look at how many elements there are. These are two boxes, two words, one symbol, and yet it's just able to communicate so much with so little.

And for the people who don't necessarily relate to themselves as designers or someone who's like good at art. This doesn't require that.

[00:19:59] Jack Butcher: Yeah. And that's Yeah, it's a good call out. And that's been intentional too. It's a little strange that I used the one with color for the first example because 99.9% of these visuals don't even have any color in them.

It's just the black and white contrast. And that, again, not to go too deep into this, but that's been a really good forcing function too, where I was explaining before, the idea that being a designer is like playing with color, choosing photographs, playing around with typefaces, like what font should I use here?

This is the restraint that was placed on this from really early on has been incredibly empowering, where it's like, these are the two colors you have. This is the typeface we're using. That's it. And that level of constraint forces you to put the idea through that filter. and as a function of having that constraint, like you're never really starting with a blank page.

You could just take something and put it through this filter each time. So that's been, again, like a happy accident and looking back at it I'm glad I made that decision. Another example here..

[00:21:10] Aadil Razvi: Someone sees your art Jack, it stands like there's a common design language from one to another.

And so it's almost a Jack butcher before you even know, read what it.

[00:21:21] Jack Butcher: I'd love to hear that. And that's, I think that's another lesson from the corporate world or the big brand world where as designers, there's actually like this huge tension in agency culture.

If anyone listening is part of an agency, probably have experienced this. The idea that being creative is like pushing back on these guidelines that have been set or having reinventing the wheel in some way. And so much of, I think, visualize values success is tied to the fact they haven't deviated from that visual style because it builds up this invisible equity over time.

As you said, hopefully this is true. When somebody sees something in that style, just instantly ties back to the other thousand images they've seen in that style. And it's just like slowly building equity up in that idea in the same way that you see, even like a, I would imagine eight out of 10 people would recognize a Nike ad without a swoosh on the bottom of it, right?

There's a certain photographic style, there's a typeface they use, there's attitude in their writing and that's, again, that's not something that comes out of the gate. But over time, as you start to find your constraints, then that like equity could have, can pick up by just sticking to it. And it's almost the inverse of creativity sometimes, where you think of it as the inverse of creativity, where you're like, man, I really wanna change.

I want something that's visually different. But I think the, I already said this in a different way, but the making the idea the hero is really I personally find it way more gratifying on the creative side too, where it's like you're solving a puzzle and you don't introduce all these variables that aren't necessarily contributing to the strength of the message.

They're just like appeasing your creative ego or something along those lines where you just wanna mix it up for the sake of mixing it up. Yeah, so this is another example of a, this is some early client work where we were working for a like full service financial firm that essentially convincing entrepreneurs to hire them as fractional CFOs.

So anybody here has been an entrepreneur or worked on a small team knows that like your visibility into the finances of a business as a single person, and especially as a person who has no financial experience or like financial experience on the business side is incredibly limited, difficult. Any synonym for frustrating, you can place in there.

And this sequence is designed to explain what a CFO is by starting with this contextual point of like you have blind spots. A bookkeeper may not have blind spots, but they're not connecting this thing to that thing. They're just they're taking stock of what's going in and what's coming out.

And accountant may be a little bit more sophisticated than that and connects things in a sequence. And then a CFO is like this all seeing financial strategy. This is what we should be doing for tax strategy versus managing your PNL versus paying contract, all of this stuff. Again this visual concept could actually be translated.

You could change those annotations, those labels underneath to essentially describe any spectrum of expertise, any industry, any even on the product side there's ways use a visual like this to explain the connectivity of, or the holistic nature of one thing versus another.

Makes sense.

[00:25:38] Aadil Razvi: Makes sense. What stands out to me is the use of what's not there in each of these images. There's like very, a lot of intentionality brought to what are we leaving out on each of these? And that really stands out to me.

[00:25:55] Jack Butcher: Yeah, there's if anybody wants to go down the design rabbit halls, a guy called Dieter Rams and German designer who worked a lot with Braun designing appliances.

One of Jony Ive's biggest inspirations guy designed the first iPhone. And he has a quote that says Good design is what's left. And that's the process that you end up falling in love with as a designer, I think, or any time any type of communicator or product designer or, I would make the argument that this is everybody's job to some degree, or there's there's some satisfaction to be had

whatever your job is in reducing and like refining and removing the superfluous and I'm glad you noticed that.

So just to get a little bit more complicated, this is a few more examples of how to get really tangible with this. Obviously the last example is like conceptual and there's it gives you an idea of what somebody's trying to communicate at a high level versus something like this, which is this is actually another

job I did for the first example I gave these guys that run a three PL company, which is a like excruciatingly boring business, right? It's pallets in warehouses and shipping tariffs, and it's just like tedious to think about, talk about, etc.So and these guys are like, just to get into the nuance of this job quickly, they're in the New Zealand market and they're competing against big names like Kuehne Nagel, DHL, all these massive logistics companies that can compete on brand just because they have a global reputation, but their presence in smaller markets is actually not that this is like fairly poor on the service side.

Yeah, it's fairly poor on the service side because they just contract out based on their name. So they'll just set up like a you know buy some warehouse, rent some warehouse space somewhere, and just hire up 50 people from the newspaper or whatever they do, versus this company that's been around for 25 years knows the market.

Has gone through all of this iteration to get to where they're at. But all they really have to show for it is this word of mouth referral system, which works great, but you have all this IP, you have all this expertise, you have this intimate understanding of what you do, but you're only able to articulate it one conversation at a time.

And that also depends on how good you are at talking about it. And all of these factors come into it. Not to say that you don't have to have the ability to present something like this, but it makes the conversation flow much better and feels like going back to the point I had where you have this thing behind you, you're supported by this visual evidence of your competency.

So I won't go through these slide by slide, but there's some process stuff here. There's some like economic comparisons and then there's like how much more comprehensive, their service offering is than their competitors. And it goes back to a lot of those things we saw five, six slides ago where we're talking about comparisons sequences, processes, things of that nature.

[00:29:39] Aadil Razvi: What stands out to me here, Jack, is, like you said, this is a boring topic on the surface level. This is something that maybe people at first glance is Okay, how could I even my industry doesn't care about this sort of thing. , But everybody cares about communication.

Everybody cares about understanding what is the value that you bring? And without, I can't even read the text on this page, but I already know what is being communicated just at a glance. And that's a really powerful tool. When you know you have a tight window of time to convince someone that you're someone that they should consider doing business with.

[00:30:18] Jack Butcher: Yeah, that's a great point. And I think to be maybe controversial. Most people aren't reading anything, like everybody's sitting in a conference room nodding their heads. Like the level of sophistication it takes to produce something like this is just the proof that you've thought through every aspect of the process.

If you've gone to the trouble of producing something like this By itself, even if you don't read anything, hopefully the feeling you had is the same thing. People interviewing three PLs say you have three meetings back to back, two people come in and just say, Hey, we're really great. This is the, here's a invoice, or here's a estimate versus Hey, it's 12 slides that really

comprehensively explain how we think about this and shows all of our results today, etc. It actually comes from a weird realization I had being a designer is just this portfolio that you carry around with you. So not once did anybody check that I had a design degree.

Nobody cared. Every job interview I went to. The only thing that came up as show us your portfolio, talk us through the work. And that's a really it's almost an unfair advantage that I had no idea I had until much later in my career. I was like, Wow. I even realized most of the work that got me jobs early on was either like self-directed work or like work I did at university, so you could conjure up solutions to things that you haven't even been a problems that you haven't been asked to solve create such a massive advantage for conversations you're having with people that want to solve the problems that you can solve so that this is, again, this abstracted from having that experience too.

[00:32:21] Aadil Razvi: What also jumps out at me is for someone who we've done like a lot of cold emails. And things like that where you need to be able to communicate something in matter. Like the default is, I'm gonna brush this off, this is someone I don't know. But if they click into it for even half a second and they see a visual that communicates the value, I imagine that is likely to convert well.

Is that something that you've seen?

[00:32:44] Jack Butcher: Oh yeah, for sure. So that idea I forget who brought it up earlier on when there's 13 times faster like a visual communicates an idea 13 times faster. What we've definitely seen is on some of our training products, the difference between a product image, which is a mocked up software product and a conceptual representation of the curriculum, the conversion is exponentially higher on that conceptual representation.

I can show an example of that. Let me just do that right now.

[00:33:19] Aadil Razvi: Cool. Yeah, I'll let you.

[00:33:24] Jack Butcher: So we have recently launched this thing.

I know if this is coming up. Yeah. So here's a curriculum that we launched recently called Compound Content which is based on the idea of producing and building this body of work that ranks on search after like finding product market fit on social. And I wrote an email that explained why I was pursuing this strategy underneath this image.

And what this represents is that half life of content on social, like you'll post on social 10 minutes later. It's like it didn't exist, right? You just have to go back to the drawing board and come up with another viral idea.

[00:34:21] Aadil Razvi: Another, it's super clear, Jack. Yeah. You don't even need to explain it, man.

You take half a second. You look at this like it's instant. You already know.

[00:34:33] Jack Butcher: So yeah, that idea, I think there's tears to this too. Like you can have an image that represents the overall arching product philosophy. And then you can go into every lesson of that curriculum, and that's what we've done and have a visual that represents each lesson.

So there's like a, almost a family tree of ideas that can live underneath this. Yeah, I switched them out on everything because of that, there used to be all this one you see here. It's kinda like why this is like a blind spot. I have myself.

This is the idea that I'm convinced is the most valuable way to communicate. And I wasn't even doing it myself until very recently. Wow. Yeah, that's it's all inside the curriculums, but bringing that same idea up to the product level has been super valuable as well.

[00:35:31] Aadil Razvi: And that's a real application that I think a lot of people who are tuning into this right now are gonna be able to take and implement.

It's okay, what about our product pages? What about our landing pages? What about our emails? How can we elevate the way that we're communicating our message using visual medium?

[00:35:49] Jack Butcher: Yeah. You should definitely play with it because it's there's something about, I think those, that style of visual too, where it invites you to figure it out.

When you like people get this, the idea of delivering an epiphany I think is it's underrated. It has to be like difficult enough or they're just a slight time delay between you see that thing and then you get it and you are like the light bulb went off in your head and you are, there's just

something really powerful about that idea. I haven't actually thought how to articulate that properly, but it goes back to the thing I was explaining in conference rooms where you see people's eyes light up and they get what you're trying to say. In the same way that I would listen to someone for a week, the guy that runs this three PL firm, for example, and then go back and just put a slide up and they're just like, Wow, that's gonna save me 500 words an hour or a day, whatever it might be.

And I'm gonna give this to my sales team and they're gonna know what to do. Yeah, it's there's some energy equation in there where if you're able to articulate something like this, you save yourself, your team, blah, blah, blah, a bunch of time.

[00:37:10] Aadil Razvi: I think you said best at the beginning, Jack, you said like being able to explain something that somebody thinks they understand better than they actually understand it.

And that almost that like realization, it's Oh wait, I thought I knew this, but this even elevated that unlocks that magic moment or that epiphany.

[00:37:31] Jack Butcher: Honestly feels like a cheat code. It's really a powerful thing when you get it right. Let me show a couple examples. I know we're getting running up and maybe we wanna do some questions, but Yeah, this is another example of something that I don't think you need to be a designer to really do a compelling job of this is literally like an x-ray of how business functions.

This is an agency I built a few years ago, which essentially just took raw audio from people and turned it into podcast articles, social posts, blah, blah, blah, and in pitching that service, you just show this visual once and be like, would you rather do this yourself or you rather we do it. And just, there's just this instant like, Oh man, I'm not gonna do this myself.

There's so much work that goes into doing a good job. It really communicates your expertise before people are even examining the nuances of the diagram. It's just getting all this stuff that's in your head, out of your head. It also gives you the confidence that nobody can walk in and replace the work you do.

And I would encourage everybody who like works in a business where something like this would be feasible, even if it's not as cut and dry as this is the deliverable at every stage of the process. There's definitely sequences and ways people work together. I did another presentation a few months ago that talked about

the value of intellectual property, which there's some economic study somewhere that says 80% of the value of the S&P 500 is intangible. So whereas a hundred years ago, that equation would be flipped and it would be like buildings, factory, hardware, etc. The inverse is true now where software, IP, human capital, brand, all of that stuff is far more valuable or holds more value.

So there becomes this massive arbitrage opportunity in articulating that stuff. Otherwise, you just have it all locked up. And even take this outside of the marketing context, even like onboarding somebody into the business. New employee, helping people understand how departments work together, how processes work within a business.

There's just so much upside that you can unlock just by basically putting this layer over stuff that's already exists or is already happening. It's just increasing the fidelity of communication between people.

[00:40:18] Aadil Razvi: Yeah I can see at Demand Curve needing to do something like this for our own growth program to show the, here's the hundred different things, the whole process if you're trying to figure this out yourself.

Or, a much more streamlined, pay once and just get it all handed to you.

[00:40:37] Jack Butcher: Yeah, I can see, Yeah, I could definitely see that here's the path of error that most people go through, or the things that a lot of people try versus this proven process that's taken 2000 people from X to Y I won't spend too long on this one.

This is another client of ours who met like wealth managers for people who have massive exits in the entertainment business. So say you sell a show to Netflix you basically hire them and they're like, Okay we'll help you figure out how to manage your money. Like you only talk to one person on our team, you're not

going back and forth with like accountants, lawyers, tax people, blah, blah, blah,. So this is a visual that they use in their onboarding meetings and they say, I know you're overwhelmed right now, but you're gonna have one point of contact. This is the person you're gonna talk to and they're gonna take care of all this stuff.

Super simple, but helps people get it.

I felt my brain, this when I was going from, when I looked at the left one, it felt like chaotic and I look over at the right. Clean and like it's a visceral feeling.

Yeah. I think that's a great call out too, is you can, that's what most businesses are.

It's what most products are. It's what most services are, takes you from. If it's successful at what it does takes you from state A to state B and state B is karma, more confident, more satisfied, more relaxed, synonym for feeling good about something. And there's so many different ways to make that juxtaposition visually.

And the thing I hope I've made clear throughout this process or throughout this conversation is there are ways to do this really tangibly and talk about the process. And there are ways to represent conceptual differences. So like at a super high level, it's like the search social idea, what's the highest level representation of the transition we're trying to, or the difference that we're trying to articulate.

Then you can go down to the nitty gritty and do stuff like this. This one we saw earlier, but this is taking that on the top left here that four or five slide thing. Sorry, that 4 or 5 visual sequence and then blowing that out into a document that articulates the way in which this business works with its clients.

There's another wealth management thing, and then I just wanted to share a couple of examples of which I think we saw all of these at one point, but this is the feedback that we've gotten from people. We've done this for. The difference it makes speaking to clients is significant and obvious. Not only do clients get it straight away, the work will unlock immense value for us moving forward.

And this last one was a actually a crypto hedge fund probably three or four years ago. And actually have to dig that stuff back out. But it was basically explaining blockchain technology to like the most non-technical audience you could possibly imagine. And that was a fun challenge back then.

But again, what I think what a lot of this stuff has in common is you can't take a picture of the product and put it on a product page. Doesn't it's like ethereal, it's IP, it's experience and a huge amount of business and like value that moves around the world is that, and is becoming increasingly more so your ability to use visuals to make what you do tangible can unlock a huge amount of value that should be.

Awesome. Wow, Jack, that was a treat, man. I very selfishly wanted to run this discussion with you and get to pick your brain into this process. So I appreciate you doing that and everybody getting to listen and on that session.

We've got some questions here so folks are asking. Okay. Any digital tools that you would recommend for people to to use when they're trying to map this stuff out?

Yeah. Figma is one I like for the, like it's a browser based vector tool so you can build multiple canvases out in Figma.

If anyone's interested, I could just share what Figma looks like quickly. It will give you some context, but basically you can build. So they just bought it. Yeah, they just paid 20 billion for it. This is what one of the like visualized value documents looks like. So you can jump in here and, draw shapes, annotate, things of that nature, export.

Figma I would recommend and also Keynote where I just did the presentation from that the restrictions you have in software like that are actually empowering a lot of the time too. It's like circle, square, text box. Don't overthink it. Don't be getting into Photoshop and be doing gradients and photos and all that stuff.

If your ambition is to communicate concepts, you can do it in Google Slides. Figma,

[00:46:05] Aadil Razvi: PowerPoint

[00:46:05] Jack Butcher: Keynote. Yeah, exactly.

[00:46:07] Aadil Razvi: Cool. How do you think about doing this for physical products? A lot of the examples you gave were in the services B2B kind of space. How do you think about it for for physical products?

[00:46:19] Jack Butcher: So I think the the last portion of the conversation we were having makes a lot of sense here. So the transformation that the product unlocks, like what is that conceptually? One thing that pops in my mind is like physical what's the word I'm looking for here? Like a supplement or like training equipment or something that this is the most obvious, like tangible example of the physical transformation that a product unlocks.

But there's also like the representation of the technology within the product, whether that's, how it's manufactured, how the materials that went into it, how the team put this thing together. So I think what you can, what are the intangibles that sit behind the product? And as we were saying, like what this is great for is like this filter that you can put intangible things through, and that's how you bring more of the story out.

So even if you're selling t-shirts, like the idea of how that material was selected or what the competitive difference is between the cotton use source or the way you stitch the fabric together, or the longevity of the materials. There's just so much to pull from a product story that isn't something you can take a photograph of, that you can then convert to a diagram or a conceptual illustration.

[00:48:00] Aadil Razvi: It all boils back to communication. We're always communicating. We gotta figure out different ways of doing it more effectively. There is your designers, whether or not we we know it. Jack would love for you to share if there's one thing you wanted the listeners at home to take away from this session.

What would that one thing be?

[00:48:24] Jack Butcher: There's a lot of value locked up in your head. So all of your experience, all of your ideas, all of the problems you've solved and the way you think about certain things like the challenge you have is to take that stuff out of your head and even if you don't think there's anything valuable in there, just getting into a, there is I'm trying to convince you there is, but the process of articulating that will help you see your blind spots.

So this idea of building a portfolio as a designer, I did that in a very tangible way where I was like, Here's this project I worked on. Here's like this poster I designed. But I think this idea of pulling the way you think out of your head in a medium that helps you share those ideas with others is is something you should practice.

And if you're, if that's something that interests you in any way fire up a Google Slides and start thinking about it.

[00:49:25] Aadil Razvi: You have the value locked up in your head. It's all about unlocking it. Thank you very much, Jack. This was mind blowing session. I think everybody got a ton of value. Give some energy in the chat.

I just wanna give you the opportunity, Jack, let the people know what you've got going on in your life and how they can get in touch.

Yeah. So you can see pretty much everything on Twitter. So I'm @jackbutcher, @visualizevalue, and then we have some training programs on visualizevalue.com.

One is a design product. One is a meta productization product. So how I took my knowledge as a designer and turned that into a training program. And then the most recent one, which I reference is compound content, which is about this ability to produce assets that compound over time. And, found by

google searches reverse engineering demand based on what people are searching for, which is very different than the social game, which is where I've been playing for the last three years.

Awesome. I'm also gonna shout out your merch Jack. I've got a ton of it. This is a NFT T-shirt right here.

A one of 100. You cannot buy this in stores, ladies and gentlemen. We also have this GM mug that changes color when you fill it with with hot coffee. So definitely check out Jack's stuff. I'm a huge fan of you, man. Thank you so much. If you click on the lead stage button, I will join you backstage in just a minute.

[00:51:00] Jack Butcher: Thank you everyone. I appreciate you listening.

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