How to Speak Better Than 99% of People (5 Frameworks)

Use the free CAC Calculator I made with HubSpot for Startups: https://clickhubspot.com/0dda8a #ad #hubspot My new book, Own Or Be Owned, is all about building a business so good it doesn't need you. I broke it into the 12 Profit Levers… The 12 levers I've seen determine whether you print cash or hate your life. Check it out: https://contrarianthinking.biz/bigdeal-speak - cs You've been talking. A lot. But nobody's listening. You're explaining your ideas, pitching your vision, trying to convince your team, and somehow the room just glazes over. Here's the truth: the problem isn't that people don't care. It's that you haven't learned how to make them care. And great ideas die every single day because the person behind them can't communicate well enough to make them stick. Communication isn't a soft skill. It's the highest ROI skill you'll ever build. It's how you raise capital, close deals, lead teams, and turn strangers into believers. The difference between someone who gets funded and someone who gets ignored isn't the idea. It's how they deliver it. This episode breaks down five of the most effective communication frameworks straight from the best speakers who have ever lived, from Steve Jobs to Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm Gladwell, and how you can use them starting today. In this episode, you'll learn: The simple map framework: why Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates he'd share three stories before he ever started talking and how giving your audience a roadmap removes anxiety and makes them actually listen Why repetition isn't boring when done right and how Martin Luther King Jr. used I have a dream eight times in one speech to build weight, not waste time Specificity as credibility: why saying this laundromat does $3 million in revenue from 164 machines is infinitely more believable than saying this business makes a lot of money How to use silence like a weapon and why the pause before your biggest line is more powerful than the line itself, just like Steve Jobs did when he introduced the iPhone Why story beats argument every single time and how Malcolm Gladwell turned a spaghetti sauce case study into one of the most memorable TED talks ever by making you feel the discovery instead of hearing the lesson Stop filling the silence. Stop apologizing for your point. Start speaking like someone who deserves to be heard. Because the moment you learn to communicate like a CEO is the moment people start treating you like one. Thanks to HubSpot for Startups for sponsoring this episode! Want to know if your business is actually making money or bleeding cash? Use the free CAC calculator I built with HubSpot. It takes two minutes and tells you the one number that decides everything. Grab it here: https://contrarianthinking.biz/bigdeal_cac ___________ (00:00:00) Introduction: Great Ideas Die Because You Can't Communicate (00:00:33) The Simple Map Framework: Tell Them Where You're Going First (00:02:40) Repetition That Builds: Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream (00:04:56) Specificity as Credibility: The Three Million Dollar Laundromat Story (00:07:06) Silence Is Sexy: Steve Jobs and the iPhone Reveal (00:09:52) Show Me, Don't Tell Me: Using Silence to Force Discovery (00:11:08) Story as Argument: Malcolm Gladwell and the Spaghetti Sauce Lesson (00:12:31) The Customer Acquisition Cost Reality Check (00:15:10) Go Big or Go Home: Masayoshi Son's Apple Crate Speech (00:16:50) Don't Apologize, Reframe: Fred Smith's FedEx Vegas Gamble (00:18:14) Communicate Visually: Herb Kelleher's Dear Mrs. Crabapple Letter (00:21:00) Build a Business That Runs Without You ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in-store and on lululemon.com now.

• 0:30Codie Sanchez?

  Have you ever noticed how some people open their mouths and the whole room goes quiet, while another person starts talking and you lose the room completely? Great ideas die every single day because you can't communicate well. And communication actually might be the highest ROI skill of all time. So today, I'm going to break down five of the most effective communication frameworks, straight from some of the best speakers who have ever lived, and that I use every day as a CEO. I think you're going to learn how to employ one of the greatest tools of all time, which is silence. I'm Codie Sanchez. This is the Big Deal Podcast. Let's go.

• 1:03Codie Sanchez?

  Okay, I want to start with what I call the simple map. So this framework is when a speaker tells you the structure of their argument before they launch into it. So think about it. Bad speakers, they make the audience work too hard. You bury the lead. You've got to figure out, where is this going? How's it going to take? Great speakers remove that anxiety. They give you a map. One of the best examples is Steve Jobs at Stanford. Listen to this.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

• 1:35Codie Sanchez?

  They say, "Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life." That's it. Just three. So simple. He doesn't say a bunch of words. This is how you make 4,000 Stanford students regret graduating. And so then, he labels each one. In the video, he says, "The first story is about connecting dots." So the audience, they know where you are. Now, we're going to steal this one. Where he says, "My second story is about love and loss. My third story is about death." That's the whole speech. So a great example of, do you see how the simple map framework works? Because it pulls all the dots together. The problem is, if you don't do this, if you don't map it, they'll either make up their own map that's confused, or stop listening.

• 2:19Codie Sanchez?

  So how do you do this? Before you communicate anything, I want you to finish the sentence. "In the next few minutes, I'm going to show you X number of Y." For example, "Today, I'm going to show you how to find a business, know if it's actually profitable, and how to avoid buying yourself a full-time job." That's a map. If you don't do this, your audience is basically having a headache trying to figure you out. Like Guy Kawasaki, an early Apple employee. His entire job was to convince developers to build software for the map. And he would use 10 to 20 to 30 rules for pitching slide decks. 10 slides, 20 minutes long, because he said, "If I suck, at least you know how long I'm going to suck."

• 3:02Codie Sanchez?

  So two of his three rules were about giving his audience their map. So I try to always remember, what is the map that I'm talking to? So if the first thing is the map, the second thing is going to be, how many times do you repeat? A lot of people think repetition is bad. But actually, saying the same thing a few times because you want to enunciate the point is different than because you ran out of ideas. Your uncle, who repeats himself nonstop, and the story about his kid's football game back in the day, not great. But Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, listen for how many times he says, "I have a dream." It's the anchor. And he's visualizing it with you. Listen to this part.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream.

• 3:58Codie Sanchez?

  You know, "I have a dream that one day, even in the state of Mississippi." "I have a dream that one day, even in the hills of Georgia." So you're visualizing all the places, the most symbolic places in the fights for civil rights, that this dream will live. And then he ups the stakes. "I have a dream that my four little children." Now, it's personal, not just national. It doesn't feel repetitive, does it? It feels like this additional weight, this weightiness to it. And I think one of the biggest mistakes you may make when you communicate is, if you say something once, you think the audience gets it. If you're in a boardroom, assume people are zoning out. They're checking on their phone under the table. If you're talking to your team, assume they've heard six other pitches this week.

• 4:43Codie Sanchez?

  So the idea matters, but you have to repeat it in a way that's skilled. I like you to pick one phrase you want people to remember. And then move that phrase through different levels. Start with the idea, then make it visual, then raise the stakes, then make it personal. So first, own your income, then own your time, then own your business, then own your future. So I'm not saying "own" five times. I'm showing you through repetition and building a new angle and higher stakes. That's repetition that builds. Great communication is not always saying more things. In fact, that can be really bad if you want people to remember what you said. It's making sure the right thing lands.

• 5:26Codie Sanchez?

  Next, I want to talk about specificity as credibility. Look at this framework. Vague people say, "This business makes a lot of money." Specific people say, "This laundromat does $3 million in revenue from 164 machines and 10 vans that allows it to process thousands of pounds of laundry a day." Which one do you believe? The second, right? And that's probably why that laundromat video is doing 3 million. It's because it's specific. Then, you point out the vans. Why? Because this is physical proof. It's in your face. It's believable. Then, this is the video where you start to see the numbers stacking. Pounds of laundry, numbers of machines, machine costs.

• 6:09Codie Sanchez?

  It feels like a hype video, right? And always, if you want to really mandate your point, get into the objections. Why would someone use a laundromat if they could use a wash and dry at home? This is an important moment, because you want to say the things that are in their head out loud. I think you also want to make sure that you're saying the things that they might not fully understand. Like, what are the SOPs? What does the machine's cost? How does the system work? And if I could only say, "This is a great opportunity," then I don't have any more specifics, you should probably hide your wallet. So how do you apply this tactically? Before you make any claim, add one of these. A number, a timeframe, a cost, a person, a place, a before, and an after.

• 6:54Codie Sanchez?

  So instead of, I think you should start a newsletter. Say, "A newsletter with 100,000 engaged subscribers can be more valuable than a million rented followers." Instead of, "Buying businesses really works." Say, "This $500,000 laundromat, bought with seller financing, well, it actually replaced this guy's 9 to 5." These details signal competence. They're also hard to remember, so if somebody's lying to you, they won't always match up. Okay, so I want to talk about silence for a second. I think about this as the fourth framework. It's one of the biggest differences between amateurs and pro. Amateurs are rushy. They're like afraid of silence. They fill all the words, so, um, you know, I guess. If you want to be a great speaker, silence is not empty.

• 7:39Codie Sanchez?

  Remember, silence is like tension. It's sexy. It's confidence. It tells the audience this matters. You know, Steve Jobs in this video, he's introducing the iPhone. And he goes like this.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  We're introducing three revolutionary products of this class.

• 8:00Codie Sanchez?

  Again, like, simple sentence. Big claim. Room to breathe. Now, he says this.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  The second is a revolutionary mobile phone.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device.

• 8:49Codie Sanchez?

  Okay, that starts to build some suspense, right? The words to focus on aren't very complicated, iPod, iPhone, internet communicator. But the delivery is everything. He separates the items, he lets the audience register each one, and then at the end, he says this.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  An iPod, a phone.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Are you getting it?

• 9:38Codie Sanchez?

  He lets the audience catch up to the reveal before he says it. If he just walked out and said, "We made the iPhone," it would still be historic, but it wouldn't be theatrical, it wouldn't be memorable, we wouldn't be watching this. He turns his silence into a reveal, and the tactical advice is this: when you have a big line, do not rush into it. Set it up, pause, say it cleanly, pause. So if I'm making a point about making money, for instance, I might say, "Most people do not get rich through a salary." Pause. "They get rich because their skills were so good, somebody wanted them to own." That pause creates contrast. What does that mean? Why?

• 10:22Codie Sanchez?

  And I want you to pause before you think of these lines. Like, for instance, the other day, in my team meeting, I was getting really frustrated with a member of my team, and the team was basically saying something along the lines of, "Well, you know, the reason why we aren't selling this product is people don't understand the value." Now, the problem is, they used bad repetition. He kept telling me, "People don't see the value, people don't see the value." And I said, "Show me where they say that." And then I was quiet. He's like, "Well, the problem is, you see what they're..." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, show me." I didn't say more words than that. He must have said three more times, "Well, I want to explain..." Like, what? I'm like, "No, no, no, show me. You have the video recordings? Show me where they say that."

• 11:06Codie Sanchez?

  Now, why was that so powerful? Because in your life, people love to yap at you constantly, and if you just instead hold the frame and say, "You're one-liner," in my case, it was "show me, don't tell me," which is a mantra at my company, that is going to make them discover the lesson. It's painful, but they will remember. And Malcolm Gladwell, who I had on the podcast, if you haven't listened to his episode, it's great, he does this brilliantly in his TED Talk about spaghetti sauce, of all things. Like, here's what he says.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years. A man who is a great personal hero of mine, someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

• 11:58Codie Sanchez?

  He basically says he wants to talk about someone who has done as much to make Americans happy as almost anyone. That's a weird opening, like, I would expect, I don't know, Albert Einstein. Instead, he introduces Howard Moskowitz. Here, he's describing Howard physically, his height, his age, his glasses.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Howard's about this high, and he's round, and he's in his 60s, and he has big, huge glasses and thinning gray hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he keeps a, has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he's a great aficionado of medieval history, and he, by profession, he's a psychophysicist.

• 12:40Codie Sanchez?

  And that turns him into a character. He says this.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  One of his first clients was Pepsi. And Pepsi came to Howard, and they said, "You know, there's this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi in order to have the perfect drink."

• 12:59Codie Sanchez?

  I was actually losing my mind with my team the other day, because we didn't know specifically one of the most important numbers in business. And so I couldn't believe anything that they were saying, because they were saying, "Well, we make this much money per customer." And I was like, "What does our customer cost us?" This is called your CAC, your customer acquisition cost, and what it costs you to actually gain a customer. So, my team and I built a CAC calculator with HubSpot for startups. The link's below, because you gotta be able to say, "It cost me 300 bucks to get a customer." You know, that customer may be worth 1,400, and that means that we make money. That's specific. This is the difference between somebody in business getting listened to and somebody getting completely ignored. And so with this tool, it takes two minutes, because you're going to figure out if your business is growing or days away from losing tons of money.

• 13:43Codie Sanchez?

  This thing's super cool. You can plug in your sales spend, marketing spend, your new customers, it hands you your number. It shows you what counts as a cost, it gives you the benchmark I use across all my businesses. A customer should be worth at least three times what it costs to get them. My favorite part, that three-to-one ratio, because a CAC number on its own is like just a number. The ratio tells you whether to scale or to scrap it. So get specific with the number that actually decides everything. By the way, this is free. I made it for you and your team with HubSpot for startups, who's sponsoring this episode, so go grab yours. Now, the story has a business problem, right? Pepsi wants to know this about Diet Pepsi. And it sounds small, but it becomes this doorway into a bigger video.

• 14:21Codie Sanchez?

  And in the video, Howard gets the data back, and the data does not create a clean bell curve, right? That's the conflict. The expected answer does not appear, and that's the discovery moment, right? Dar Man on the podcast, we call this the incendiary moment, the insight that there's no single perfect Pepsi, there's no single perfect spaghetti sauce. There are these different kinds of perfect, and that's way more interesting than saying, "Customer preferences are heterogeneous," which is the kind of sentence that probably should be illegal if you're trying to sell something. Gladwell makes the story carry the idea, and here's why this works. Do you know that a story can lower somebody's resistance to you? Like, if I say, "Here's the lesson," your brain starts debating with me. If I say, "Let

• 15:04Codie Sanchez?

  me tell you about a guy named Howard who got hired by Pepsi," your brain is like, "Okay, what's going on?" And by the time you reveal the lesson, you feel like you got there. This is persuasion, not pushing, this is leading. And here's the tactical advice: if you want to make a point, do not start with a point. Start with a moment when someone discovered the point. Instead of saying seller financing is powerful, tell the story. "I met a guy who bought a business with very little money down. The seller wanted out, the buyer didn't have cash, he thought he was going to lose everything, and then the seller realized he could play the bank." Now, the audience wants to know how. That is story as argument. The point lands harder

• 15:45Codie Sanchez?

  because the audience experiences the evidence. This is how you speak like a CEO. CEOs also sell a vision so big, nobody else can see it in the beginning. I actually like to talk about Masayoshi Son. So he was obviously one of the most famous CEOs of all time from Japan, and what's fascinating about him is, he had this thing called the fax machine standoff. So in 1981, he's 23 years old about, he has no money, he has two part-timers, they're in a wooden warehouse, the place is a wreck. On his first day of business, he climbs famously onto an empty crate and gives his two employees a speech. I'm just like, picturing this, it's kind of unhinged. He says, "In 25 years, we'll be counting sales in trillions of yen."

• 16:30Codie Sanchez?

  Both employees, they quit that week. They think he's insane, actually, and he goes on to build SoftBank, which is, you know, one of the largest investment firms in the world. He's the richest man in Japan, and his moment starts on an apple crate that is now in the SoftBank museum. The CEO move is, when you're communicating, do not talk small, go big. And this is if you want to win in communication overall. If they were never, you know, if those two people were going to stick with him for the long time, they never would have quit to begin with. And so be this delusional type of human who gets other people to see a vision so big, they are shocked by what you can show them.

• 17:13Codie Sanchez?

  If you want people to listen to you, even when you have done something really dumb, I like to go to this story, which is actually from Fred Smith, famously the creator of FedEx. And I don't know if you know this, but back in the day, FedEx was basically out of money. FedEx had a $5,000, had $5,000 left in the bank. On Monday, they owed $24,000, and if he didn't get that $24,000, his business would be out of business. This is obviously early on in the beginning of it. And so what does he do? He does the reasonable thing, flies to Vegas and puts 5K in black, and plays a couple rounds, and wins $27,000, which is actually not a great idea.

• 17:56Codie Sanchez?

  But I like to use this example, because if you want to talk about communicating, even and especially when you may be wrong, he says this line. He goes back to the chairman, and the chairman says, "What would you have done if he'd lost?" And Smith's answer was...

• 18:12Codie Sanchez?

  Well, it couldn't have been worse than doing nothing. And this one sentence is so good because he didn't apologize. He really used silence and he didn't have to explain. He just reframed his inaction. So maybe you're not being listened to because you are apologizing too much. And maybe instead of trying to fill the space and instead of trying to make excuses, you should just say the one sentence, let it hang. I love that. Sometimes communicating means doing it with people you don't like and they don't like you either. And in fact, the way to get heard the most is by overcoming those people who want you quiet.

• 18:53Codie Sanchez?

  You know, somebody like that right now, who wishes you just wouldn't talk, who's talking over you, who wants to bulldoze you, right? We've all met those people. And I love to use an example, sometimes maybe you're not a loud talker. Maybe the way that you communicate isn't even verbally. Maybe you're a person that likes to write things down. Do you ever feel like when you're having a conversation and then you go back and you're thinking about it later? And you're like, oh, if I had a couple of seconds, I would have done it differently. Like, I wouldn't have done it that way, right? Okay, that was me. Well, then I like to think about Herb Keller, who was the CEO of Southwest Airlines. And he did this incredible thing. In the 1980s, when he was CEO, he received this complaint letter from a woman who literally hated everything about his airline. The entire letter is like, your peanuts suck, your humor's annoying, your flight attendants are the worst.

• 19:38Codie Sanchez?

  You know, there's no assigned seats, it's a cattle car, the airline sucks, you're a terrible CEO, I hate you. And he wrote a reply to her and the reply was this. Dear Mrs. Crabapple, we will miss you. Love, Herb. And that he framed it on his office wall for the rest of his career. And I love this. Why? Because you're allowed to be loud and writing too. And in fact, sometimes you say in that one sentence written later, hanging it on the wall, allows you to not have to verbally speak much in the future. I was just telling Ashley, our designer of our office right now. She's sending me all these art pieces and I'm like, no. The way that we tell stories is visual, not just verbal.

• 20:19Codie Sanchez?

  So I want every piece of art from now on in the office to be part of our story. I want it to be logos of all the companies we've helped build seven and eight figure businesses. I want another piece of art to be our very first office, AKA my kitchen in a tiny little house. Then our next office, AKA my upstairs living room in my second house. I want our third office, a house by itself on the east side, not a very nice one. Then my next office, 10,000 square feet. Then our next office, 20,000 square feet. I want the art to be stories. And so if you are not the type that feels eloquent verbally, CEOs talk with visions too. They talk with visuals too. And you can do the exact same thing.

• 21:04Codie Sanchez?

  So the next time an unreasonable client emails, why don't you reply with eight words instead of 800? What would that be like? Like, is there a chance where you can be a little funny? Obviously, that woman's name was not Crabapple, right? Herb was making a point. He was showing them love, but also a little tongue in cheek. So just remember, when you communicate, you control the medium, just like you control the message.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  You are arrogant, you are lazy and you're stupid. If you're sitting there and you cannot afford supercars, you're one of those three. You should work 84 hours a week.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  No family, no kids, no girlfriend. Every day you wake up, the only thing that should be on your mind is money.

• 21:44Codie Sanchez?

  That's not what being rich looks like. Jeff Bezos is worth $257 billion because of Amazon. He drinks coffee and reads the newspaper in the morning. Tim Cook earned $74.3 million at Apple last year. He turns his phone off to go to the gym. Berkshire Hathaway is worth 1.3 trillion. Warren Buffett founded it with his best friend. You don't have to wake up at 3 a.m. every day. You don't have to give up your life and you definitely don't have to do it alone. The goal was never a business you run. It's a business that runs without you. It's time to take back control of your business and your life. Come do it with me on September 18th. I'll see you there.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.