A Work in Progress (Sean D’Souza)

      Welcome to Making It! This weekly show explores the lives and stories of entrepreneurs as they share their unique perspectives on their success and the path to making it.  

     Sean D’Souza, founder of Psycho Tactics, helps businesses develop marketing strategies based on the psychology of buyers. Sean explains his view of how a buyer’s decision boils down to a combination of risk and like. Simply listening, observing and putting yourself in another’s shoes are the keys to finding the sweet spot. 

     In this episode of Making It, Sean pieces together his own journey from writer to cartoonist to marketing strategist and the influences that shaped his path. Not only have Sean’s entrepreneurial goals evolved, so has his view of what it means to make it. For Sean, making it is a never-ending process that continually evolves.  While he still believes that the mark of success is having the resources and time to live on your own terms, he also feels that as a successful entrepreneur, you never really make it - you just keep making it.

“We tend to think that people are unpredictable, but people have very few things that they are looking for.”

– Sean D’Souza

Sean D’Souza is the founder of Psycho Tactics. Sean was taught early in life that education requires deconstruction. When you run into something that’s complex, you have to break it down into tiny components and then reassemble them to gain mastery in any subject. After reading Good to Great by Jim Collins, Sean decided he wanted to master deconstructing complex topics. He had been an entrepreneur since college and knew that building his own business was his chosen path. Sean leveraged his keen interest in and studies of psychology together with his ability to dissect and reassemble and set out to answer the toughest marketing questions: Why people buy and why they don’t. 

For nearly two decades, Sean has been answering these questions for clients all over the world through speaking events, workshops, consulting and courses. Sean’s normal work day begins when the clock strikes four. He says it’s the best part of the morning, and it helps him focus on the nitty-gritty of the human brain and why it does what it does. Sean is as much respected by his clients for his integrity as he is for the results he helps clients achieve. Psychotactics Philosophy—Care, Guidance and Protection.

Resources or websites mentioned in this episode:

Mirasee 

Sean’s website Psycho Tactics

Sean’s Twitter

Sean’s Podcast

Credits:

Guest – Sean D'Souza

Associate producer – Danny Bermant

Producer – Cynthia Lamb

Executive producer – Danny Iny

Assembled by – Geoff Govertsen

Audio Post Supervisor: Evan Miles, Christopher Martin

Audio Post Production by Post Office Sound

Music soundscape: Chad Michael Snavely

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Music and SFX credits: 

• Track Title: The Sunniest Kids

Artist Name(s): Rhythm Scott

Writer Name: Scott Roush

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: The Changing Tides

Artist Name(s): Brent Wood

Writer Name: Phillip Barnes

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: Only the Brave

Artist Name(s): Joshua Spacht

Writer Name: Joshua Spacht

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

Episode transcript:

     I'm Sean D'Souza and you're listening to Making It! I run a business called Psycho Tactics. Yes, you heard that right. It's Psycho Tactics. And what we do is we look at why customers buy and why they don't. And that pretty much takes up all of our day. 

     So I moved to New Zealand and I would meet with these agencies and then I would go on holiday sometimes and and then I would get in touch with them and they would say, "Oh where were you?" We had this really big $3,000 job and, I get really annoyed with myself because I not only lost the $3,000, but I also opened the door to competition, which is why I started reading books at the public library. Which is another really cool thing because I didn't have that in India.

     When I went to the public library here in Auckland New Zealand, I could get access to all these books and I just got a 30 books at the time, started reading them and then found, "Oh I'm really interested in marketing..." or copywriting or something to that effect. And I started writing articles online; this is back in 2000. It was in six point and I don't know if you know point size but six point is like... you need a magnifying glass to read it. And there was no subscribe button, there was, like, you read a lot and then it just said, "If you would like to subscribe, click here," and just the click here had a little hyperlink under it. And 1000 people subscribed, not in one day, but we had a list of 1000 people. So I don't know maybe the internet was more, more gullible back then. More trusting back then. But it kind of showed us that it worked and that's kind of where we started. 

     So I heard this the other day on a podcast and someone said, what do you do for a living? And the answer was "I listen for a living." And that's kind of it kind of takes your breath away when you realize that that's what you do. You listen. You put yourself in the other person's place. So the psychology of how the other person thinks is mostly not about some fancy thing... but about listening or watching what are they doing. And then when they don't do something the way you expect them to do, why didn't they do it? We tend to think that people are very unpredictable, but people have very few things that they're looking for and basically they're looking for things like risk and if there is a certain amount of risk then they don't like that situation and then they get to a point where, "Okay I don't have that much risk, but I don't like it that much." And if I were to boil things down to how I understand the world it is just risk and like....