Kyle Scott Just Keep Learning Summary

Kyle shares a ton of great strategies for sales. As the President of Serhant Ventures and former producer at NBC, he has a ton of business wisdom to share. We also discuss online learning and how to create amazing courses.

Episode Notes

Kyle Scott is one of the most passionate people we’ve ever had on the Just Keep Learning Podcast when it comes to learning himself. Throughout his entire life, as a kid, in school and within his career, he has always adopted that JKL mindset too.

In this episode, we talked about goal setting, manifestation and understanding what drives you. We also discussed some more technical components of being an entrepreneur, or business leader. Kyle has learned a lot about business from working at NBC and being Ryan Serhant’s right hand man as President of Serhant Ventures. But he is also working formally on his MBA.

There is no one one the show to date that can drop more names than Kyle could. He shares a lot of wisdom that he picked up over the course of ten years producing content for NBC. As a video journalist he interviewed the likes of Michael Phelps, William Shatner, Mel Robbins, Daymond John and many more thought leaders. One thing you’ll notice is he has a special ability to pick up a little something from everyone he meets.

He is also an avid reader and explains to the audience all about how books are the things that turn his money dial. Money dials is a concept learned from Ramit Sethi, whereby you allow yourself to restrict spending on things you don’t actually gain intrinsic joy from. But, you spend freely on the things that you do gain appreciation from. Because Kyle has read so many books, and met so many authors, he can drop a whole lot of wisdom. 

We talked a lot about education and learning in general. One thing that has elevated Kyle throughout many points in his career is the ability to learn and pivot when others start to slow down. By setting goals, continually improving his mindset and staying focused he has achieved a lot in his career.

The main two things we talked about were sales and creating awesome courses. Kyle has a high level of talent and expertise in both. The most important thing that he points out is that selling is human. In order to live a good life we have to be good at sales. Moreover, the ability to sell is transferable, but if you want to build a brand and community, the ability to focus on your niche is huge! Kyle provided us some examples of sales techniques and strategies they teach in their top course, “sell it like serhant”.

When it comes to creating courses that convert we talked a lot about online education and production quality. We also discussed how important it is that the learning actually provide real world examples. When teaching someone the goal has to be to help change their behaviour. This happens by sending knowledge, but most importantly by helping them unlearn, and shift their mindset.

12 Steps To Create Awesome Online Courses

We know that education is increasingly moving online. It’s not something that will slow down, in fact it will only speed up. So, here are some of the most important steps to take in order to launch a successful online course.

1. Provide a balance of higher level information and nitty gritty details about how to implement what the audience should be learning.
2. Don’t overthink, but ensure you have good storytelling foundations. What is the beginning, middle and end of the lesson and how are you taking the listener through a narrative arc?
3. A talking head and whiteboard are not enough to make for a successful course.
4. Use language that the audience understands and can relate to in order to make sure they are connected since you are not in person.
5. Make sure you have clean audio. Reduce ambient noise, static and use quality microphones.
6. Create visual variety. Can have a talking head and board. But, you should make sure you have a medium shot of the teacher, a wide shot that shows the whole scene and closeups of drawing, writing, or talking. Add more and more production value by adding some movement.
7. Make the lessons engaging by connecting the importance to real life scenarios. Show how it’s actually being used in something that’s visually interesting and demonstrates application of the concept.
8. You need to share theory in a course, but this is a great time to add visual elements in the use of graphics. Put graphics such as key terms and quotes on top of talking head shots. 
9. Don’t over use it, but use b-roll if it adds a visual element, while staying on brand and focus with the video.
10.  Create lists for things like learning goals, and recaps. Keep the audience knowing sneak peaks of what’s to come, while not having the answers. In other words, share some fill in the blanks, or these 6 things are what we’ll learn and keep bringing the audience along while checking each thing off.
11. Always implement some style of actual practice and execution of the things the audience is learning. Learn something, implement, reflect, feedback, and repeat.
12. Create moments for community discussion, questions and debrief.

Memorable Quotes

“You have to believe in your product so much that it would be like a crime for your potential customers to not be able to purchase it.”

“In the course we talk about the 4 W’s to a great life and work. Why do you wake up every day? What will you do? What are you running from? And what are you working toward winning?”

“When teaching, increase engagement by creating relevant scenarios that make connections to real life. Say you’re teaching calculus. You could show the design process of a Boeing 787. Then have people take it a step further and apply the concept themselves. All of a sudden you not only have visual variety, but you have a story and a problem that needs to be solved. That is how you make learning interesting.”

Guest Bio

Kyle Scott is a powerful video journalism producer. He got his big start as a producer at NBC News, which included building his own vertical programs, such as Better, “news you can use”. He spent ten years at NBC, where he had evolving roles as a producer in digital and broadcast news, including the TODAY show, NBC Nightly News, NBC News Specials, and NBC News Digital.

He is now the president of Serhant Ventures, where he is responsible for the growth and profitability of Ryan Serhant’s (the famous real estate agent in NYC) digital product businesses.

As far as his personal brand goes, he is an expert in all things sales. In general sales knowledge, Kyle is a public speaker and content creator. Specific to Real Estate sales, he built and scaled the digital business side of Team Serhant. His focus has expanded over the years, but always revolves around content that connects with an audience interested in improving their own sales.

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