Vulnerability and marketing that connects with Steve Turney

Dan King: [0:00] Hello, everyone. It's Dan. I am delighted to be joined by Steve Turney. He's the owner and executive director of the Mental Health Marketing Conference, as well as Turn Productions. And I know him to be an enormously generous, empathetic organizer of very, very specialized events that bring people together. So, Steve, welcome so much to the podcast. Steve Turney: [0:22] Dan, thank you for having me on and for that generous introduction. I really appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. Dan King: [0:28] It's well-deserved. I want to start with your LinkedIn headline says that you produce and promote events that feed the mind, fill the heart, and fuel connections. Tell me about that. Steve Turney: [0:38] Yeah, sure. So I spent a good decade plus of my career on the sales side of things. I was a salesperson, business development professional, and I went to hundreds, if not thousands of conferences. It felt like thousands, but definitely in the hundreds. I stood at the booth, had experiences that just didn't always feel like I was connecting in the ways that I was hoping. And there's a lot of reasons for that. So time in the game helps you clarify, Steve Turney: [1:07] oftentimes, where the challenges and the opportunities are. When I figuratively stumbled my way into the Mental Health Marketing Conference back in 2019, I wanted to do it differently than what I had seen it done. And so we started to experiment with ways to make that happen. And one of the big problems you run into oftentimes at a conference is that there's so much great content, And so little time to take it all in that you walk away oftentimes saying, people will say, oh, my brain is full. And it's true. It's full. And there's not always enough time for brain breaks in between. Steve Turney: [1:48] Oftentimes our focus level is somewhere around 30 to 40 minutes, and then we need a break. Our brains actually need a break to reset. But what happens in conferences is that we stack a panel on top of another panel on top of a TED Talk. And we just really burn ourselves out with content. So more isn't always better, but it's the good intention of the event producer to say, I want to give as much content as I can. We try not to overfill the brain, but we try to feed the mind for sure. And then there's a model that I'm always leaning on in terms of, does this event have enough humanity in it? Does it have enough heart? Steve Turney: [2:25] Because stories move us powerfully. And And when we connect with each other as humans, then we start to know it's that saying, you know, they don't they don't care how much, you know, until they know how much you care. And to be able to signal that, hey, we really care about you. We care about you as a human. Sometimes we do that in interesting ways. One example is at my marketing conference, we booked a presentation that was completely about the topic of shame. And that was part of my own journey coming out of work with a licensed professional counselor. But you could hear a pin drop in that room. It was by a chief clinical officer who was very well informed and had a very powerful personal story that he was ready to tell. And it was just chills and sniffles the whole time. Without manipulating people, we want to have the full spectrum of experience. Dan King: [3:19] As humans, we have access to this incredible emotional range that we so rarely get to see in ourselves as well as people that we meet at a conference, right? Dan King: [3:30] Are you able to, at a conference, create experiences like that on command or at least if I go to one of your conferences, am I likely to have an experience like that? Steve Turney: [3:40] We're probably going to try. We're probably going to try to have some emotion brought into it. You even see it with the ways people dress for conferences. Oftentimes, it's all black clothing, very serious, supposed to be a business format. Steve Turney: [3:57] But we actually know deep down that a lot of the best transactions and relationships in business come from being able to work with people that you know and trust. And that's when the deep work starts to really happen between humans. So last year, out of gratitude, I brought my daughter on stage and my wife and said thank you at the very top. Usually I say that for the end of the conference. And I said, no, this year, this year, this needs to be right up front. My daughter, she's very, very cute. They both are. But my daughter's very cute. And so there was oohs and ahs in the crowd. And one thing I tried to do related to that, that's what drives it, is that it's the Jungian concept that there is a child inside all of us. We're all four years old in some sense of the word. That person is timeless and never leaves us. And so when we bring puppies to a business conference, well, it's because that resonates with humans. I saw it at a conference one time in Florida that was for the most business professionals of all business professionals. It was health insurance companies and payers. And there's these professionals in dark blue suits and red ties and crisp white shirts just getting covered with puppy kisses and fur, and they don't care at all because they just go into another space. And so it's things like that that just, that open us up to delight and surprise. Steve Turney: [5:27] And there's other ways. We did it with a hot air balloon one year where this last year, where logistically it was very challenging, but going up like you're in the Wizard of Oz is an enchanting experience. And if you've never done it, a hundred feet in the air is plenty high for me. I'll tell you. You feel like, oh my, the world is a different place than what I felt five minutes ago. And so we do try to take people to this apex moment. It's not the entire conference. You don't need to just be summiting the entire time. But after you smooth out the potholes, then you do need these moments of delight. Dan King: [6:05] No matter how perfectly creased the suit, often that will create a gap. That you can fill with your humanity, right? And even all of us, no matter how hidden our humanity may be, it's still in there, right? And if you can pull it out, then you're going to captivate people. You're going to create memories. And so much of our memory, so much of skill building comes down to emotion. It isn't an intellectual exercise, it's an emotional exercise, right? So it sounds like your conferences create that kind of experience, which is so rare and memorable. Steve Turney: [6:38] We really try hard. I was just at a conference this last week in San Diego on Coronado Island called Sway Health Live, and it's for healthcare tech marketers. And I was delighted because they're starting to bring in more mental health Steve Turney: [6:52] conversation around it. So I moderated a panel on how to build partnerships within behavioral health through marketing. That conference does such a great job. And I said it on stage and I meant it. It was true that I attended that conference nine, 10 years ago, and I logged away so many great moves that they make in terms of community building and making these real lasting connections that I still put into practice at my own conference. It truly works and sticks with you, but I combine that with a lesson I learned from my LPC. Steve Turney: [7:26] And he said so many things that were just eye-opening for me. There's two. One is if you wanna know how you're lying to yourself, just tell yourself the things you wouldn't tell your mother. That's always a good exercise. But the one that's relevant here is that the mask is the opposite of the face. When we dress up in suits and when we put on an air of confidence that is protecting ourselves, that's a shield. There's something to be said for professionalism and just being able to get along well with people. That goes such a long way. The opportunity to educate ourselves and all of that is wonderful. But when we start to guard ourselves and defend ourselves, what we're guarding is some soft underbelly that we don't want to expose. Steve Turney: [8:12] Being able to design a conference that puts us into a headspace that knows we're in a safe space is critically important to maximize, like what you said, exactly, the ability to put our emotions out there without thinking we're too vulnerable. Dan King: [8:27] That's perfect context for a mental health conference, right? Dan King: [8:32] Makes immense sense, especially in this universe. Makes sense in any universe, but especially here. Tell me about what is, so if I'm a group practice owner, you mentioned at the Coronado Conference, you learned a lot about building partnerships in behavioral health. And I want to get into some of the things that practice owners could learn at MHM, at the Mental Health Marketing Conference. But why don't we start with partnership building in behavioral health? I think that's often a missed opportunity for group practice owners. What do you see as insights for how they could leverage partnership building? Steve Turney: [9:04] Yeah. Oh, that's a great question. There's so much on my mind. I sat with Mary Considine from Ascenda and Andy Halliwell, who had led growth at Lightfleet Behavioral Health in California for a long time. And they were so insightful. I just kind of sat at their feet and listened. And we talked a lot about both sides, how behavioral health practice can grow up from a very clinical lens. And a beautiful thing about a practice is that it starts to specialize what we do best. So you can have a chief financial officer or somebody responsible for operations and human relationships that a clinician just may not be well trained in or ready for, or that's maybe not their best and highest use. And so bringing people together into a practice can be a beautiful thing. It's why they're sometimes called corporation. It's the corpus. It's the body. And we're not all hands. We have all sorts of different parts that come together to be greater than the sum. There's efficiencies there, and especially in this age of access challenges. Steve Turney: [10:11] Defined efficiencies is wonderful. And then it becomes, how do we partner internally and how do we partner externally? So how do we partner with health systems in a way that we can start to educate and align ourselves with not just the systems and the EHRs and those technology platforms, but with the people? It sounds so simple, but a lot of my takeaway was the importance to have clinically led partners that you engage with that have like-mindedness around the community. Just the importance of staying focused on the outcomes and the clinical rigor and the clinical perspective that's so important as we grow and partner. It's sometimes just perhaps a red flag or a yellow flag if you're out there looking for organizations and they don't appreciate or value the clinical perspective. It's just something to very much factor into the SWOT analysis. And then How do we play with payers? Steve Turney: [11:11] And that's always complicated. But it came down to, and it sounds so simple, but it came down to two things that I took away from this panel, from those experts. And one was go in, but before you go in, have your yes and your no outlined and have your deal breakers and makers outlined and then share those more often than not so that everybody knows where you're coming from. So if you ever have to unwind a partnership or you get down the road with a potential partner and you feel like, ooh, this is not going the way I want it to go, and everyone can refer back to, these were my rules, they're still our rules, and this is the work that we need to do, which is doing the best we can for this organization. And then two, and just to wrap up this idea is you got to communicate well. You got to communicate well. And it sounds so easy, but have the ability to say what needs to be said and have the hard conversations. I see that in just in so many settings where we shy away from that. And that's oftentimes where we do ourselves a disservice. Dan King: [12:16] I can see running through your answers to the last couple of questions, this deep interest in vulnerability, right? So to be transparent in a negotiation often is a very vulnerable thing to do. To be talking to a potential partner, to disclose things that in the short term Dan King: [12:33] might make me look a little off, right? It's a very vulnerable thing to do. To work with a counselor as deeply as you did, right? It's a very vulnerable thing to do. Did you build this skill set of vulnerability consciously? Did you build this capacity for it? And how does vulnerability play into the conferences that you build? Steve Turney: [12:53] That's a thoughtful question. And I would love to hear your perspective, too, on it, because there's times when I've sought counsel and the best advice was, well, you don't need to share all of that quite yet. There's times. Steve Turney: [13:07] So I believe there is probably a yin and yang to this. But the vulnerability for me came from when I went to a monastery. I turned 40 and went to a monastery for a silent retreat and started to do some inside work. And Carl Jung says life begins at 40. everything before that is just research, which is kind of, that's tongue in cheek. But it's a good reminder for me to say, life isn't over here. Life might in some ways be off to a new start with this lived experience, which we can't underestimate. So I took that to heart and used it as this intentional moment. Well, it led me to some insight that really, I would love to help people more than I am right now. And the first best person to start with is myself. So that's what walked me into a licensed professional counselor was under the guys, kind of the ego-driven guys of career guidance, because the sales route didn't really feel like a calling or a vocation. And the counselor said, yeah, well, we will get there. We will definitely get there. But as I started to do my own work and get the logs out of my eyes, clear out the plumbing from the mental hairballs that get stuck, I found myself working into a place of honesty and flow in my own life and clarity. And I could see through myself and live with myself in grace too and appreciation. Steve Turney: [14:29] And then what happened was I started to do that with, other people where before I would have definitely my own shield up. I didn't have quite so much to guard or the need to guard it. So when I put that down and I saw both the great side of myself and the dark side of my moon and say, yeah, I'm like you. I'm like everybody else. And then it became a very flat community-based relationship rather than a hierarchy relationship, which is trying to impress somebody or this or that. So that, that led to my openness. And so for me, maybe it's different for other people, maybe. And there's certainly, you don't need to unmask every moment of your mental health journey, for example, not suggesting that. Dan King: [15:14] We've got half an hour. We can go through the whole thing. Don't worry. It's easy. Steve Turney: [15:18] We got, we're going to have a part six of this, if that's where we're going. I think, yeah, I, I lean on vulnerability and the Ernest Hemingway quote, which is like, the best way to trust somebody is to trust them. And they'll show you that pretty quickly, one way or the other. Dan King: [15:34] My experience of MHM last year was that point you made about how your capacity for vulnerability created this. It dismantled hierarchies. Dan King: [15:43] You really got that sense at MHM. It's chill. People are smart, smart, and sharp, and like you will see at other business conferences, but it's just so easy to connect with people. It is a flat hierarchy at least you as an attendee as a speaker you have that feeling of a flat hierarchy right which is so accessible so if i'm a group practice owner right what skills could i learn going to mhm i know there's lots of different kinds of attendees But I'm a group practice owner. You know, I don't know a ton about marketing. Why should I go to MHM? Steve Turney: [16:15] I do love, for starters, I love that hierarchy, that comment, because how that resonates or comes through, because that is so much what we try to do. I mean, if you're a sponsor or an attendee or a speaker, it doesn't matter to me. You're a human there and you bring your own expertise, but let's level set from the ground up. And then we go from there. I love that. I think the group practice professional has the opportunity to capitalize on the Peter Drucker observation, which is that there's innovation Steve Turney: [16:44] and there's marketing and everything else is cost. I think you have to understand those things, what those words mean. And I can't say I fully do, but I think the innovation component is the people that have committed themselves to this industry and the clinical modalities that we're learning more and more about every day and the new technologies out there. And technologies could include psychedelics or whatever. Steve Turney: [17:11] We're still in massive learning mode, but there is a lot of innovation and the clinical side has that. But you don't get the opportunity to square the impact if you're not understanding marketing, which the word marketing oftentimes gets relegated to a graphic design or logos or those kinds of things we see and do. But the real marketing is, does the market have an appetite for this? And how do we connect with that appetite with our solution in a way that is a continuum of trust from the very first moment you experience our brand? Steve Turney: [17:48] And I would think that brand also gets confused sometimes. And there's a number of great definitions of brand. There's a lot of paths up the mountain to what brand means, but I think it It means the promise that you make of the experience you'll get when you experience it. Steve Turney: [18:05] Everything about the brand says, if you do this, you'll get that. It's a very if-then statement. And then you have to pair that with positioning, which is, what is the path to the position of advantage for your organization? Because if you don't have one, someone will just eat your lunch every day. So organizationally, you have to position yourself in the market in a place that in a very short timeframe, I look at your organization and I know what the flag is. I recognize the flag. It's different. And the flag says, this is our part of the country, our part of the world. It's quite a bit more complicated than I think we sometimes make it out to be. And then on the other hand, there is some real basic blocking and tackling that you can do to go. Steve Turney: [18:52] Light years down the road, depending on where you are in your own life cycle of your business. Michael Fulweiler last year at MHM did a presentation on email marketing that doesn't suck. And that's kind of a cheeky term. And it was so good because email marketing is still, as an early mover, early adopter, that's the new post office. There's new things that have come around. But in terms of getting somebody's permission to message them right in a personal private space, it's hard to beat. And so there are some just table stakes that you can learn in addition to realizing you're learning more about the nuance of marketing and then meeting people who do that better than you can do it at a lower cost compared to trying to do it yourself. So there's a lot of marketing firms and PR agencies and design shops and content creators who just the way that you're a great executive or a great clinician, they're a great marketer and there's efficiencies to be had for your business there. Dan King: [19:48] That is a lot to learn. And it's interesting. I think at MHN, attendees get the chance to get exposed to people that talk about that are experts in each different phase of that journey, right? From branding to positioning, there are subtle differences there. And so most clinician founders haven't gone to business school, right? There's no year one MBA marketing course that they've taken. And so to be able to hear from experts can really supplement the little that they do know, I think it's a tremendous opportunity for them. And understandably, they've been learning about being a clinician, they've been learning about managing a team, the stuff that is sort of right in front of them. And so marketing can be a real competitive advantage and to have the chance to learn it from people that are real specialists, you know, to learn some solid, solid marketing game over the course of a couple of days, I think could be very valuable. Steve Turney: [20:37] Yeah. And oftentimes a practice will have a, a discipline or a focus. Maybe they're an eating disorder. They want to be the next Montanito or something. And it's like, there's ways to use marketing to make sure you're helping the people that you are positioned to help the most, the best. So there's that opportunity to deliver care and find those people who are out in market looking for exactly what you do. Dan King: [21:00] It's interesting to reflect on. I can see so much in all of our conversations, your references to either classical literature or to things that were written a long time ago and how that informs how you're building events today. Is it fair to say that's a pretty significant theme in your work and you're Dan King: [21:18] quite informed by the classics? Steve Turney: [21:20] I do read and love the classics. And then just old things generally for me, it's a reason I drink water and wine and not Coca-Cola. One reason is because it simply stood the test of time. Whereas Coca-Cola is sweet and wonderful and no judgment, no judgment. If anybody's drinking Coca-Cola, it's no problem with me. But things that stand the test of time have done it for increasingly some greater reason than coincidence of simply survival. And it turns out that water is very, very, very, very good for us. And there's nuance to be had with wine and things like that. And coffee. Coffee's another one. I'll drink coffee because coffee has also stood the test of time. I opt for old literature, or it's also fun to read old newspapers because that's a lot of information that you can start to weed out of what's really being said instead of just like, here's what's happening, write this instance. And also, even when I do technical analysis, I tend to look at long timeframes of how charts have moved. Once you find waves on these different moving averages or different charts, it's very hard to stop something with that much energy, and it makes it easy to spot when the tsunamis are coming. Nobody knows the future, but in light of that, old information is so valuable. Dan King: [22:43] That is fascinating. I always like to end, and I feel you almost answered this question, but I feel you could answer it a second time even more beautifully. When you're not building amazing conferences, bringing people together, creating events that inspire people, what do you do for fun? Steve Turney: [22:59] I have stopped some things that I used to do. When my daughter came into the world, I stopped golfing. I just kind of gave that up for the benefit of being able to put more time into her life. Yes, spending time with my family is certainly something I do. Lately, I'm in a phase where I'm enjoying the process of being an entrepreneur and building a business. And that is very hard. And then I keep finding myself coming back to it and enjoying the learning process and putting in the reps, learning from people like you and many others who have done that work or played those games. And so it is a beginner's mindset that I'm in. And a posture of humility, quite honestly, that leaves me open to quite a bit of learning right now. But that's kind of what I'm doing. Yeah, people, my friends do ask me, like, when do you play? And I just, I think it's also deferred gratification right now. And there's no promise of what's going to happen. But I do know that any kind of investment, time in the market usually beats timing the market, although there's something to be said for knowing when to make your moves. I'm trying to play long games right now. And some of that means deferring what I might want to do. You know, that's a sweet moment for something, maybe hopefully even more beautiful later. Dan King: [24:16] Well, all of that humility, as well as the expertise that you built through years of marketing, as well as the classical literature shows up in the awesome events that you create. I speak from personal experience here. So thank you for coming on and giving folks a sense of what they can expect if they go and always just on a human note, such a pleasure to connect Steve. So thank you for coming on and sharing that wisdom. Steve Turney: [24:42] It's so great to talk with you, Dan. It's always too short. So I look forward to our next conversation, wherever that is, but thanks for having me on.