Simon Chappuzeau is the Founder and CEO of StoryLux, a company that implements Linkedin marketing strategies primarily for business coaches and smaller companies. He is also the host of the How I Went Viral podcast where he breaks down viral posts on LinkedIn. Simon has been a member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) for 10 years. 

In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran interviews Simon Chappuzeau, the Founder and CEO of StoryLux, about tips and strategies for optimizing a LinkedIn post. They also discuss the lessons Simon learned from working in the corporate events industry, his experience studying script development at UCLA, and how he helps clients create better LinkedIn content.

Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

• How Simon Chappuzeau’s artistic background influenced his career 
• Simon talks about studying script development at UCLA and working in the media industry
• How Simon entered the corporate events industry
• What attracted Simon to LinkedIn marketing?
• Tips for optimizing a LinkedIn post
• How Simon helps clients create better, consistent LinkedIn content

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

• StoryLux
• StoryLux on LinkedIn
• Simon Chappuzeau on LinkedIn
• How I Went Viral podcast
• Justin Welsh on LinkedIn
• ChatGPT

Sponsor: Rise25

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution. 

We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.

What do you need to start a podcast?

When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.

We make distribution easy

We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars,  YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk,  and many more.  

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win? 

Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.

Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:14

Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we ask today’s most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, your host for the revolution, John Corcoran.

John Corcoran 0:40

All right, welcome everyone. John Corcoran here, the host of this show. And if you’re new to this podcast, go check out our archives because we’ve got all kinds of great interviews with smart CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs from a range of companies. Check out Netflix, Kinkos’, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard. LendingTree, lots of different great episodes for you to check out there. I’m also the Co-founder of Rise25, where we help connect b2b business owners to their ideal prospects. My guest here today is Simon Chappuzeau, oh, sorry, Chappuzeau, there we go. He is the Founder and CEO of StoryLux, which is in a company that implements marketing strategies with a focus on LinkedIn, primarily for business coaches, and smaller companies. So if you have any interest in getting more mileage out of LinkedIn, doing it more effectively, then I know that this is going to be valuable for you, because we’re really gonna dive in to that he is also the host of the How I Went Viral podcast where he breaks down viral posts on LinkedIn, and why they did so well in interviews, people that created them. 

And of course, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, my company, where we help connect b2b businesses to their clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcasts and content marketing. And you can learn all about what we do at Rise25.com. Alright, Simon, my pleasure to have you here. We’ve known each other for a while. And you’ve got a interesting background, I love to ask people about how entrepreneurial they were, as a kid, you grew up with a family who was very artistic, your parents are musicians. And so you’re taught to play musical instruments as a kid, which reflecting on it, given what you do now, which is helping people to tell better stories using the platform of LinkedIn, there’s definitely a creative element to it. How much you think that that background, being raised not in an entrepreneurial household, not in a business household, but in a creative background? Creative household? affects the work that you do now?

Simon Chappuzeau 2:37

Yeah. Hey, John, thanks for having me. Great question. I’m asking myself, so there’s definitely I mean, a my world growing up was all about music and being artistic. And the whole notion of making money and sort of trying to build teams was something that was very foreign to me and my family. And so when I started out, growing up studying business, by studying studying in life, all I thought about was doing something creative. And all I could think of that was not music, because I didn’t want to do music, but something artistic. I ended up doing film. And because yeah, film can be a very artistic medium, but can also be very commercial. And so that’s how I made a decision to go into film and started script development, which, as I had to find out, then was very systematic, artistic, but really more almost scientific method of developing scripts and helping authors to do that. Yeah,

John Corcoran 3:48

actually, one of my first jobs after college, right, as I wrapped up college, was doing script coverage, as they call it, reviewing scripts that hadn’t been produced yet. And writing basically a one page summary for the great Polly Platt who won an Academy Award for broadcast news was a really impressive producer at the time. And it was really, it was really interesting reading scripts and kind of giving feedback. But you’re right, there is kind of a structure, there’s a formula to it, which of course, is similar to would you say that, you know, LinkedIn posts can have a formula to them. Yeah,

Simon Chappuzeau 4:29

absolutely. That’s that’s so funny. I started the same way reading scripts for producers and branding, this one page report. So I think we both know what we did. But, yeah, being able to see the structure and the script helps to understand whether it’s any good and whether whether it could work on the screen. And it’s something that I found you also see in good LinkedIn posts. And you can you can really see a structure that makes it easy for the reader to read. Post makes it easy for the movie guy to follow the story in the film theater.

John Corcoran 5:04

Now, how did you grew up in Germany? How did you end up at UCLA studying film scripts? Because that’s, you know, you the UCLA, the UC is tend to be focused, I think 90% or something are in state people are California residents. How did you end up going all the way to UCLA?

Simon Chappuzeau 5:20

Well, good question. I think, at the time, it was the only place in the world, we could actually study script development. And there was no other place, maybe, maybe in New York, but in Europe, definitely. Film was seen as a very artistic thing and was more like the, the director would come up with a big vision and probably write the script. But there was no, there was no, nobody was thinking about doing that. And for a systematic way to analyze and sort of try to target a film for a specific audience. That is something that was developed in the US. And I mean, you see the the film industry in the US, it’s much more commercialized, much, much more structured. And in order to do that, you need to have these tools. And so back then, the only place to actually learned about that was going to UCLA, or USC. And that’s how I ended up going down. Because I figured it’s the only place where I could actually learn about script editing.

John Corcoran 6:23

It’s interesting to me careers, that kind of, you know, are individuals who in their career, they find something they’re passionate about. And then it takes a little bit of roundabout way of getting back to the original thing that they’re passionate about, or monetizing. The thing that they’re passionate about, like, for example, my father was in journalism was in TV news, we grew up around that grew around media, he did actually film reviews on television. So I was around media a lot. And then I did radio and college. So I was interested in that I did newspaper. So I was interested in that. Now, what we do now with with helping companies start podcasts, is in the media world, generally, it’s a new landscape, but it’s still in the media world took a while to get back to that, right? You know, with you, there’s a similarity in the sense that you knew you’re interested in something creative, you’re interested in film development, there’s probably something very analytical and creative about your mind where you can kind of break down the structure. And now years later, you’re back doing that same thing, understanding the structure of something, it’s a different piece of content, and then advising clients on it. But you had a roundabout way of getting there.

Simon Chappuzeau 7:36

Oh, exactly. It’s, I feel like I went full circle came back to one of the beginning 20 to 25 years ago. And it’s interesting because it comes to understand more about yourself what you like and what you’re good at. And I remember back in the days, when I started to work in the industry, it always sounds very glamorous, and everybody was like artsy cool, you film it. But seriously, it was it didn’t get a lot of money, it was a very competitive market, because you have a lot of people who want to be in film. And so it was, it was no fun. And that was why I left the industry after a couple of years because I back then I didn’t see a way how I could make a living a decent living and the industry. And but I always loved looking at a story and trying to see how that story might resonate with a certain audience. And there were just stories, and you might have made the same experience some scripts that just sort of grabbed you and sort of like, throw it into storage and loved it, and then others that sort of just let you go. And always try to understand why is that why do certain stories work better with me, or a certain audience, and coming full circle 25 years into the future today. That is basically what we do on LinkedIn. I mean, we try to help the the owners of LinkedIn profiles to understand how what they pose or what they want to pose, how that potentially resonates with a certain audience. And there are certain principles of work. If you talk about certain values that people hold, high and love. That is something that will resonate with a certain audience that shares these values. So we tried to help our clients to think about them to become self aware, and to also see the market, if you will, of readers that are trying to engage and it’s a very similar thing to fill. But the cool thing is, with film, you wait years until you get the results at the box office. And between the script that you read and the film on the screen, so many people fit into the old thing. It’s not it’s not recognizable, but with LinkedIn, you write it today and tomorrow, you know when was a box or a box office? Hit on also much more rewarding,

John Corcoran 10:02

good way of putting it I want to ask about how you ended up from film development at UCLA to corporate events business for many years. But before I get to that, one more anecdote about the world of screenwriting scripts and stuff like that, when I was trying to break into this world, this is before I went and got a job at the White House in the Clinton years. I was in Hollywood, and there was this script that it sold for, it was like a million bucks or a million half bucks, brand new writer, it got a lot of attention, because the title of it was untitled teenage sex comedy that can be made for under $10 million that readers will probably hate, but I think you will love and that was literally on the cover page of the of the script. I remember reading it. And it was hilarious over the top line ever. Yeah, it was like, it was crazy, right? And it sold for like a million bucks. And this was a brand new writer not sold anything before. So it got a lot of attention. That became American Pie. But I remember reading it and reading it before and be like, This is all so over the top crazy ridiculous. And it got made, you know, it was great movie. But so how did you end up in the corporate events business, you end up basically running the Berlin Film Festival, which is not a place that a lot of people think of, you know, running film festivals.

The post Simon Chappuzeau | Helping Businesses Tell Better Stories Through LinkedIn Marketing appeared first on Smart Business Revolution.