Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: What actually drives solution-oriented thinking, and how did it shape the launch of a hit reality series? In this expert talk, Dr. Yasemin Yazan is joined by publisher Julien Backhaus (ERFOLG magazine, Wirtschaft.TV, and the Amazon Prime reality series “Consultants — Life in the Fast Lane”) to talk small first steps over grand plans, networks as problem-solving shortcuts, the courage to risk failure in public, and why the smallest common denominator beats waiting for the perfect plan.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Good morning, everyone. Today we’re welcoming Julien Backhaus for a special expert talk on solution-oriented thinking. Julien Backhaus is a publisher and editor who has built considerable success with various magazines, including the well-known ERFOLG magazine and Founders, as well as his own business channel, Wirtschaft.TV. He’s the author of the bestsellers “Erfolg” (what you can learn from the highly successful), “Ego — Winners Are Good Egoists,” and “Bullshit Rules,” and he’s received the Change Award as well as being named Man of the Year 2019. Right now, Julien is celebrating yet another success with the production of his new reality series “Consultants — Life in the Fast Lane” on Amazon Prime Freevee. The series quickly climbed to number one among documentary series, showing the everyday business world of German consultants, and with plenty of tension and surprising turns it has already captivated countless viewers. What exactly is behind this success, what it has to do with solution-oriented thinking, and how all of that connects to our current overarching theme of thinking — that’s what we’re talking about today. So, once again, very officially: good morning, dear Julien! I’m thrilled to have you here with me today, and I’m really curious to see which aspects we’ll get to cover.
Yes, and thank you for the invitation so early in the morning.
Wonderful. Actually, just before we started the introduction, we already got a little taste of what today’s topic is about — we had our first “scare” this morning. I don’t know if you had a similar moment already today, but for me it was actually the first opportunity to put solution-oriented thinking into practice this morning — to pick it up and figure out what to do. Maybe you can briefly describe what happened, dear Julien?
Well, I ignored your instructions. You specifically wrote to me yesterday, please be in the room right at 8:01, then everything will go smoothly. And I thought, well, let me just peek in at 7:36 already — just to see if everything’s working, if my app is updated, and so on. So I clicked on it and thought, okay, looks fine, and wanted to leave the room again. And suddenly it said: if you leave this room now, the room will be deleted. And I thought, oh no, what’s going on here? So I just stayed muted in there and messaged you right away, because that’s the first thing you do — if you need a solution, you ask someone who knows what they’re doing. So I asked you, and you said, just leave, it’ll probably be fine. And that turned out to be the case — I was able to go back in, and thankfully the room hadn’t been deleted.
Wonderful, thank you so much. And actually, because you went in so early, I didn’t have that experience myself of what would actually happen. On my end it just kept showing normally. So within a matter of seconds I had to think fast — of course I could have just said “stay in the room,” but by then we’d already have listeners joining, and a lot of people would wonder why nothing is being said even though the show is scheduled for 8. And they might just leave again. Then I thought, well, if it doesn’t work, we can always set up the room again. But I wanted to try this workaround only if we actually found at 8 o’clock that we couldn’t get in — accepting that we might start the show one or two minutes late and set up a new room. Because I know a new link gets generated every time, and we’d already announced on various platforms that the room would happen today, sharing that link. So if other people who aren’t necessarily familiar with Clubhouse tried to use the link directly instead of finding the room, they wouldn’t find us. So I decided to just take that residual risk and see what happens at 8. And in the end, everything worked out beautifully. I think it’s because you had already set me up as a moderator beforehand — that probably gives equal rights, which is likely why it worked.
Yes, absolutely. And that brings us right back to the point — and this is actually already the reflection phase. I asked myself whether it might be better in the future not to add you as co-host. But that has pros and cons too. The downside is: if I don’t add you as co-host, you can still use the link and get into the room, but you’d initially be among the listeners, and I’d have to keep an eye on when you’re in the room to give you the chance to come up and speak.
Well, you have a point there too. As long as the audience is manageable, I suppose it can be done either way. Exactly, and above all — that’s the beauty of it — it’s a live show, and sometimes there are a few challenges, and maybe we’re touching on this aspect of future skills here too: being able to tolerate and accept that something goes wrong sometimes, and being able to handle that. But since you said this was your first time experiencing that, I take it everyone else has been dutifully following your rules — I was the outlier this time. So you were at least the outlier in trying the link so early this morning. Had you tried it last night, you wouldn’t have gotten into the room at all — it would have opened automatically at some point this morning, I don’t know exactly how many minutes beforehand. And the others who didn’t follow the rule, so to speak, probably went in a minute early and simply stayed in.
Yes, of course, that makes sense.
Exactly. Wonderful. So we already had our first little situation this morning, but it fits perfectly with the topic of solution-oriented thinking we want to talk about today, also in connection with your new reality series, Consultants — Life in the Fast Lane. That’s what we’re here for today, and I’m really looking forward to it. Basically, there are two levels we can look at when it comes to solution-oriented thinking. First: you’ve done many different things in the past, quite successfully, so the question is, what influence has solution-oriented thinking had on your own success? And the second level we can open up is: what influence do you think solution-oriented thinking has on the success of the various protagonists in your reality series? So let’s look at it from both angles today. Let’s start with the first question — regarding your own personal success in your business, what role does solution-oriented thinking play, and what does it mean to you?
Yes, that’s almost a leading question, because solution-oriented thinking is very deeply anchored in me, and I believe that’s exactly why I’ve always been able to bring good products to market. My field is media, in the narrowest and broadest sense — communication is something I’ve been doing professionally for 18 years now. And if you don’t think in a solution-oriented way about challenges — well, “problems” isn’t quite the right word — as an entrepreneur, and especially as a consultant, you want to solve problems, you want to offer solutions. That’s how I approach media. If someone wanted to read about success in a magazine, that simply wasn’t possible before, because there was no success magazine. So we solved that problem. The same applied to the Sachwert magazine [tangible-assets magazine] twelve years ago, when I founded it — there was no magazine about physical investments back then, so we solved that problem too. And at some point it also came from a personal perspective. Like many people, I imagine, I enjoy some entertainment too — on the weekend you might want to watch something entertaining on some streaming platform. And I could never really watch German reality TV, because it’s mostly just shallow trash. So I’d occasionally watch things from the US instead, because I found them more high-quality. “Million Dollar Listing,” for example, is a series I enjoyed, because it wasn’t just showing sensationalist drama — it also had real business content, you could actually learn something. Interesting protagonists who genuinely did what they claimed to do on camera. That’s an issue with scripted reality, by the way — it’s almost always amateur actors. The policeman isn’t actually a policeman, he’s just a lay actor. But in a lot of American business-reality series, these were real protagonists. And I thought, why can’t we watch something like that in German? Why isn’t there something like this from Germany, maybe with German protagonists? That already starts with comprehension — you don’t have to read subtitles or google English words you don’t quite know, and then miss the next scene while you’re looking it up. That always annoyed me a bit. So I said, we have to do this ourselves someday, because back in 2010 I already had the idea for Wirtschaft TV — establishing a business channel in Germany. That took a long time too, because the time wasn’t right yet back then. Now we’re really at the forefront with Wirtschaft TV — we deliver stock market coverage from Frankfurt, we do interesting studio talks and news from the business world, and we supply the major German news platforms with that. And we said, okay, that’s really our core — we want to entertain a business-interested audience, that’s the core across all our publications. And from that own history, I said to myself: you know what, the next thing we do will be a reality series — a high-quality, entertaining business reality series. And that also took a while to get off the ground, finding the right partners so it could run on a major streaming platform and so on. But that’s how I approached it.
Wonderful. And I hear two aspects there I’d like to dig into. One is that you said “from my own perspective.” Now the question is — we’ve established in previous rooms that your own perspective doesn’t necessarily have to overlap with other people’s perspectives. So how do you make sure there’s an overlap there? And the second aspect you touched on, between the lines, is time — meaning it has to be the right time, and it also takes preparation time. Maybe you could go into those two points a bit more.
Yes, preparation time is needed, and it always depends on the complexity of a problem. You can take the first step immediately, and that’s usually what I do — look at what’s the smallest common denominator I can fulfill to move the project forward. Usually that’s information. In business, they say you really should know a lot about what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll run into some very nasty surprises. And doing that in parallel is the next challenge. But that was of course the first point — a lot of people face this. When I founded my first magazine, I had no idea how any of it worked. Where do you register? Where do you get a trade number? How do you even get into retail distribution? Who delivers it there? How does the logistics work? There are so many different open questions. And it was the same with the series. I knew how to produce videos for the web, and we did that very professionally and still do. But how you negotiate with streaming platforms, how it all works, what the revenue splits look like, and what you need to know in advance — that’s like being a book author. Before you write the product, you need to know what to pay attention to, otherwise you have to redo everything afterward, which isn’t economically sensible either. So you need to know in advance what to watch out for in designing a series, what formats you have to comply with, and so on, and what you might not have thought of at all yet. Those are the first things you can clarify before diving into the details — writing the script, casting protagonists, finding a production company, and so forth. Those are the first steps you can take immediately. And regarding the other question, whether it’s smart from your own perspective — I’d say yes, because there are roughly four or five perspectives in any market that more or less always overlap, and you can almost never reach all of them. I don’t believe that’s possible. Even if the iPhone is, in my opinion, a truly excellent phone, there are still people who say, I use Samsung, I use Xiaomi, whatever. And it’s been the same with my products. I’m 100 percent sure, even before launching a product, that it will find interested people — but that won’t be everyone, absolutely not. And especially with our media, I know we serve niches, because that’s my goal — to serve people who think similarly to me. That’s roughly a quarter of the market. And that’s enough for me, if I address that 25 percent as my potential group and know that, in the best case, we might reach maybe ten percent of them. They’re not regular consumers, but they’re people who at some point know our brand. So you know you’ve zeroed in on a certain target group. And once you start with small starter products, you quickly notice who the people are who watch, read, or consume this kind of thing — an MVP, if you will. Then you can zero in on that group and give them what nobody else delivers to them. I’ve always enjoyed that niche approach, both with the tangible-assets magazine and the success magazine. You’d hardly believe that success is a niche product, but especially in Germany, it really is — it’s a bit better in the US. But both the Success magazine in the US and the ERFOLG magazine in Germany will never reach the circulation or reach of a critical, gossip-type publication, because critical media are simply much more popular. People prefer to get worked up about something rather than learn something. And you have to be aware of that — which market you’re entering, who your target group is. You shouldn’t have inflated expectations. In fact, with many of our products we are market leaders — but within the niche.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Let’s look at another aspect. You said you operate in media — but magazines are quite different from producing a reality series. What did that mean in terms of new skills you had to learn, and what challenges did you face? Maybe you can share a bit behind the scenes.
Funnily enough, the distribution channels, production paths, and often even the names of the individual entities are actually the same as in publishing. Book publishing, newspaper publishing, and film actually overlap quite strongly. There are film publishers, book publishers, magazine publishers; there are film distributors, magazine distributors, book distributors, and correspondingly the outlets, the retailers — they’re just called Thalia for books, Presse Plus or similar for magazines, and Amazon or Netflix for films. But the approach, even the producers — there’s a magazine producer, a film producer, a book producer — it’s all very similar. So structurally, in terms of hierarchical thinking, I didn’t have to adjust that much. I just had to find the right partners who do this in the film industry. So, from that angle, it’s actually quite similar. Did you have a second part to that question?
Yes — challenges you faced, where you can maybe take us a bit behind the scenes.
Oh yes, right. One of the big challenges, I think, is that you naturally have to think in a different language — namely, visual language. But as I said, we’d already been doing that well for ten years with Wirtschaft TV, so it wasn’t such a huge adjustment, the way it would be if you were used to thinking purely in text for a magazine. Sure, a magazine has some visual language too, but it’s a smaller share, at least in an informational magazine — a lifestyle magazine is different, with a higher image share. But in the series, of course, we’re talking entirely in moving images. That means we have to try to convey all the information, both emotionally and factually, through images. We can’t have a mismatch between text and image, where the story just doesn’t fit the picture — that can happen in print as well as in film, where a wrong edit is inserted into a scene and it just doesn’t match up. So you have to watch out for that. It’s a big challenge to fit different protagonists into one format — that has to be said clearly. It’s similar with a magazine: you have a magazine style, and you have to ask your authors, guest authors, interview partners, and so on to fit into that a little. And with a series it’s even more so, or worse, because you also have to ask people to do things they might not naturally do. They’ll say, I wouldn’t do that in real life. And we say, I know, but the viewer needs to understand what we’re trying to convey right now, and we need to show that visually — so we need a startled expression from you right now, even if you don’t normally look startled. Those are the small details, the nuances where you sometimes have to argue a bit with people on set and try to explain why they need to do it this way, why they need to enter from the left even though they normally always come from the right, whatever it may be. That’s one thing. The other thing, as with any product, is finding a way to market it. You have to figure out how to get a brand-new title, with no history at all, in front of consumers. Because consumers already have their shows and formats, which is why some series are already on season fifteen — a loyal audience has developed. But if you’re a rookie just starting with season one — we actually released two seasons at once — you first have to get into the market and become known somehow. But I already knew that from all our other products, including my books. They’re not published by my own publishing house, but I’m still interested in making sure they become known too. And we had to do the same for the series. It started with a cinema premiere for press and everyone involved — a pre-premiere, before it was even available for streaming. That’s how the first press coverage started, a few interviews we filmed, a few Instagram stories, a few vlogs. Then it continued with the release, which was also a bit tricky and tense, because — you wouldn’t believe it — Amazon, or streaming platforms in general, are a bit less communicative than what I’m used to from the magazine world. There, we work with very fixed dates, no way around it — when the truck arrives at the door, the magazine comes out, period. With streaming platforms, especially Amazon, it was a bit different. They said, once the review is done, it’ll launch — but that review took forever, and we started sweating a bit, waiting for the date to finally arrive. And eventually it did, thankfully. Until then we couldn’t really do proper marketing, because we couldn’t say “starting on this date” and so on — we had to wait for that review first. So it ended up being sort of a last-minute scramble — okay, it’s launching now, all systems go. And then we talked to a lot of media outlets, did an enormous amount online and on social media, both organic and paid campaigns. And it started off, and thankfully it didn’t start slowly at all — it took off relatively quickly, and the series climbed fast. We always hoped to reach the top 100, that was a goal of ours, because we said, for a new series up against big Hollywood competition, that would already be quite something. And we were absolutely thrilled. It also helped that we got into Amazon’s Freevee program — accessible through the regular Prime app, but you don’t even need to be a Prime member. That was an advantage, because the series could basically be watched completely for free, with some ads sprinkled in — you can argue whether that’s good or not, but that’s how it is. And because of that, it really got pushed extremely well. Amazon liked it too and moved it up onto the homepage. As a result, we were actually number one for a few weeks among documentary series, and even among regular series we were in the top 20. That was incredibly exciting for us, and then the series started carrying itself a bit, because success speaks for itself — someone sees it on the homepage and thinks, wow, cool, let me check that out.
Very, very cool. And you also mentioned — in this context, it sounds like you were, in a way, waiting for things to finally get going. You’re in a certain dependency on external factors, in this case Amazon. Often, when we’re planning projects in our fields, we do have fixed deadlines, and you can see that quite nicely in the reality series — we have concrete protagonists giving us insight into their projects, into their day-to-day work, so to speak. And often — if I may summarize, feel free to add to this — it’s about projects running in the background that, as an outsider, you normally don’t get to see. You see the end product, but you don’t know how it got there. And here we get to see the various challenges the protagonists have to overcome — what happens behind the scenes gets shown. Would you like to speak to that first?
I’ve always found this world extremely exciting, even though I don’t consider myself a consultant today. I actually started out as a consultant myself, because I went self-employed with a media agency when I was 18, and back then I didn’t have a publishing house yet, so I know this world a little too. But this world itself is incredibly exciting, because, exactly as you say, these are normally the shadow figures you don’t notice behind corporations and politicians and so on. That’s largely intentional too, because the brand is supposed to shine, not the consultant who may have made it possible or accompanied it. And we wanted to show that, because I found it exciting. I mean, there are a lot of real-estate-agent reality series, and as I said, I enjoy watching the American ones too, because I find it exciting what actually happens behind the scenes when, say, a listing agreement falls through or whatever. And I found it exciting to bring that into the consulting world. It also really surprised me that this didn’t exist yet. So we’re quite niche and quite new with this title and this approach, especially in bringing together different categories of consultants. And, well, now I’ve forgotten your question again.
Right, and you’ve actually already answered it. Great. So here we basically have various deadlines — something happens in the background, a project gets set up, we have a deadline, but then there are challenges you normally don’t see, because you only see the end product. And here we get a view of what happens beforehand, before any end product hits the market or whatever.
Exactly, and as you say, the deadline has to be kept — for example because there’s a launch date, because a trip is coming up, because the meeting is already scheduled, because the client needs the product tomorrow, whatever it is. And the world just doesn’t work that linearly — problems always come up, and these problems threaten the timeline. As the documentaries so nicely put it, a race against time begins. And that’s exactly how it is in reality. Sometimes you have to set priorities, make decisions, maybe rewrite certain paths. The goal stays fixed, carved in stone, but the path in the sand might get erased and redrawn — we have to go left instead of right, otherwise we won’t make it in time. Sometimes you have to compromise, sometimes you have to make cuts, whatever it takes. And showing that process, that it’s possible, and that afterward often nobody even notices — that’s the exciting part. People always say, oh, but we can’t do it that way. And then behind the scenes people often say, the audience doesn’t know how we actually wanted to do it. So the consumer, the end user, whoever, never even notices — we can change our plan, do it the other way around, but in the end we arrive at more or less the same result. And I think having that flexibility in your head, that elasticity, is simply important, especially as a consultant. As a consultant, there’s no way around it — if you’re a stubborn mule, I don’t think you belong in the consulting world at all.
Yes, and what becomes very, very clear is that certain things are planned, but then something unplanned happens, so to speak. And usually these are things that happen right at the last minute, which is exactly when this flexibility and elasticity is called for. And that brings us straight to solution-oriented thinking. You could just bury your head in the sand and say, well, we simply can’t keep the deadline — but there’s a client who commissioned something, and now you really have to do everything you can to deliver exactly what was agreed. The “how” can vary, as I understand from what you just described, but we have to arrive at that result, and that’s where it gets really exciting. Maybe you can give us a few more insights there.
Sure, here’s an example from the reality series. A fitness studio was being planned — these consultants help open fitness-studio chains, develop concepts, and so on. We followed Alex and Tim through their everyday work. There are always three cases per season, and one of the cases was a fitness studio that was about to open. Upstairs there was a class room, which is basically the heart of the center — that’s where opening celebrations happen and where the class programs take place, yoga and whatever else. This class room absolutely needed a door, a partition, a front, to separate it from the rest of the space, and it was supposed to be glass. Full-surface glass was planned. But the challenge was — and this was during the last three years — that material shortages were severe, and there was also a shortage of skilled tradespeople, so two factors combined to make it clear that this glass front would absolutely not be finished in time for the opening. So of course they first tried, okay, how can we still achieve 100 percent? How can we get the complete glass front installed anyway? So they made calls, pulled every lever they could, but it turned out, no, it just doesn’t work. So, what’s the second option? You can consider whether a different product, a different approach, could still get you to the result you need — we need a separated class room. And then one of the protagonists — and this is where experience helps, whether you have it yourself or get it through outside hints or consultants, but they had it themselves — remembered that they’d once worked in a studio with a tiled glass front. And they’d noticed back then that it’s faster, easier to handle, more contractors are able to install it, and the material, being smaller pieces, is available faster too. So they said, okay, how about we go with a tiled front? They checked with manufacturers — okay, would that be possible? Yes, actually it would. Great, so that’s settled — now we just need a contractor. And that turned into a bit of a funny situation, because every contractor said no way, we’re booked solid up to the roof, and so on. Then it came to a point where Alex said to Tim — or the other way around, Tim said to Alex — how about we ask so-and-so? And Alex said, no, that guy’s an ass, I can’t work with him, he’s a jerk, and so on. And Tim said, yes, we know he’s an ass, but he’s reliable and gets his work done. So the project was put above personal feelings, because it’s about the client, who wants his job done and couldn’t care less whether someone is friendly or unfriendly — he wants his studio ready on opening day. So they called him, and he also said, well, problem is, I’m fully booked and time’s tight and all that. So they tried to lure him in with a series of future orders, saying, look, honestly you’re kind of an ass and we’ve never worked with you before, but we have a whole series of orders, and you seem to be the only one right now who can actually deliver — so let’s set aside our personal animosities, and I’m offering you this series contract, it’s a huge volume, if you get this done for us now, quickly, you’ll just have to ask some other client if they can start a week later — maybe they don’t have as much time pressure as we do. So it’s a bit of a negotiation — you have to show perspectives too. Maybe the contractor hadn’t even considered that he could push back one job by a week because it wasn’t as time-critical as Alex and Tim’s. Long story short, it worked out, it worked, and everyone was happy — the tiled wall looked just as good and got done faster.
Wonderful. And what becomes very, very clear here are several aspects we keep coming back to in Deep Talk. For instance, we talk about emotion regulation — you just said the decision was made to put the project above personal feelings, because it simply had to move forward at that point. We also have this negotiation aspect — genuinely offering deals, so to speak, that can lead to the desired outcome. We’ve talked about negotiation here in Deep Talk before too. And a really important component I find in all this solution-oriented thinking is the aspect of network — not just looking at how I can solve the problem, but with whom I can solve the problem, and what contacts I have that I can bring into play here. Let’s pick up on this network aspect, and then we can open up the hand-raise feature too.
Absolutely, network has always been my thing too. Ever since I went self-employed, I’ve tried to build as broad a network as possible. And I was lucky that through my agency I got to know so many different people, industries, and companies, who keep helping me to this day — even though they’re completely unrelated to my own field. Often you run into problems where you think, wow, I never would have thought I’d need a contact for this someday — but I’m glad I have one. So my view is that you shouldn’t only stay in your own bubble, or your own industry circle, but really step outside of it — and LinkedIn and similar platforms offer great opportunities for that. Back in the day it was Xing — I started my networking and online-networking career on Xing, or OpenBC as it was called back then. It’s really valuable to spread yourself broadly like that.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Let’s take this opportunity to open up the hand-raise feature, so our listeners can join in and ask a question or share their own thoughts and experiences on this. So I’ll open it up now. Just a quick reminder, or for those who weren’t here at the start of the room — we record the entire session, and anyone who joins automatically consents to it being published. And we have three small room rules: a profile photo where you’re clearly recognizable, your first and last name, and at least one sentence in your bio. Of course, if you’d rather not come up, you’re welcome to share a question or thought via chat instead, and we can pick it up from there. Take this chance to get into direct exchange with Julien. You’re all very warmly invited to join. Since we’re limited to about 60 minutes and want to wrap up reasonably on time, don’t wait too long — if you really have a question or something on your mind, please take the opportunity to come up directly. In a few minutes I’ll turn the hand-raise feature off again, just a heads-up in case anyone needs a minute to think about how to phrase their question or thought — but still try to come up as quickly as possible so you can share your point too.
Dear Julien, before we maybe pick up on a question or two, would you like to say a bit more about exactly where people can find the series? You already mentioned you don’t necessarily need to be a Prime member to watch it — I’ve shared the link here. Maybe you can say a bit more about that?
Sure, we started on Amazon Prime Freevee — you can find that normally through the search bar, or you go to the Freevee button, which is right there in the regular Amazon Video app. That’s one option. You can also watch it on Apple TV, that works too. You can also get it through Google Play if you’re an Android user or whatever — that works as well. We also run on the TV channel MyStory, which regularly broadcasts reruns, usually in the evenings. MyStory is a fast channel — you can watch it through TV apps like Waipu, which also carries Spiegel TV, Stern TV, Focus TV. You can watch MyStory TV there too. They also broadcast several other reality series throughout the day. So that’s roughly the current state of things.
Wonderful. On one hand, there’s the option to consume it, so to speak — to watch it. I imagine some people might also be wondering, how does one actually get onto this show? Do you approach people directly, can you apply, is there a way to get featured yourself? Maybe you can speak to that too, dear Julien.
Well, we haven’t had applications so far — we’ve specifically sought out people ourselves and gone into conversation with them. A lot of people turn us down, though, and I completely understand that, because you do expose yourself in the process. That’s one part. The other part is that we tell people, please keep in mind, we’re producing an entertainment format — of course it also has to do with knowledge and content, but it’s also entertainment, and you have to be willing to be a bit entertaining in front of the camera. Many people can’t or don’t want to deal with that. You also have to be able to fail on camera, because we don’t just show the positive sides, we also show the negative ones, where something doesn’t work out, or someone gets fooled, whatever it might be. That requires a bit of thick skin — to publicly experience a setback, so to speak. I mean, usually the consultants still manage to turn it into a win in the end, but there are these tension arcs where something first completely goes wrong. So we always have a pool of people who would generally be willing, and then we talk with them and say, look, here’s what to expect. And, well, we need actual shooting time, and it has to be uninterrupted. You have to understand we’re not following someone around for 30 weeks hoping for the three juiciest cases we can air — we can’t air ten-hour phone calls, that’s just not possible. So it’s scheduled quite tightly in advance, and we say, look, from this date to that date, we’re filming, and during that time you can’t squeeze in coffee with grandma or staff meetings or whatever — you have to be fully on the road with us and completely available to us.
Wonderful. Can you already share a bit about what’s coming up next — both regarding the reality series, what’s planned there, and also regarding your own personal path? What’s the next big thing you want to tackle afterward?
Well, we’re indeed producing the third season now, and of course we didn’t know that in advance — we had to stay flexible enough to know it could flop or it could be a hit. We had roughly a 50-50 chance, maybe even better, because in a niche you often find success faster than if you go for the broad mass market. So it turned out to be a hit, and naturally nothing stands in the way of a third season, because Amazon isn’t interested in continuing a flop series. So we’re happy about that, and we’ve already found great protagonists, really exciting topics, where we say, wow, this will be another milestone, this is going to be great. And of course, from the first two seasons we learned a lot that we can now carry over into the third — how we can improve certain details, and so on. As for me personally — you already mentioned in the intro that I’ve launched various things, and that’s something that genuinely fills me with joy, taking on new projects. I’m not someone who says, I’ve been doing the same thing for 30 years — I want variety, I want to create new things. New excites me more than old, so of course I’m looking forward to tackling new projects in magazines, film, and books again. I’m not someone who broadcasts things loudly in advance, though. I didn’t say anything publicly during the filming of Consultants either — I’d rather show the result afterward than announce things publicly beforehand, because that’s also a competitive disadvantage if you give away too much insider information.
Yes, I can really relate to that. But it makes clear — you already said earlier that some things need quite a bit of preparation time, and then you’d rather come out with the result. So for me that means we can already look forward to the next big thing, so to speak, and just let ourselves be surprised by what comes. What I also love is that Patrick shared something in the chat: congratulations on the great show on Amazon and the courage for a new format. Courage — encouraging and doing. What do you think about that?
Courage is a huge topic. I remember my conversation with Reinhold Messner and also with Wladimir Klitschko for ERFOLG magazine — both spoke very extensively about this topic of courage. And I already touched on this — you need courage precisely because you might fail. Courage means doing things you can’t do — you don’t need courage for things you’re already good at, that’s clear. But for things where you say, this is new territory for me, this is a new experience, kind of a black box — that’s where you need courage, because you don’t know what the result will be. Doing it anyway, facing that fear and overcoming it — that’s exactly where courage is needed. And I think it can then give courage to others too. Not just by watching someone push past boundaries, which can encourage you yourself, but also through an end product — a series, a magazine, a book, whatever — you can feel encouraged too. Every book author knows how much fun it is to get letters from people saying, hey, your book motivated me — and I mean “motivated” with a capital “M” — to take a step I hadn’t dared take for a long time, and so on. That’s always wonderful too, when you can trigger that kind of impulse.
Let me follow up on that. You said earlier that when you started all this, you were of course happy that it landed so well — but it could have flopped too, not just with this particular topic or project, but with others as well. You only really know after implementation whether something is actually accepted. What would it have meant if things had suddenly taken a different turn and you’d felt, oh, we’re somehow not reaching people with this? Would that have meant doing more marketing? Or at what point does it mean saying, okay, I think this just didn’t work out?
Well, you definitely have to find out whether it’s actually about product quality or about lack of reach. If it’s about product quality, then it doesn’t make sense to pour marketing into a bad product — you should develop a better one instead. We wouldn’t have been alone in that either, if we hadn’t had big success with it, because — honestly, I don’t know the exact numbers — but probably half of new series flop. They just don’t work. Even in recent weeks and months, several series came out that got cancelled after the first or second episode because they simply didn’t work with audiences — and these were big networks, with plenty of reach. So it’s not about reach in that case, it’s about the concept itself. So, sure, we would have had to say, either people don’t like the idea of a consultant series, in which case we’d just drop it. But we could more or less rule that out already, because there are comparable formats out there. We just went for something more high-quality, more content-driven, less sensationalist, less crude — but for that we have our small target group. We never expected to reach five million people with it, because there’s no market for five million people for a product like this — it’s more like one to two million at most. In Germany there are, I believe, around four million self-employed people, and you can calculate from there — sure, there are also managers and executives who aren’t typically self-employed, but this group of genuinely business-interested people just isn’t that large in Germany. So we could calculate that we’d never exceed a certain scale, and we’re fine with that.
Wonderful. And that brings us back to this aspect of courage — it shows that some things first need to be planned and implemented before you can see the response and deal with it accordingly. Above all, then reflecting and drawing out lessons learned, rather than assuming everything will always go smoothly, but instead looking at what you can do with those new learnings. So I think it’s wonderful that all these facets are becoming clear here. Julien, is there anything I haven’t asked yet that you’d like us to cover before we wrap up the room together?
Oh, you’re catching me off guard there. I don’t know if there’s any particular point that would especially interest the listeners — I think we’ve really covered everything very well, and you’ve always summarized it so nicely afterward. That’s the thing about me between 7 and 10 in the morning, I need a bit longer — that’s why you did such a great job with that.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Then let me ask you one last question about solution-oriented thinking — is there maybe one tip you could give our listeners?
I think a lot of people have a problem in front of the problem. You have a big problem ahead of you and think, oh my god, that’s overwhelming — whether it’s life goals, financial goals, or business goals, it always feels huge, powerful, somewhat overwhelming. My approach has always been, okay, what’s the smallest first step I can take? I touched on that briefly earlier — it does me good personally, when I’m looking for solutions, to start with small steps, climbing up that mountain. I mean, that’s how it works, isn’t it — if you told a child, well, you start with the first step to climb the mountain, they’d say, sure, that’s obvious, that’s clear. But adults often think from the summit downward, and I find that difficult sometimes. What I find easier is, as you said earlier, activating someone in your network, calling someone who might know about it, maybe reading something. Sometimes you just google something and see, is there a study on this, are there statistics that could help me put this problem into context? And maybe the problem has even existed before — maybe there’s a Wikipedia entry about it that already explains how it was solved. Personally, I’ve always benefited a lot from reading entrepreneur biographies, because they’ve pretty much experienced every problem already, especially if they’re older gentlemen or ladies. And that often leads you quickly to some reading material where you think, ah wait, I’ve read that before, let me look at that again, how did they solve this problem back then.
Wonderful, thank you so much, and that also fits nicely with our next overarching theme, because starting next week, toward the end of next week I believe, we’ll begin approaching the next overarching theme, action, opening up various rooms around it. And you can see the connection there — we said from the start that we wanted to look at reflection, then thinking, then action, and we’ll bring those connections together again in a final week, how it all ties together. So I think it’s wonderful that even here, with solution-oriented thinking, we’re already looking at, when we want to tackle new topics, what’s that first small thing I can already put into action, what can I already start with. And that ultimately helps us move into action too. Wonderful, thank you so much. I think we’ve opened up a lot of facets here. Thank you so much, dear Julien, for your time and these insights — I think that’s wonderful. We’ve shared the link here, and it will also be featured in the podcast accordingly — so if you don’t know the series yet, check it out, and if you already know it, feel free to watch it again with these aspects we covered today in mind — things like emotion regulation, solution-oriented thinking, network, and many other aspects we discussed here today. Maybe looking at it again with this specific lens can lead to even more learnings and help you find your own answers, seeing it through this particular perspective too.
That was Julien Backhaus on solution-oriented thinking and his new reality series “Consultants — Life in the Fast Lane.” Thank you so much, Julien. Would you like to say a few closing words?
Yes, I was really happy about your invitation. Glad I could talk about this topic, and I wish everyone great success.
Wonderful, thank you so much. And tomorrow, Deep Talk continues — we’ll come together again at 8 a.m. and look at thinking and decision-making: how does our thinking process influence our decision-making, that’s the question we’ll explore. So you’re all very warmly invited to join again tomorrow morning at 8. I wish you a wonderful and successful day, whatever you have planned. With that, until then — ciao.
