How to Handle Adversity, Build Confidence, and Reinvent Yourself with Pete Briscoe

Show Notes

Today on the show we are sitting down with preaching and business coach, Pete Briscoe to talk about how to handle adversity, build confidence, and grow as a leader.

Pete is the former senior pastor of Bent Tree Bible Fellowship for During his time at Bent Tree, the church grew from 200 people to over 5,000. Pete has preached over 4,000 times and understands what it takes to prepare each week and the need to be at the top of your game.

Since leaving Bent Tree, Pete has started his own coaching business for leaders to help eliminate blindspots, focus on self-care, and make an impact with their work.

In this week’s episode we’re talking about:

Why Self-care should be the number one priority to grow as a leader
Where Pete thinks Church and business are headed in the next 5 years
At what point Pete felt called into ministry
And how Pete runs his coaching business, traveling across the U.S. in an RV

Connect with Pete Briscoe

Connect with us

If you’re a local business owner who wants to generate more qualified appointments online we created a free training to show you our proven three step process. Watch the training

Transcript

Aaron [00:00:00] Hey guys! Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Natives. We're talking with Pete Briscoe and his new venture with Coaching. We're talking about why self care should be the number one priority for you as a leader to continue to grow. Where Pete thinks the church and business are headed in the next five years. And how Pete started and runs his online coaching business through an RV.

Narrator [00:00:21] This is the Marketing Natives providing actual ways to grow, improve and succeed in your business.

Narrator [00:00:29] And now your host Christian and Aaron.

Aaron [00:00:38] All right, Pete, thank you so much for jumping on to this episode of the Marketing Natives. Super excited to have you on.

Pete [00:00:45] Hey Aaron! It's my joy. This is really something I've been looking forward to. Thanks for inviting me.

Aaron [00:00:50] Absolutely. So for those who don't know who is Pete Briscoe, how would you describe him?

Pete [00:00:58] Oh, you're asking me to describe me?

Aaron [00:01:00] Yeah. For yourself.

Pete [00:01:03] You know what I am. I'm a regular guy who found himself in extraordinary opportunities. And I found myself rubbing shoulders with amazing people. And I'm a learner and I'm a sponge. And so as I got to spend time with these incredible people, I just learned and grew and got to lead a church for about twenty nine years. And then the process got to serve and work with just some remarkable people. So I'm kind of a sum total of the people that I've met. And it's been quite a journey.

Aaron [00:01:47] See, and if you would have asked us to do some kind of intro, I don't think we would have done nearly the justice. Both amazing and humbly awesome.

Aaron [00:02:00] So as you've mentioned, you're a pastor in church for twenty nine years. But like before you got into that industry, as a kid, is that something that you've always wanted to do, is to jump in to that realm or that tight style of work was be around those types of people?

Pete [00:02:17] Yeah. No. So I grew up in a pastor's home by my parents led a church and outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for about 30 years. And the church grew exponentially in the years that I was in the home. It went from about 300 people there, about 6,000 people in about four or five years. So our dinner conversations almost every night where my dad coming in and saying, well, these are the three or four issues we're dealing with to try to figure out how to manage this growth. Any ideas? And he would throw stuff out at the table and we would just talk about problem solving. And, you know, I'm a little 9, 10 year old kid jumping into these conversations. But, so and as I was growing up, people would tend to say, Wow! Pete, you're probably going to do this someday. And I just wanted to be a pro basketball player. And then I wanted to be a sportscaster. That was my dream. And then I took a trip with a basketball team to the Philippines. And it's kind of a long story. I won't go through the whole thing. But we would kind of play the first half and then we would do a presentation at halftime and then play the second half. And then we would beat them pretty well. So the people in town would really want to listen to us. And we would always try to connect with the local pastor that was there. It would lend him some credibility in the eyes of the people. And some of these towns were pretty tough. And there was one guy that had pastored a church in this town for about five years, and he had like four people in his church, one of whom was the little boy with leprosy in the town that no one would go and go close to. And just my heart really went out to this guy. Right? And so we asked him to come in and introduce us and show the gospel at halftime. And he said, I'm not going to do that. We're like, why? And he said, because if I go out there with you guys, one of you will get hurt because every time I walk down the streets, they throw rocks at me, they throw batteries at me. And I don't want you to get hurt. And I just said, I really think they won't throw things with us. So let's take the risk. And so halftime came. We sang a song, "Tagalog", their language. And then this little guy walked out to present the gospel and everyone started doing and hissing and whistling. And we just talked for about five minutes. Couldn't hear a word he said. And then he walked off and I just felt so sad for him and. After halftime, I'm lacing up my shoes and I see his little Filipino feet walking towards me and I thought, what am I going to say to this guy? I looked at him and he was smiling from ear to ear. And I'm like, What are you smiling for? You just got booed out of the place, right? And he said, you know, I've been praying for five years for a chance to share the gospel with my hometown. And tonight was the night. That's all that matters. And I just watched him loving the people around him and was laying on my little bamboo mat in my hut that night. And I thought, you know, if that's what it means to be a pastor, that's what I want to do. I just want to be with people. I want to love people. I want to help people. And that sounds like a good way to do it to me. So, yeah, it was weird because my dad pastored this huge mega church and I was never really drawn to that. And then I was really drawn to the pastoring world when I saw and a guy that pastored four or five people.

Pete [00:05:42] And so that was always my heart was just to help people and love people.

Christian [00:05:47] And still doing that technically.

Aaron [00:05:49] Right.

Christian [00:05:50] Tell us about your new endeavor.

Pete [00:05:55] My new endeavor.

Pete [00:05:56] So, yes, after after 34 years actually of church ministry, which we absolutely loved, it was just a joy. We came to the end of our time and we thought we really need to do something different. And there are a lot of reasons around that. But as we thought about what we wanted to do and what we needed to do, we just didn't really know at that time. We knew we wanted to serve people and love people, but we didn't know what that was going to look like. And so we decided to breathe a little bit. And so the crazy part of our story is we didn't know where we wanted to move and we felt like it would be healthy for the church, for us to just to leave town and get out of the way so that the church could not have us around. And so, we thought where should we go? And we didn't know. So we sold our house and we bought an RV and literally live in a 40 foot motorhome now with my wife Libby. And we drive around the country and we went to different national parks and we would just park outside and go into the park and hike and just catch our breath. And it was just so good for us to get some time like that. And then they also gave us time to dream about what we're going to do next. And so what my wife, Libby and I are both doing now is we're doing coaching. We're coming alongside people, helping them move from this point in their life to where they want to go in the future. Right? So, counsel is kind of look backwards and try to help you sort through struggles, trauma, things that were hard for you to get you launched into the future. Coaches kind of figure out where you are now and help you to get going into the future. And so that's what I do. I do it in two different ways. I do it with pastors and then I do it with executives and business owners. The common denominator are people who are point leaders in fairly large organizations. It can be lonely at the top, right? Yes. And so it's a lot of the same struggles, really. The pastors of large churches have and pastors of organizations have or leaders of organizations have too. So I'm doing two things with those two groups. I'm doing communications training. So, that's kind of the one thing I do. I've been a professional talker for 35 years. So I help people learn how to talk better in front of people. And that's just a blast. I just really enjoy doing that with pastors. Obviously, it's centered around sermon coaching, help them improve their preaching. But with executives, you know, a lot of executives, the last speech class they took was back in seventh grade or whatever. And every once in a while, they got to stand in front of their team and they've got to stand in front of the stockholders or whatever. And they got to talk. And for some of them, it's not a very natural thing. So I want to be available to help with that. But then more importantly, is really talking about their inner worlds. A lot of leaders neglect self care on the mistaken notion that if they work 24/7, the company is going to be stronger. The fact of the matter is, a healthy leader is much better for an organization than an unhealthy one. Someone told me years ago, there was a time when I was working too many hours when our church was growing exponentially and I was just working too much. And one of my my leaders pulled me aside one day and said, the biggest gift you can give to Bantry. That was the name of our church. The biggest gift you can give to Bantry is a healthy Pete. And you need to figure out how to get healthy. And so, that's a message that I share with business leaders and executives. It's like, you know, the biggest gift you can give to this organization is a healthy you. And oh, by the way, wonderful fringe benefit. Your life gets better too. When you start to take care of yourself and you start to do those things. So it's a really long answer to a really short question. But I'm trying to dive into what's really going on inside and how I can help men and women get their arms around what it looks like to actually live healthy in a healthy way.

Aaron [00:10:17] When you're teaching people now or you're coaching people now rather, you have this, like you've mentioned, this film room session and you kind of equate that to like an athlete. Can you explain a little bit more about what this film session is? Because I feel like you touched on it's like a little taste on the website, but maybe you can expand a little bit on what actually is detail or entailed with that.

Pete [00:10:39] Yeah, thanks Aaron. And it's. Yeah, so I was a college athlete. I played basketball in college. I mean, full disclosure, I sat on the bench and watched my teammates play basketball in college.

Pete [00:10:54] But I was a very valuable member of the bench. Anyway. I loved the game. And I just loved to play hard. And I loved the coaching aspect of it.

Pete [00:11:06] I loved to watch coaches draw the most out of people. And then we had three kids. Our daughter played volleyball and basketball at Hebron High School and our two sons both played basketball and football at Hebron. And then our oldest son played college football.

Pete [00:11:24] And so it was really fun talking to the boys after their football games. And they would go in early on Saturday morning and sit down with their coach and the defensive coordinator and the defensive end coach would sit down with Cameron and go through every play that he had the night before. And mostly, pointing out areas for improvement, right? I mean, some of it was encouragements like Wow! You did that really well but that's kind of what we expect of you. These things we need to clean up. And it was just remarkable watching the kids improve over time because of that in-depth personalized coaching. And then, you know, when I was in seminary, one of the most helpful classes I had was called a preaching lab, and it was really fun because you would stand up in front of about six or seven other students and they had evaluation forms and they were all sitting there just evaluating you, which, you know, that's not too unnatural right?

Pete [00:12:20] And then the professor is sitting at back with a video camera and he's videoing the whole thing. And then you sit down for a video session with him. And that was really intense. It was hard to watch yourself. I don't know if you guys ever listen to your podcast after you're done.

Christian [00:12:38] Yeah. We did and regret it.

Pete [00:12:39] It's hard right? It's like man I felt so much cooler in my head.

Aaron [00:12:47] Yes.

Pete [00:12:47] And then when you're you know, when you're preaching, you're trying to convey some deep truth that matters to you. And so you're passionate about it and you can pick up bad habits and stuff. And so that was so helpful to me. Then I thought, I'm going to start doing this with young leaders that I'm trying to develop. So over the year at Bantry, we had a teaching team, we had a lot of teachers on our staff. And just started doing that with them where I would sit down with a video of their message. I would go through it first and come up with a bunch of input. And then I would sit down with them and forced them to watch it with me and I would point things out and then give them two or three things to improve on. And then we would do it again the next time they taught. And over time, you just you just get better when, you know, if you're evaluating yourself. Practice isn't enough. You have to practice and then evaluate your practice. Right? If you're just practicing and you never evaluating it, you're not really going to get better. But if you're evaluating it and then you have someone who knows a little bit more than you evaluating it, you're going to really learn a lot. So that's what I do. Right now, I'm doing it all with pastors that, you know, they send me a link of their sermon and I go through it and then we hop on Zoom and we throw it up on the screen and we watch it together. And then they practice those things and we do, you know, minimally we do six sessions like that and over six sessions I'll give them between 15 and 18 specific things in total to change and to improve. And you know, after six sessions they're just better because there's things that there's things in communications that you should just never, never, never, never, never do. There are common mistakes that people do all the time.

Pete [00:14:42] And then there's simple strategies, too, that if you can employ some of these simple strategies, you can just improve your communication exponentially. And so I try to tackle both of those things. If I see things that are hurting them, I'll point them out. I'll give them alternatives, alternative ways to do that. And if. For example, if their structure is muddy, it's not clear. It's not it's not easy to follow where they're going. That's just really easily correctable. There's simple structures that you can employ that just make the speech or the sermon or the message much more effective. So it's a lot of fun. I just, we laugh a lot and we just have a great time.

Aaron [00:15:25] So if you don't mind sharing. I mean, I'm curious now because I'm thinking of myself just auditing. And I'm sure that people listening to obviously our audience's, business owners, leaders. What are the common mistakes that you see? Like you said, there's a couple of common ones that are like, you know, a common thread. What would you say those are? And hopefully we're not doing them now but i was just like, no.

Pete [00:15:51] Yeah. man, In one of my trainings that I just worked with a whole teaching team in McKinney, Texas, just this last week from a church. And one of the sessions I did with them or I call them the killer bees. They're just I think I'm 13 things in there that you just never, never do. So I'll just throw a couple of mouth at you that would apply across the board. One of them is that most people who are not used to speaking publicly struggle, both starting and stopping. And if you ever watch someone who is kind of thrust into giving a speech, it like takes them forever to get started. And then a lot of times they just don't know to end and so they just start looping at the end and everyone in the room is just like, oh, please, just stop.

Pete [00:16:40] Right? And so they struggled starting and struggled stopping.

Pete [00:16:45] And so, you know, one of the things that I teach my clients is that experts tell you that when you have an audience and this is pretty old data now. But when you have an audience, you have 18 seconds to grab their attention. If you don't have their attention in 18 seconds, you're already losing peopl, right? And I would think nowadays it's less than 18 'cause I mean, how long is a TikTok? You know what, eight seconds or whatever? I mean things nowadays, they're just shorter, right? Than if they get gone a whole lot longer than that. We just click onto the next video. We go to the next thing. It's our attention spans have shrunk exponentially in the last 15, 20 years as media has become so mainstream. And so I tell my clients, you know, 18 seconds is really pushing it. If you haven't grabbed their attention in 8 to 10 seconds, they're already starting to look at their phone or they're thinking about what they're gonna do after the speech. And so, one of the things I really drive home is the very first sentence you say when you start will probably determine whether people listen to you or not. And so you have to really think about that. So, for example, for you guys are just starting your podcasts. You know, if you're thinking that I've got ten to twelve seconds to grab their attention, you would probably strategize how to start it really carefully. Probably maybe potentially even write out your first sentence and practice it a couple of times and just launch in so that you're grabbing people and heading off. And then, you know, as they are trying to end, one of the things I'll use as I'll just talk about the analogy of an airplane, that speech is like a plane ride. And so, you know, when you're taken off on an airplane, you don't just go straight up, you know, just launch in. You grab their attention. But then you carry them along and then you launch into your speech and you take some time . I mean, there's lots of different ways to do it. The most effective way to do it is to create tension. And it's not easy to create tension, but you want them squirming in their seats before you get to the point that you're trying to get across to them. And so this is all part of the introduction. It's all part of what we learn about. But then as you're landing the plane. You don't just boom! You know, you just don't go straight down, which is what a lot of people look at. They don't know how to stop. So they just say, OK, I'm done. And they walk off and it's like, you've got to land. You've got to come in for a landing, right? And you've got to do it so that people can feel closure with the message. And there's specific things that you want to accomplish at the very end of your speech that help people remember what you want them to really remember.

Pete [00:19:37] So it's all purposeful.

Christian [00:19:38] We're going to restart the beginning of this podcast.

Aaron [00:19:41] Well, I guess the good thing is we do record the beginning of the podcast at the end.

Aaron [00:19:47] But this isn't really a question, but it's interesting to see or to talk to you on this side of it, because I remember the most vivid series or message that it's ever happened in my life was actually from you. And I remember the series on Daniel and it was like, I don't know five or eight week series or whatever, but I remember every single week. And you did exactly that. Like you would always start with a story to relate to us. And I would just like drawn in and as you mentioned, like, I was just, I don't know, like at the edge of my seat or what's going to happen. Like, well, we're going to talk about this next week. And so it just kind of like left us wanting more. But yeah, you always introduce it with some kind of story to, like, draw us in and then take us to how it relates. So it's not really a question, but it's just interesting to hear this from the other side of it now to know what was going on in your head things.

Christian [00:20:41] The technical side of thigns.

Aaron [00:20:41] Yeah.

Pete [00:20:41] Yes, I think.

Aaron [00:20:42] Go ahead.

Pete [00:20:44] I think a lot of times when you hear a great speech. It just it sounds natural. And the person who's giving the great speech is usually extraordinarily well-prepared, right? And so it just flows. And a lot of times some people just have two or three great speeches that they just do over and over. And so they're really practiced on it. And it seems so natural that it's like, oh, man, it looks so easy. It looks easy to do that. And the fact of the matter is, it's really not easy to do that. And there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes to create the illusion that this is just a natural conversation that we're having together. But what's cool is a lot of it's just really easy to get your arms around what you know about it. And for example, you guys will probably. If you're smart, you'll probably which I know you are. You'll probably have a conversation about, OK, how do we want to start our podcast so that we're really grabbing people's attention upfront. And if you wanted to continue the conversation, that would be how can we create tension like so that people are literally as they start to listen to your podcast, they're like, man, I can't wait to hear the answer of this. I got to hear the answer to this. Then you guys are marketers. You know what it means to create a need or felt need, right? And that's kind of what you're doing in speeches to as you're helping people say, wow, that's I really need to know the answer to this. If you're not creating that tension, speeches tend to come across pretty flat.

Aaron [00:22:23] Mm hmm. Yeah. Such a great platform. Like we could have a whole like I gave you the prelude, the beginning this that hey, we're gonna have you come back on later, so we'll have to have a whole conversation specifically around that.

Pete [00:22:37] Okay.

Aaron [00:22:37] So with what you're doing now, more so, how long have you been doing it?

Aaron [00:22:46] Like how long usually you've been in this profession for thirty five years and now you're just honing in on the coaching side specifically. Like how long is it going? And then like what have you enjoyed most about the coaching side of things?

Aaron [00:23:02] Anything that surprised you?

Pete [00:23:05] So, the how long have you been doing it question.

Pete [00:23:09] You're very insightful the way you asked it, because, I mean, the short answer is I've been doing this for 35 years. Because especially Bantry, Bantry is full of just incredibly gifted, sharp people. Many, a lot of business owners, a lot of executives. And I got to walk with them through life over the last 30 years. And so a lot of the stuff I'm doing now with clients I just did with my parishioners over the years. But the anything surprised me?

Pete [00:23:46] I think as I've started to work with clients, I think not much has surprised me. I think. So what I really trying to do is a I have conversations with with these folks and I talk to them about the fact that there's kind of two aspects to a fulfilling life. And as I'm talking about this, I'm not necessarily talking about spiritual. It's talking about. What does a good life look like if I wanted to do something with my life that was fulfilling, what would that look like?

Pete [00:24:20] And rich and and one is the science of achievement. And the other is the art of fulfillment. And they're two different things. So the science of achievement. It's science because there's just been a lot of studies done on how to be successful at something. And it's not hard to get input. To get training on the specifics of building a business, for example, or running a business or whatever is best practices. You can learn the best practices. You can try to employ the best practices. If you invest a ton of energy and probably the life savings into your company, if you really are diligent, you can probably figure out ways to make and it's all much of it is science, right? It's figuring out the right way to do things or the wrong way to do things and avoiding those. And so a lot of the people that I work with, they figured out the science of achievement years ago. I mean, they're very successful. They know what they're doing. The art of fulfillment, however, is a different thing. And the reason they struggle with that many times is because they believed the lie that fulfillment comes from achievement. So it's like if I just achieve a certain level, a certain size of a company, a certain bottom line, my bank account, if I achieve X, then fulfillment will all of a sudden show up in my home, right? Which, of course, it doesn't work that way at all. Achievement can bring momentary joy and fulfillment, but it doesn't bring lasting fulfillment. And all you have to do is look at people that have made it and see how driven they are to make it again, to realize that it doesn't bring lasting fulfillment, right? And so what does bring lasting fulfillment? And I think I'm not really surprised by this. But one of the things that really strikes me often in working with really successful people is, how no one ever taught them the art of fulfillment side of life. And it's art because it's not like science. It's not systems and processes. It's not best practices. It's art, like we're all different individuals. And so the way that I'm going to experience a fulfilling life is going to look different than the way you experience official life. And obviously, I think the spiritual aspect is a huge piece of that. But there's a lot of other aspects, too, that really aren't rocket science. And if you are willing to invest. Energy and focus and time in some of those areas. You can start to experience fulfillment regardless of whether you're achieving to the level that you hoped or not. And so I think the surprise or the thing that strikes me is just how many really extraordinarily successful people there are that don't know how to experience a fulfilling life because they've been so good at the achievement side.

Pete [00:27:30] I would have just assumed that they would be good at the other side too. But it just doesn't seem to work that way. And a lot of the things that you really need to invest in to experience fulfillment in life, they don't have time for. Because so much of their time and energy is going into the achievement side.

Christian [00:27:50] I can definitely look or see myself as that. Whatever you just describe, you know, looking at achievement and not fulfillment. And that's, you know, we also have business coaches and that's some of the things that they speak directly to us, that says as you know, about those things, about. I think you touched earlier about, you know, self care and the importance of for me. For example, I work in an office almost all day, sitting down and have no time to really get out of here, right? And we sort of implemented just this for 15 minutes every day around 3:00. I get up and I walk the trail and I just call it my reflection walk. Right? And it does wonders, like in my head, I'm like, no, I need to work, work, work, work, work. Right. And I don't have time for anything else, not anything else to fulfill me. Right. I just need to get that achievement. But that little time of reflection brings hours and hours of of fulfillment and even more achievement. Right? To my business and my personal life. So it's taken those little moments of breaks and self reflection that actually brings out the most output out of you. Those moments of not doing much. Right? Doesn't feel like you're achieving much, but you really are.

Pete [00:29:14] So. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Christian. Yeah. We call it white space. And if if you don't have any white space, so you look at a book, a page in a book and if it's an academic book, there's not a whole lot of white space. Right. They push the margins out to the edges. Figured that they get the print this far out. There's less space in between the lines. They go higher and low. I mean, it's just all copy very little white space. And then you look at a children's book. A lot of white space in a children's book. Right? And what authors and publishers know that if you have white space on the page, it leaves more room for imagination. And it's a beautiful metaphor, really, for white space in life. If you have no white space and life, if you have no downtime, where you're not producing something or accomplishing something. It's basically like a page with copy all the way to the edges. And over time, there's just no room for creativity. There's no room for ideas. It wouldn't shock me at all Christian, if some of your best ideas in the next year happen on your little walk around the trail because you'll have been taking your brain out of work, work, work mode and giving it a little white space. And that's where creativity happens. But it's also where health happens. Right? You know, one of the things I point out to people is, you know, God took a day off. I mean, if God takes a day off, you could probably take one too liek Sunday. Which is the seventh day, I mean, He didn't have to take it. It's not like God was tired and needed to take a day off. It's like he knew it was healthy to stop working and to do other things.

Pete [00:30:57] And and so I know you don't want to push that metaphor too far, but it's really basically taken some time off is is creating white space so that you can be healthy so that you can pour into your relationships. And so you can be more creative. And then you just bring much more to your company because you're healthier. Then you got more energy, you got more focus. You know, the the poor folks who are working 18 hour days and barely getting any sleep, you know, four or five months into that routine, they're just not bringing much to the game. They're working really hard, but they're not helping much.

Aaron [00:31:48] Pete is a visionary for a lot of different things, but I want to talk about like the future of what you see for business leaders and pastors here in a second.

[00:31:59] But before we jump to that, I want to take a time here to talk about our middle section, which is the tip for tip section. And for those who are first time listeners or been listening for a while, you may know when we have a guest, we like to ask them or have them ask a marketing question if they have one. And we try to answer it on the spot. But it's tip fot tip and if you're familiar with us, we used to do this as a video show only on Facebook, but now we are expanding it to the podcasts and we'll break it up that way, too. But just want to leave it over to you, Pete. If you had any a marketing question, could be several questions. Doesn't matter. But just a marketing question that you have in your business that we could help you out with.

Pete [00:32:40] Yes.

Pete [00:32:41] Thanks for the opportunity. I mean, I was a pastor for 25 years and now I've started my own company.

Pete [00:32:47] And so I, I literally had to read a book on accounting because I've always had a team to do my accounting for me. Right. So, everything is brand new for me. Sales, the marketing side. It's all brand new.

Pete [00:33:02] And so, yeah, my my question would be, when you're starting from scratch, what would be what would be the best way to start? Would it be to buy ads on Facebook? Would it be to use your social media? Would it be to get out and and get to physical settings where there's people that you might want to be introduced to? But, what would, if you guys were sitting down with a client and they were just getting their business started and they said, I can only afford to do one piece of marketing to get launched. Where would you guys point him or her?

Aaron [00:33:38] Very good question. And honestly, the fact that you answered. You kind of gave your own answer in there, which is like our best piece of advice is to tell people, don't try to be everywhere or like most people tell you, to be on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and whatever else. And LinkedIn. And our approach to tell people is just dominate one thing and move on to the next. Don't worry about trying to be everywhere, because if you try to be everywhere, you'll be mediocre more than likely. And as you mentioned, you're trying to figure out accounting. You're trying to figure out your processes and you're trying to work with clients. And then you're also trying to figure out social media, which could also be a full time job. So I would say, find a platform that you know your audience is on and then find out one way to communicate with them, whether that's through video, whether that's to tag or lack of written word like copy, whether that's the podcast. However it is and create content around that for you to be successful online through social media, you have to become a local authority. I think what's good about you is you. You have so much experience. You already have built that authority. Now people just need to know about you. And then you didn't have a way to communicate or like receive your information. So focus on one thing. I think you're a very good writer. So I don't maybe that's the way you go. I don't know. Or if you'd like video, but I don't see that a right or wrong answer. But just focus on one of those. I don't know if you anything to add to that Christian?

Christian [00:35:04] Now, just kind of got me remind of a tweet not too long ago where it's very simple. I think you had two dozen a semicolon and had you build a product. Then you find the people that want to buy their product. In 2020, it's more of a need to build an audience. And then you can sell them a product or service. Right. So I think even the way the you build a communique should be more towards you're just building a community. Right. You're building a community of pastors or business owners. Then, you can worry about selling to them, selling them services, sell the product, etc.. But nowadays, Yeah, building a business is more of you need to build this community first and then transition into, OK, how can I actually help this community.

Pete [00:35:53] That's awesome. Thanks, guys. Very helpful. I'm taking notes.

Christian [00:35:56] Awesome!

Aaron [00:35:56] All right.

Aaron [00:36:02] I was going to say and I look forward to seeing posts on on Facebook and updates and stuff from you. So it's very it's cool to see that. So I definitely know that you are like, I think you had a post on Facebook as it was. I would normally not read this, but as you said, you have like 18 seconds or so to catch somebody's attention. I think the same thing for the written word. I'll read like three or four lines. And if that doesn't intrigued me, then I keep that. I don't keep going. So, yeah, there's definitely a gift with the writing side, whether you choose that one or you choose video or podcasts. I don't know. But I feel like you could start a podcast and just dominate that because blogs just give me an idea. There's 17 or 18 million blogs and there's a row. Yeah. Podcasts, though. There's only like seven or eight hundred thousand in the world. And of those seven or eight hundred thousand, most of them don't make past like ten episodes. So it's an uncharted territory. It's like the lot with less. So maybe you go that route.

Aaron [00:37:00] I don't know.

Christian [00:37:00] You can alwasys convert podcast episodes into written.

Aaron [00:37:04] Yeah you dictated that way too.

Pete [00:37:08] Awesome. Thanks, guys.

Aaron [00:37:09] Absolutely great.

Aaron [00:37:18] So we mentioned before it jumps to this tip for tip section. I always like to see I don't want to jump too far ahead because I think the world changes so quickly. But where do you see the church with the pastoral industry or the business leaders? Like what do you see? What kind of shifts potentially are happening in the next five years? And where do you see yourself, like, uniquely suited to fit and help them?

Pete [00:37:46] It's interesting, Aaron, because those are two very different worlds, right? So what a pastor is dealing with right now and what a business leader is dealing with right now are two very different things. There are there are some commonalities.

Pete [00:38:03] Certainly there is financial instability, which both kind of leader is dealing with right now. But I think on the church side, I think what a lot of pastors are struggling with. And pastors are really struggling right now. I was with three of my pastor friends from Dallas recently, and one of them had just been involved in kind of a roundtable conversation with some sme leaders. And someone shared the statistic that over 51% of pastors in the last number of months, maybe six months, have had suicidal ideations. Well, I mean, that's over half thinking. I don't if I can keep doing this. That's a staggering statistic. I probably should have been careful about throwing that out on your podcast, because I can't tell you where it came from that. But I I've heard enough anecdotal conversations too, recently about pastors struggling that I know it's just really hard.

Pete [00:39:04] And if you think about it makes sense there people-people and also they're talking to a camera every Sunday. Instead of real people. And people in their body are struggling, but they can't really ministered to them. And then people are online, but they're not really there at the church. So they don't know how many people are still in the church. And I mean, it's a time of true upheaval. But I think it's also. And you didn't ask me this so I don't know if I'm answering your question or not, but it's such a time of upheaval for the church. Because the way we've always done things just they're not really working anymore. And so businesses have to tackle this, too, right. You know, Blockbuster, you know, heard about this thing called Netflix. And they didn't. They didn't really make the adjustment pretty quickly. Right. And it cost them. And so things are always changing that. Historically, the church is kind of breezed through those things because it had these traditions that were that felt timeless. And but even a lot of those things now in our culture, they're just not really valued anymore. And so they had a pastor ask me just last week, you know, it does the church even survive CoVid? Which, It's hard to even imagine that we're asking that question. And my answer would probably be something along the lines of I'm not sure the churches we've known it will survive CoVid. I think the churches just can look very different on the other side of CoVid. And then you would say, well, what's it going to look like? And I'll tell you I have no idea. I think there's going to be some incredible innovation. I think there's going to be moving back towards smaller context as opposed to big, huge auditoriums. And it is going to be some trends that come out of this that actually are really good for the church. But it's going to stretch pastors. It's going to stretch them really thin because they're going to be having to do things that they've never done before. I mean, CoVid, a number of churches, had never live streamed their services before until COVID and aso they're not allowed to meet. And so these poor pastors are they're literally trying to learn all this I.T. stuff on the run with no one there to help them. I mean, it's that. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for the innovations that are going to have to happen. So I think on the business front, I think, you know, my focus with business leaders is on their inner world and on who they are as people, as human beings. I don't pretend to say I'm going to come in and help your business go to the next level. That's not my role. They know more about business than I do. But my role is really to do a deep dive into their soul, into their heart, into their what they're feeling, into their relationships. And just talk about how can we be more healthy as we're leading our organization? And so because of CoVid and a lot of the other tensions, I mean, the political tensions are just escalating. And, you know, companies are having to make decisions all the time. And so the stress level is just going up and up and up and up and up. And what we tend to do when the stress goes up, if we struggle with fear at all, is the anxiety starts to take over. And we take much worse care of ourself. We we just our mode of operation is to work harder, to work more hours. And so we just work more hours and more hours and more hours, which is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing.

Pete [00:42:48] We need to be taking care of herself more now than ever. And so, you know what can I offer? I mean, I simply come alongside people and we do a deep dive and then I'm there for them on phone calls as they're grappling with the stuff that very few humans really know what to do with. I mean, I don't know the answer,you don't know the answer.

Pete [00:43:11] Are there even any answers? I don't know if there are answers to some of this stuff. Right?

Pete [00:43:15] So how do we as leaders navigate unanswerable conundrums in a healthy way without it, without snapping at our wives and without neglecting our kids and all those types of things? And that's what I'm trying to help people do.

Christian [00:43:31] That's very, very powerful. What would be, I guess, looking into the future for your own business? What do I get? What are you most excited about or what do you think you're heading with your business? Do you want to, like, grow it like crazy?

Christian [00:43:46] You want to try to keep it small and traveling? Where do you see yourself?

Pete [00:43:50] That's a great question, Christian.

Pete [00:43:57] I really love living in an RV. It's really cool having wheels at your house, you know.

Pete [00:44:03] I mean, we were literally chasing 72 degrees and and basically living outside national parks all the time. Right. So it's just beautiful that the downside is there's a lack of community. So we you know, we can start to feel a little lonely when there's beautiful places. But it's just the two of us and our friends aren't there. So and so I think we're going to land somewhere at some point. Our hope is that as we drive around, we'll find a place and just go, oh, this is it. Let's put our roots down here. But because we don't know how long that'll take. We are both really building our businesses so we can do them from the road. And so my goal, because basically what I'm selling is my time and my experience and expertise. I'm not looking to build this huge, massive organization, I think on the on the preaching coaching side. My hope would be long term to bring on some other coaches, because they're just a huge need.

Pete [00:45:08] I'm full on my preaching coaching docket already.

Pete [00:45:12] And literally all I did was post that one Facebook post that you read Aaron. And got my Web page out there. And I'm hopeful and I just don't have margin for any more at this point. So one of the things I'm going to do with that is I'm going to launch a program of some kind. The other thing. I mean, some of the people that I've done contact calls with from my Christian coaching in one week, I had a call with a guy in England, a guy in India and a guy in France. And and none of those three guys could afford my services. And so I'm like, how do I help guys like this that I know I could help.

Pete [00:45:56] But I just you know, I've got a severely delimit because my business is me working one on one with people. I've got to just to delimit how many clients I can have. And so scaling is gonna be a challenge for me. I've got to figure out what that looks like. But on the preaching side, I'm going to start a course that people can get into for much less than my one to one coaching cost and will keep it to a group of ten or fifteen, and there'll be interaction and coaching in that format. And that's a way for me to be able to serve more people and also to serve people that couldn't necessarily afford one on one coaching services. And so I'm excited about that. And the executive and business side, I'm really thinking that's just going to be one on one coaching. And I don't know how else to help people in those types of positions on the kind of stuff we're talking about. It's just it just requires in-depth one on one conversations. And but I just love that. I mean, I, I just love being around people like that. They challenge me and I learn so much every time I'm with them. And.

Pete [00:47:06] And so, yeah, I'm.

Pete [00:47:09] You know, the question you asked earlier, Aaron, is how long you been doing this in one respect. I've been doing it for 35 years. But, you know, I launched my business about three months ago. So as far as just the business is concerned, it's very young and I've got so much to learn.

Pete [00:47:24] And one of the biggest things I got to learn is how to scale this thing in such a way when what I'm selling is buy time. And that's just a challenge. I don't I'm just gonna have to learn from people that were done consulting for years on how they go about doing that.

Pete [00:47:39] I haven't even started to do that processing yet.

Christian [00:47:42] On the community and course aspect of things. I recently stumbled on Circle.so. So if you search on circle.so, it's a white label sort of community platform where, you know, people can, you know, pay and you can have different sections. It's kind of like a Facebook group. But outside of Facebook, you have your own sort of Website and you can, you know, label it however you want. You can have your videos laid out in their. Section where if people can ask questions and different things like that. Just a resource. A found it the other day.

Pete [00:48:23] Thank you.

Christian [00:48:24] Just kind of looking for stuff.

Pete [00:48:25] So I'll definitely check that out. Thanks.

Aaron [00:48:30] All right. I want to transition here to some some rapid fire, more fun questions on. And because I want to be respectful of your time, Pete, but also want to get in some fun questions outside of the business realm, if you're ready.

Pete [00:48:44] Absolutely. Let's go. Okay.

Aaron [00:48:47] What purchase of one hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months or in recent memory?

Pete [00:48:57] One of the awesome things about living in 350 square feet? Is you stop buying stuff like we just don't have any room for anything.

Pete [00:49:07] Oh, that's a hard question. 100 bucks or less.

Pete [00:49:12] Oh, my goodness. You know what?

Pete [00:49:18] I recently bought a yellow legal pad because I used to do all my white space thinking on legal pads and I've tried to transition to an iPad and electronic and typing just that. It wasn't working for me. So I bought and my creativity went off work. So I'm going to say yellow legal pad.

Aaron [00:49:37] Nice. Okay. That definitely counts.

Christian [00:49:45] That counts. Well, we're just doing the bold ones.

Aaron [00:49:48] Yeah, let's do, oooh no! Let's do, this one's very specific.

Aaron [00:49:52] To Pete can go with that one. Nice.

Christian [00:49:55] What is life like in a class A- RV? And how long have you been doing this?

Pete [00:50:02] So we've been in the RV just over a year.

Pete [00:50:07] And life is just so much fun. It's so stinking fun. And that being said, the learning curve was mind boggling.

Pete [00:50:18] I mean, the day we bought our RV was the first night we never stayed in RV and we like and we have never done this right. We flew to Las Vegas to buy it from a couple that we found online and we got out there and the guy was incredibly gracious.

Christian [00:50:36] He's become a great friend of mine. And he was a former FAA engineer and he used to inspect airplanes. And so this thing was just clean. And he had taken meticulous care of it. And he took two days to train me on it. That when it's got a 450 horsepower diesel pushing engine in the back, I know nothing about diesel engines. It's got a generator. It's got a furnace. It's got air conditioning. It's got wiring. It's got plumbing. And then you drive it down the road and then you set it up and break it down. I mean, the learning curve was just ridiculous. And so. I had to change my mindset. I mean, I literally. Number of years ago, I survived in my world by figuring out what I was really good at doing and then getting other people to do everything else. And I like I don't have a staff anymore so it's like I got to do everything. And so the RV life is incredibly fun. It's so cool to be able to just pack up and drive somewhere beautiful and just set up and just be there. Out in the western United States is what's called BLM Land Bureau of Land Management. It's just public land. It's American land. We can go it. And you can just camp there for free as long as you want. And we have solar panels on the top of our rig. So we can we can literally go out in the wilderness for nine to 10 days and just sit there and. And so it's incredibly fun. I love it. I recommend it. There's almost two million people living full time in RVs in America, which if you think about that, it's just ridiculous.

Aaron [00:52:12] Wow.

Pete [00:52:14] If you tried to get into certain RV parks, you believe it because some of them you have to book a year in advance just to get in the park. And so that's why we like Boondocking, which is going out into the wilderness, because you can just drive up and pick a spot and that's a lot easier. So that's a long answer to a short question. But we're having a blast now.

Christian [00:52:35] That's awesome.

Aaron [00:52:37] I was going to say. I want to do a shortened version of that to turn a test drive, because I feel like you guys kind of had to pull the ripcord you like. Well, this is gonna be our home.

Aaron [00:52:44] We better figure this out like quick.

Pete [00:52:46] Absolutely.

Pete [00:52:46] Yeah. Oh man I got so many stories we could do a whole podcast stories. I mean, it's unbelievable.

Aaron [00:52:56] Yeah, I was going to say we could take the first half of the next podcast about communication.

Aaron [00:52:59] The second half of like RV mistakes. Don't make these or like.

Pete [00:53:03] Oh, man there's a long list.

Aaron [00:53:07] All right. So now that you have a little bit more white space in your life, do you guys have what you obviously have Internet and stuff, but are you guys on are you watch anything like Netflix or Disney Plus or Hulu or anything like that?

Aaron [00:53:23] What are you binging right now?

Pete [00:53:24] First of all, you've made a huge assumption there about having Internet because I mean, that's one of the challenges, right?

Pete [00:53:32] I mean, we'll be parked outside Capitol Reef National Park in Utah for two weeks and have no Internet.

Aaron [00:53:39] Oh wow!

Pete [00:53:39] And so we'll have to, like, drive to town and find a coffee shop to get Wi-Fi. Just to send e-mails. Right. So that's one of the challenges of this life. And part of our challenge is making sure we can find a place to park that does have does have coverage. So we're working on all that. But you know what? We don't have Netflix. We have Amazon Prime. But I can't remember the last show we binged. We tend to work all the time. I mean, we're both building our businesses. And so, you know what that's like. You know, it's just, it's all consuming and there's so much to do. And so we watched. I can't remember the name of it.

Pete [00:54:29] I can't remember the name of it. It was just a sappy show about a family that was kind of back in the past and in the future. And this is an awful answer to your question.

Pete [00:54:40] I'm not a TV guy. I need a TV to watch my Mavericks and my Pacers. Other than that, I don't really need it.

Aaron [00:54:47] Yeah, Pacers win yesterday. That's crazy game.

Christian [00:54:50] Yes, alright so.

Christian [00:54:53] The last question here. And I don't know. Do you keep up with the NBA?

Pete [00:55:00] I do. Yes. NBA fan. So who do you have? L.A. or Miami?

Pete [00:55:07] Yawn.

Aaron [00:55:07] I agree with you 100 percent.

Christian [00:55:11] Really?

Pete [00:55:13] I'm just kind of depressed that it's just the same, same guys, although.

Pete [00:55:20] I mean, I would want to see Miami would beat Lebron, but.

Aaron [00:55:24] Same

Pete [00:55:24] I'd love to see some new blood in there.

Pete [00:55:28] And I actually, I don't like my Miami because what they did to my Mavs back in 2006, I just thought the Mavs got wrong end to that deal. But I'm just really impressed with what they've done. And I think Spoelstra is a much better coach than we realized he was. And I love the way they play. I, I just I mean, they play basketball the way you supposed to play it. They play as a team and they play defense and they pass the ball. And then Lebron will do something and L.A. will win.

Pete [00:56:05] It's just depressing.

Aaron [00:56:07] But if you're so your Mavs. Where Mavs fans as well. One good thing about the Mavs is it looks like the future is brighter.

Aaron [00:56:15] You know, it looks like we're just a couple of pieces away, a couple of things away from really putting a full game together where it's like, OK, we can make a deep run, an absolute make it happen.

Pete [00:56:28] So you've got a transcendent player who has the ball in his hands. Eighty percent of the time. And that's a beautiful thing.

Aaron [00:56:35] Oh, my gosh. So fun to watch him, too. So young. And just amazing.

Pete [00:56:41] Yeah. Huge fan.

Aaron [00:56:44] Pete, this was absolutely amazing. But one major thing we need to have for everybody who's listening right now, what is the best way for them to connect with you, to reach out for you for services and follow along with your journey as you continue to grow?

Pete [00:57:00] Yeah.

Pete [00:57:00] So probably the simplest way is to message me on Facebook, just search me on Facebook and then just message me. I can throw my email address out there, too. It's just my name. So Pete Briscoe, there's an E on the end of Briscoe. PeteBriscoe@me.com

Pete [00:57:20] And if they just want to e-mail me, I'd be happy but reach out to them and. But simplest way is just to hop on Facebook and message me and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Aaron [00:57:30] Awesome. Thank you so much, Pete. It was a blast. Like I say, we definitely early planning the next session here in the next year or so to have so to have you on here. Thank you so much for jumping on and thank you for your time.

Pete [00:57:42] Hey, thanks Aaron. Thanks Christian. It was great hanging out with you guys. Thanks for having me.

Aaron [00:57:46] Absolutely.

Christian [00:57:46] Thank you so much.

[00:57:46] The Marketing Native's podcast is a production of BitBranding.