Social Capital: Recent Episodes
Lori Highby
Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast, where we dive into social relationships and how the investment you put into them establishes trust, reciprocity, and value within your network and community.
Our host, Lori Highby, will connect with top professionals and dive into their best networking stories and techniques to share with you!
Meet Heidi Solomon-OrlickHeidi is a proven veteran in Enterprise sales as well as a DEI and active aging advocate. With over 3 decades of global sales and executive leadership experience Heidi has generated over $1.5 Billion in revenue throughout her career in the BPO industry and has created thousands of jobs globally. She currently serves as Founder & CEO of GirlzWhoSell and CRO of The DORS Group Powered by Keller Williams. Founded in 2020, GirlzWhoSell is committed to democratizing professional sales and to building the largest pipeline of diverse, early-stage female sales talent. Heidi is a 2x author who, in 2022, released the highly acclaimed and award-winning book “Heels to Deals: How Women Are Dominating in Business-to-Business Sales.” Heidi is a 3x Stevie Award Winner for Women of the Year in Sales (Gold), Worldwide Sales Executive of the Year (Gold) and Women Helping Women (Bronze). She was listed in the Top 100 Women Magazine, was featured in Top Sales Magazine, was listed in the Top 100 Women in Sales published by Demandbase in both 2022 and 2023 and the Sales Collectives list of Women in Sales to Follow in 2024. Finally, Heidi has been ranked in the Top 50 Women Leaders of New Hampshire and was recently nominated for the SheRise 2024 Women in Leadership award.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:21 Introducing Today's Guest: Heidi Solomon-Orlick
02:51 Heidi's Journey and Influences
05:13 Sales as a Life Skill
06:00 The Intersection of Athletics and Sales
10:34 Closing the Gender Gap in Sales
16:35 Advice to My 20-Year-Old Self
19:43 Lori's Why and Final Words of Wisdom
21:40 Wrapping Up and Staying Connected
Connect with Heidi
GirlzWhoSell
Heels to Deals: How Women are Dominating in Business-to-Business Sales
Meet Brin'na Rollins-WilliamsBrin'na is an unshakable optimist who is an accomplished people leader with over 10 years' of Leadership experience at Target, Fortune 50 Company. From an Intern to District Senior Director overseeing multiple stores, thousands of team members and +$500 million in annual revenue.
As a high performance coach, speaker, and culture consultant Brin'na has discovered remarkable patterns, tools and resources that some of greatest, leaders and organizations use to think, act, and communicate. She is fascinated by how people and organizations truly have the ability to unlock team synergy, elevate company culture to make a lasting impact on their employees and in the world. She has devoted her life to leadership, sharing her experience, thinking, and leading a movement to inspire people to do the things that inspire them to be successful both at work and in their life.
Free PDF Resource: From Chaos to Clarity: A Simple Tool to Reclaim Your Time, and Recharge Your Life
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:20 Introducing Today's Guest: Brin'na Rollins Williams
02:36 Scaling Leadership: Personal Growth and Development
05:31 The Eisenhower Matrix: Prioritizing Urgent vs. Important
13:15 Balancing Personal and Professional Growth
14:46 The Power of Journaling for Personal Growth
15:42 Reflective Questions for Daily Improvement
17:17 Advice to My 20-Year-Old Self
17:54 Balancing Personal and Professional Success
19:48 The Importance of Simplifying Leadership
22:07 Embracing Technology for Human Connection
23:27 Final Words of Wisdom and Free Resources
25:55 Connecting with Brin'na Rollins Williams
26:53 Conclusion and Call to Action
Connect with Brin'na
legacyfulfilled.com
brinna@legacyfulfilled.com
Meet Brent HalfwassenBrent Halfwassen is the founder of MKE’s Small Business Coach, a business coaching and consulting firm focused on small business owners and entrepreneurs from $5,000 to $5M in revenue, helping to turn their hard work into hard cash.
Brent is a reality-focused small business coach empowering small business owners and entrepreneurs so they can stop spinning their wheels and instead take the next right actions to transform their hard work into hard cash. He has spent over 20 years building businesses and opportunities, coaching hundreds of entrepreneurs and small business owners around him and evolving his own entrepreneurial focus.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:12 Introducing Today's Guest: Brent Halfwassen
02:12 The Unique Approach of MKE Small Business Coach
04:18 The Importance of Delegation for Entrepreneurs
07:57 Building and Maintaining Business Relationships
12:08 When to Hire a Business Coach
15:08 Lori's Podcast Journey and Final Thoughts
20:14 Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Connect with Brent
MKE’s Small Business Coach | Halfwassen & Associates, LLC
OFFER: Free Small Business Scaling Score Download
Meet Michael CreedMichael Creed is the Branch Manager for Luminate Home Loans’ Brookfield and Waukesha, Wisconsin locations, but he does much more than just manage. In fact, Michael wears many hats at his job—from running his own personal production team to creating systems, policies, and procedures for branch processing, Michael does it all. In addition, he also coaches the loan officers and other team leads at his branch, working hard to ensure his team is set up for success.
As a homeowner before he even graduated college, Michael is very familiar with the pain points that most homeowners and prospective homeowners face. He loves working with clients that are willing to trust his expertise to get mortgages closed quickly, while also improving their quality of life with a holistic financial plan.
When at work, Michael is energized by all of his amazing clients and hardworking staff. Outside of work, you’ll usually find Michael rock climbing, alpine skiing, mountain biking, weightlifting, attending church, or going on other various outdoor adventures.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:12 Introducing Michael Creed
02:29 Michael's Journey into the Mortgage Industry
04:54 Keys to Success in the Mortgage Business
09:59 Personal Life and Hobbies
15:55 Advice for the Younger Self
21:02 Lori's Turn: Marketing and Hockey Passion
24:43 Final Words of Wisdom
25:18 Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Connect with Michael
Luminate Home Loans
-Mortgage Lending
-Mortgage Careers
-YouTube
-Coaching and Consulting
-Text (262)696-9048
In this special 400th episode of Social Capital, host Lori Highby, CEO and Founder of Keystone Click, is interviewed by Abby Radewahn, Digital Content Manager at Keystone Click. They discuss Lori's background, her passion for sports, and her journey from working at a web development company to founding her own digital marketing agency. Lori shares valuable lessons she learned about networking, mentorship, and the importance of authentic relationships. The episode highlights essential networking tips and emphasizes the significance of strong personal and professional connections in achieving success.
Highlights
00:00 Introduction to Social Capital Podcast
00:49 Lori Highby's Background and Early Life
02:57 The Role of Sports in Lori's Life
04:42 Early Career and Lessons Learned
07:12 Founding Keystone Click
10:02 Personal Growth and Decision Making
18:06 Networking and Mentorship
25:35 Final Words of Wisdom
Connect with Lori on LinkedIn.
Meet Louise McDonnellLouise McDonnell is a renowned expert in leveraging social media to enhance sales and lead generation for coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs. She offers a comprehensive suite of services, including a complete "done for you" package, group coaching, and online training, aimed at converting social media efforts into tangible business results.
As the founder of SellOnSocial.Media, Louise leads an agency dedicated to developing and implementing custom digital strategies that drive real results. Her team excels in creating actionable plans that effectively integrate strategy with execution to boost sales and market presence.
Louise also established the Academy, an online platform offering training in sales-driven digital strategies. It features group coaching and mastermind sessions to support collaborative learning and practical strategy development. This platform is designed for professionals eager to expand their digital marketing skills and achieve sales growth.
In addition to her entrepreneurial work, Louise is a four-time best-selling author, recognized for titles like 'Facebook Marketing, The Essential Guide' and an annually updated 'Social Media Planner & Guide.' These works are essential for businesses aiming to optimize their digital marketing strategies.
As a keynote speaker, Louise shares her expertise on digital marketing and social media strategy with audiences worldwide. Her presentations offer practical insights, aiming to improve digital marketing skills and contribute to organizational success.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:14 Introducing Today's Guest: Louise McDonnell
02:38 Using Social Media to Drive Business Sales
04:46 The Impact of AI on Social Media
09:47 Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing
16:58 Advice for Young Professionals
21:48 Host's Perspective on AI
23:28 Free Guide and Final Words of Wisdom
25:10 Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Connect with Louise
SellOnSocial.Media
Twitter/X
Free Guide: Why Isn’t My Social Media Working for Me in 2024
Free E-book: AI Powered Social Media: How To Save More Time & Get More Leads
Meet Erik OwenErik brings over 30 years of diverse business experience across manufacturing, distribution, services, and banking. He spent 20 years in corporate America, including roles at Fortune 500 companies, focusing on finance, operations, and executive management, with expertise in IT, strategic sourcing, logistics, and Lean/Six Sigma. In 2009, Erik founded Oak Hill Business Partners, a boutique consulting firm in Brookfield, Wis., dedicated to growing the intrinsic value of lower-middle market companies through excellence in finance, sales, marketing, and operations. Oak Hill has been recognized multiple times by the Milwaukee Business Journal and has successfully guided companies through growth, M&A transactions, and exit planning. Erik holds CPA and CEPA designations and is actively involved in the Exit Planning Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:09 Introducing Today's Guest: Erik Owen
01:41 Top Problems Businesses Face
05:18 Valuation of a Business
10:55 Alternative Exit Strategies
18:40 Preparing for an Exit Plan
24:23 Fun and Reflective Questions
31:48 Final Words and Contact Information
Connect with Erik
oakhillbp.com
Meet Ken OliverA Milwaukee native. Born and Raised. Marine Corps veteran. Owner/Founder of GruntWorks Junk Removal and Demolition.
As the Owner of GruntWorks, he oversees all aspects of the business, from operations and marketing to customer service and partnerships. He leverages his skills in team building, training, and recruiting to create a culture of excellence, integrity, and respect. He also works with local organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity and recyclers, to recover items that can serve another purpose, without going directly to landfills. He is proud to lead a company that is making a positive impact on the environment and society.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:10 Introducing Today's Guest: Ken Oliver
01:58 Lessons from the Marine Corps
07:22 What Sets GruntWorks Apart
10:36 Long-Term Goals for GruntWorks
13:15 Advice to My 20-Year-Old Self
14:56 Marketing Challenges and Strategies
22:03 Final Words of Wisdom
23:21 Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Connect with Ken
gruntworksjunkremoval.com
(414)414-7868
info@gruntworksjunkremoval.com
Meet Dave OatesDave holds 30 years of strategic crisis public relations experience dealing with a wide array of adverse public events. Starting as a U.S. Navy Public Affairs Officer and later as a Corporate Chief Marketing Officer and Non-Profit President, he excels in expertly addressing a myriad of crises that span sports/entertainment, non-profit, military, government, corporate, education, charity, and start-up environments. Dave is the author of several Amazon e-Books and co-produced four LinkedIn Learning courses. Dave is an accredited PR specialist (APR) who received his MBA from San Diego State University in 2004 and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in 1991.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to Social Capital Podcast
01:12 Introducing Dave Oates: Crisis PR Expert
02:37 Understanding Crisis PR
06:55 Must-Do's in Crisis PR
13:41 Common Mistakes in Crisis PR
14:41 Planning for Crisis Situations
18:28 Personal Insights and Fun Questions
21:58 Final Words and Contact Information
Connect with Dave
publicrelationssecurity.com
Twitter/X
Free 30-minute consultation about any HR-related issue that folks believe COULD become a crisis. Reach out by Thursday, August 8th, 2024 to redeem.
Meet Stacey HallStacey Hall, Founder of Success with Stacey Hall, is best known for her ground-breaking social media marketing training program, Go for Yes, which has helped thousands of people attract more sales, customer and employee satisfaction, and success. Stacey is an acclaimed international speaker who gained recognition for her TEDx Talk. Her mission is to help entrepreneurs attract and connect with their ideal audience, solve their audience’s problems, and leave a legacy that lives on long after they are gone.
She wrote her new book, Selling From Your Comfort Zone because so many sales people believe that they must push themselves out of their comfort zones and compromise their values to sell products. But, as Stacey explains, the comfort zone can actually be a power zone that leads to sales, satisfaction, and success.
Shifting away from pushy sales tactics, she will show how you can bring meaning to how you serve others through your business. You will discover a simple formula for a personalized approach to connection-building through problem-solving by remaining in alignment with your calling, with yourself, and with what you are selling.
By adopting this approach, you will have more confidence, more energy, and more courage to achieve your goals, and will be able to stay flexible and resilient in the face of challenges.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:27 Introducing Today's Guest: Stacey Hall
02:20 The Go for Yes Program
04:10 Understanding Alignment in Business
08:52 Selling from Your Comfort Zone
12:25 Stacey's Advice for Her Younger Self
13:40 Lori's Podcasting Journey
15:46 Final Words of Wisdom and Giveaway
19:00 Closing Remarks
Connect with Stacey
www.staceyannhall.com
The Ridiculously Simple Way To Create Sales, Satisfaction, And Success
In 2024
Selling From Your Comfort Zone
Twitter/X
Meet Chris DaigleChris Daigle is the CEO and Co-Founder of ChiefAIOfficer.com. In these dynamic times of AI enablement or extinction, Chris’s purpose is to ensure businesses thrive through AI strategy crafted by certified Chief AI Officers (CAIOs) or the use of their education and certification program on how to use AI in your business or your role.
An early pioneer in SaaS, he launched my first software company in 2002 and since then has gone on to found several successful businesses where he was able to develop the entrepreneurial and leadership skills that have led his company to where they are now, the cutting-edge of AI empowerment for Small to Medium sized businesses.
Highlights
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
01:01 Guest Introduction: Chris Daigle
02:25 The Importance of AI in Business
09:41 Getting Started with AI
17:57 Fun Questions and Career Advice
20:12 Final Thoughts and Closing
Connect with Chris
ChiefAIOfficer.com
Using AI at Work
Twitter/X
Meet Eleni KelakosEleni Kelakos, The Speaker Whisperer® , is a presence and presentation expert, and the President of the Eleni Group, established in 2003. She uses performance techniques learned over twenty years as a professional actress and award-winning, nationally touring, singer/songwriter to help speakers and business leaders across the globe present with more authenticity, confidence and impact.
When she’s not coaching individuals or facilitating trainings at companies like General Motors, Allstate, Little Caesar’s Pizza, and Kubota Tractors, Eleni practices what she preaches, firing up hearts and minds with her signature keynote presentations at conferences nationwide.
A double major in Theatre and Semiotics from Brown University, Eleni is a past president of the National Speakers Association of Michigan. She’s sung the national anthem at Shea Stadium for three (winning!) Mets games, and has produced four acclaimed CDs of her original songs. Eleni is the author of two books, “Touch the Sky: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Truth, Make Your Mark” (which was a gold medal winner of the 2014 Global e-Book Awards) and her “Claim the Stage! A Woman’s Guide to Speaking Up, Standing Out, and Taking Leadership” was a 2021 #1 Amazon Bestseller. She lives happily with her husband, and two constantly shedding cats, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:21 Introducing Today's Guest: Eleni Kelakos
02:09 Marketing Tools and Strategies for Success
04:59 The Power of Networking and Building Relationships
11:47 Personal and Professional Growth Advice
13:44 The Journey of a Podcast Host
17:30 Final Words of Wisdom and How to Connect
Connect with Eleni!
The Eleni Group
Twitter/X
Go to www.theelenigroup.com and sign up on the home page for a free e-book “5 Ways to Minimize Stage Fright, Amp Up Your Presence and Wow Any Audience.”
Meet Neha BucaroWith a remarkable professional journey spanning media, strategy creative and research, Neha is a true believer in the power of transformative thinking. Throughout her career, she has worn some big titles, led, and inspired brilliant teams, and collaborated with some of the biggest brands in the world. With an innate comfort with data and refined strategic and creative thinking skills she has honed an expertise in her craft that is both broad and deep. Neha has helped her clients navigate shifting market dynamics, competitive disruption, technology, and product evolution and changing consumer expectations with grace and success. Over the last 5 years, she has applied her skills to benefit non-profits, early and mid-stage startups and investor backed businesses. Every client, no matter their size or stage, benefits from her unique blend of creativity, strategic acumen, and business pragmatism.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:25 Introducing Today's Guest: Neha Bucaro
02:44 Diving Deep into Strategy
04:46 The Critical Role of Strategy in Today's Marketplace
09:50 Exploring the Impact of Generative AI on Creative and Strategic Services
12:44 AI Implementation Challenges and Considerations
20:33 Personal Reflections and Advice for Young Professionals
25:43 Final Thoughts and How to Connect
Connect with Neha!
NP+SB Strategic Consulting
Meet Jim HeinignerJim Heininger is The Rebrand Man. He leads the efforts of The Rebranding Experts, which he founded in 2017, after 30 years of business and brand strategy experience for P&G, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch and others.
Rebranding Experts was purposefully designed to be the only agency with the comprehensive services necessary to rebrand organizations. It starts from a fundamentally different viewpoint than traditional branding firms that see rebranding as a marketing strategy. His team believes rebranding should be a strategic growth accelerator, creating a forward-facing organization ready to grasp new opportunities. It’s a jetpack to your success.
Jim has designed the methodology used by the firm and merged the many disciplines necessary for successful rebranding, including research, brand strategy and planning, creative naming, design/identity, corporate and leadership communications, change
management, employee engagement and internal marketing, customer experience design and marketing/public relations.
Jim coaches CEOs through the rebranding process, aligning their executive team, and helping to execute complete name changes and new customer promises. He regularly speaks at national conferences and is a frequent contributor to Forbes.com on the topic of rebranding.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:21 Introducing Today's Guest: Jim Heininger, The Rebrand Man
02:23 The Art and Strategy of Rebranding
05:05 Current Trends in Rebranding
08:03 Learning from Twitter's Rebranding to X
10:44 Personal and Professional Growth Advice
14:07 Engaging in Professional Networks for Success
14:53 How to Connect with Jim and Closing Thoughts
Connect with Jim!
Twitter/X
Rebranding Experts
jim@rebrandingexperts.com
Meet Bobbi BaehneBobbi Baehne is the founder and CEO of Think Big Go Local, a digital marketing agency that helps small businesses succeed in their local communities by leveraging the power of online marketing. With over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, and small business development, Bobbi has a passion for helping small businesses grow and thrive, and has worked with hundreds of clients to develop successful marketing strategies. In her current role, Bobbi leads a team of digital marketing experts who provide personalized support to small businesses. She has done a TedX talk, has been featured in Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post, and more, and is a regular speaker at conferences and events, sharing her expertise and insights with audiences around the country.
What are the top three trends that small business owners should consider integrating into their marketing mix right now?
So there are so many things and so many trends we could talk about, but there are a few that I think are top of the list.
So first is something we're hearing so much about, and that's artificial intelligence, right? How to use AI effectively. That that is definitely one of the things small businesses need to keep top of mind, because one of the challenges I hear so frequently from my customers is the bandwidth to do all the things that need to be done in their business.
And as a small business owner, sometimes you don't have a team built yet. And so figuring out how to make the most effective use of your time so that you can run your business and market it effectively is kind of top of the list for me.
The second thing, which has been a thing for a while, but it's just not going away is video. For a while, we were all talking a lot about short-form video, reels, TikTok, and those are so relevant. But I also think business owners need to step back and notice a couple of things.
There's still so many small businesses not leveraging the power of YouTube. And we're finding that a lot of people we talk to are using YouTube in such different ways that you have such a larger opportunity to leverage that. I can go to YouTube and get the small sound bites for the things I want to know and that I'm looking to learn so quickly, and it's opened up an entire new market for YouTube content.
For a while there, we were talking about really short videos. So a TikTok video, eight to 15 seconds, right? These platforms are starting to incentivize creators to do longer videos, a minute or more. So in 2024, we're going to start to see the length of those shorter vertical videos start to shift a little more. Small business owners should be paying attention to those kinds of changes so they can kind of get in the favor of those algorithms, and just be putting out more content that the platforms wanna show to more people.
And then finally, a place that many small businesses aren't leveraging, and that's paid promotion. It is so difficult for a small business that doesn't have a ton of name recognition or brand recognition yet to get their content seen. Facebook doesn't show anything on a business page to anybody if they can help it. They're in the game of wanting a business to pay for that type of attention.
And yet so many business owners either aren't doing it or they're not doing it right because they've only extended their knowledge base to how to hit that blue button and boost a post versus getting into ad manager and learning to develop a variety of different types of campaigns, leverage different types of audiences and all the tools that Meta is offering.
What social media platform do you plan on using more right now?
So, I have never been a big fan of LinkedIn. When it came out, I'd been doing this digital marketing thing for quite a while and it just was no fun. That was just the way it was. And I was having so much fun on the other platforms. And it's ridiculous, and shame on me, because I am a B2B organization. So that should be my place, but I just never enjoyed it. And over the last couple of years, it has expanded to be such a phenomenal platform with so many fantastic tools. Things like events and live streaming.
So, I tried to jump in a little bit last year and get more active, but this is the year I'm going all in on our LinkedIn marketing and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. My audience lives there and that's where we need to be. So we're going to be leveraging some of those great new tools that they've launched over the past couple of years and spending a lot more time there.
Connect with Bobbi!
Think Big Go Local
FREE 30 minute 1-on-1 consulting call
Bobbi B's Social Media Clambake
Meet Eugene MarshallEugene Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Magnolia Tax Services. He is an Enrolled Agent (EA). Eugene is federally authorized to represent taxpayers before the IRS and, like CPAs and attorneys, has unlimited representation rights. He specializes in advanced tax strategies to reduce his client’s tax liability through effective tax planning. Eugene has several years of tax experience, including preparing taxes for individuals and small businesses.
Eugene is also an avid real estate investor. He owns a real estate investing company that acquires multi-family properties within the inner city of Chicago and has recently expanded to the Milwaukee market. Eugene believes owning real estate and having a small business is the cornerstone of building wealth.
What sets Magnolia Tax Services apart from other tax firms?
Magnolia Tax Services is a tax advisory practice that ultimately specializes in tax planning, tax preparation, tax debt resolution for individuals or small businesses that need assistance with solving a tax problem, and accounting and bookkeeping. What separates us from the average tax practices is that we're actively meeting with our clients periodically throughout the year and most of our client book is all small businesses.
I want to say maybe 90 to 95 percent is all small businesses. We do have some individuals that don't own a business, but have the desire to pick up some rental properties. We do bring them on as clients.
And we also assist and consult them on how to analyze deals, source those deals as well and get the capital to fund those deals, and it creates an opportunity for us to also educate our clients on how to be strategic in markets like today, where the interest rates are higher than they have been.
Fortunately, we're starting to see things climb down a bit. Still, we do introduce other topics such as seller financing, subject to a contract with the seller, wrap-around mortgages, and all these other creative ways to acquire properties that could ultimately benefit our client's tax position. So what separates us apart in short, is that we are actively looking at our client's financial position, and coming up with strategies to ultimately assist them with minimizing their tax bill.
This gives us the opportunities for that business owner to reinvest those savings either back into the business, back into themselves or personal professional development and or into their future.
Can you explain what the difference is between an enrolled agent and a certified public accountant?
Absolutely. So when we look at the tax space, the tax industry as a whole, there's four types of people. You have your tax preparers that do not have to be licensed at all. This could be someone who just understands how to file taxes using a particular software. Don't need a license, do not need a degree, just need to be able to file taxes.
And then we have tax attorneys. And then we have certified public accounts. And then after certified public accounts, we have folks like myself, which are enrolled agents. And so the primary difference between an enrolled agent and a certified public accountant is our specialty is tax. And we get our designation directly from the department of treasury, which houses the Internal Revenue Service. Certified public accountants that get their designation, their license from state boards.
And we actually partner with a ton of certified public accountants because they don't have an interest in tax. And some of them don't know tax. And many of them, their focus is on the accounting portion. And a lot of folks stay co associate accounting with taxes when accounting is nothing more, nothing less, but understanding and being able to read and produce financial statements.
P and L's, balance sheets, cashflow projections, not more so taxes. Now there are a ton of CPAs, of course, that do get a master in tax or do get a focus in tax, but for us, that's our specialty. We're solely designated here to niche down in the tax space.
Connect with Eugene!
Magnolia Tax Services
1 complimentary 30-minute tax strategy call
marshall@magnoliataxservices.com
Office: (414)285-2446
Meet Lisa ApolinskiLisa Apolinski, CMC is the CEO of 3 Dog Write. She is a content coach, teaching business owners how to use their content to attract more right-fit clients so that they experience the positive ROI on marketing and business development investments.
She has written several books, including Persuade With A Digital Content Story, named one of the top content marketing books in the world and most recently as a co-author on The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever, an Amazon #1 new release.
She has been featured in Forbes and The New York Times for her expertise on digital storytelling and has been dubbed “America’s Digital Content Futurist”.
What do you think are the biggest mistakes you see businesses make with their content when they're trying to focus on that trust factor?
I actually had a conversation with a client today about this some feedback she was getting from her mentor who is heavily into sales. And I'm not saying that sales is bad. They're simply different ways of being.
He was pushing her to put all sorts of call to actions and you don't have a call to action in your posts on social media. And I said, well, hold on a second. What are you creating your content for if you don't have clarity around what it is that you are hoping your content will do besides drive revenue?
Because we all know the content really should be helping you to make more money, but how do you get there is the question. If you're constantly pushing calls to action or take this next step or sign up now or click on this link. It feels very sell-y and it feels very icky.
People know how social media posts work. People know how websites work. People know how the internet works. It can be a lot more subtle, where people are engaging with you through your content and learning about you, and then from there, allowing them to decide how they want to take the next step.
Do they visit your website? Do they do a Google search on you? Do they attend a webinar you're in or a podcast? Do they sign up for your newsletter? Let them decide. Don't shove call to actions in their face where it's unnecessary. You can certainly guide them.
Mark Schaefer talked about this. The customer is the marketer now. The customer is deciding the path. And if you think you're in charge of their digital path, that thought process and that ability has absolutely gone by the wayside because there are so many ways for people to engage with you and your content.
So if I would drill it down into one big issue that I see people making now as a mistake is trying to control the digital journey versus allowing your audience, who's very savvy to discover you in a way that's right for them. And that allowance of letting them have control that absolutely builds that trust factor that we talked about.
What is one thing that businesses can work on in their content today to help improve these relationships with prospects?
Add in stories. People are hardwired for stories.
I don't know if you noticed, but I've told you three stories so far. They don't have to be long, but it helps to share information. Show how it's relevant. Because people are hardwired for stories, they absorb that information a lot faster and they hold onto it a lot longer. So if you have information that you need to provide on how the journey would be to work with you, put it in a story format. Talk about a former customer or client who is similar in their journey and how they made it to the finish line.
And in my “Persuade With A Digital Content Story,” I actually give you a six-step formula to create persuasive stories within your content. You're not selling, you're not pushing features and benefits, and you're making it relevant to your audience. Again, it has value to your audience because it's the information that they want, not the information that you think you need to push.
So when you add in stories, it also makes the conversation more enjoyable to consume. And with all the content that's available today, having storytelling is, to me, the fastest way to get your content read and to get it out of that content noise and actually show up for your audience.
Connect with Lisa!
LinkedIn Newsletter: Making Your Digital Mark
X
3 Dog Write
Meet Frank KingI am a Suicide Prevention Speaker and Comedian, was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years, a full-time speaker and comedian for 37. I’ve worked with Jeff Foxworthy, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Steve Harvey, Rosie, Ellen, The Beach Boys, Neil Sedaka, Randy Travis, and Lou Rawls. I’ve fought a lifetime battle with Depression and Chronic Suicidality, turning that long dark journey of the soul into 11 TEDx Talks, one SPEAK Event, and sharing my lifesaving insights on Mental Health with colleges, corporations and associations. I’ve survived 2 aortic valve replacements, a double bypass, a heart attack, 3 stents, losing to a puppet on the Original Star Search and lived to joke about all of it.
A comedian who speaks on depression and suicide. How does that work?
Well, depression and suicide run in my family. It's called generational depression and suicide. My grandmother died by suicide. My mom found her. Nine years later, my great aunt died by suicide. My mom and I found her. I was four years old. I screamed for days. In 2010, after filing a Chapter Seven bankruptcy in April, I came very close to suicide. Close enough, I can tell you what the barrel of my gun tastes like. Spoiler alert. I did not pull the trigger. A friend of mine came up at a keynote recently. He goes, “Hey man, how come you didn't pull the trigger?”
I go, “Hey, man, could you try to sound slightly less disappointed?” So that's where the humor is in the topic. It's not jokes. It's just funny, personal anecdotes. That's why. And I myself live with two mental illnesses, major depressive disorder and chronic suicidal ideation, major depressive disorder, relatively common. Chronic suicidal ideation, far more rare. It means for people in my tribe, the option of suicide's always on the menu as a solution for problems large and small. And when I say small, my car broke down a couple years ago. I had three thoughts unbidden. One, get it fixed, two buy new, and three, I could just kill myself.
That's chronic suicidal ideation.
You have 11 Tedx Talks. How did you land all of those?
Well, the only person who had five was the guy in England. He passed away. That's the most I've been able to find anybody else has gotten. In 2014, I applied. It was a Tedx in British Columbia. And I got it on my first try, which is unusual. And then two TEDx events reached out to me after that said, do you have any more mental health ideas to talk about? And I did. So I did two more at their request.
The next seven I applied for and got. And I've got a really big social media footprint on LinkedIn. And an event in India, in the state of Assam, reached out and said, we like your take on mental health. Would you be willing to do a TEDx force virtually? I said, absolutely.
So I got invited to as well. So, it's just a matter of applying, it's a bit of a numbers game. I got my first one on the first try, but the other ones took 20, 30, 40 applications before I got the audition and got asked to do it.
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Meet Alane BoydAlane Boyd is the Co-Founder of BGBO Co., an operations and growth strategy agency utilizing AI and automation to improve efficiency for their clients. In 2022, her company launched Arvo, an AI-powered visual documentation software for creating standard operating procedures, training documents, and company knowledge. Alane has been written and featured in Entrepreneur, HuffPost, South by Southwest (SXSW), PBS, FemFounder, and many more.
How do you start positioning yourself as an expert or a credible resource in your industry?
I really struggled with this for a long time because I was looking at the work we were doing. We are doing such amazing things and our customers love us. I finally realized we weren't telling anybody about it. Even when we would do these big case studies, we weren't sending them out in a bite sized piece.
No one's gonna know that you're an expert unless you're telling them, and you're not gonna be credible just because you say you know how to do something. You have to tell stories and do them short, where people's attention span can still follow along with it.And also very clear.
You can do that so easily now with social media. And I have found that has really turned a 180 for me. I was just going, Hey, I'm an expert. I'm over here. People are coming to me because they see me as an expert.
I would love to hear more about your AI software.
We launched that for companies to create internal process stocks, SOPs, training manuals for their team, and it's all digital.
We were looking at it from a perspective of stuff out there, a lot of platforms, they look like glorified text documents. We just thought nobody wants to learn like that. Everything is meant to suck you in longer and also for short attention span.
So that's why we built Arvo, to be really digitally appealing. And then we added AI earlier this year and we've got a couple of new AI features coming out too. We thought, what a great use of AI to help write processes. If you could have AI write 90% of a process for you, and then you tweak it for your business, that could be saving you hours of work. We've got some things coming down the line that I'm really excited about with AI too.
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Meet Ross KeatingRoss Keating believes all businesses, regardless of their size, can be more successful, including yours. When you are successful it not only helps you and your customers, but it also helps your employees, your suppliers, the community around you, AND your family.
Over the last 15 years or so his clients have been in industries such as industrial equipment sales, pet grooming, civil construction, fitness, lighting and motor systems, house construction, mining, animal welfare, tourism, and pest control.
Many of Ross’ clients have 2x and 3x their revenue and profits yet become more relaxed and able to have more focus to “work on the business”. The result is their business continues to grow. These clients say they have also been able to achieve personal and lifestyle goals as a result of working with Ross.
He has managed the development, implementation and sales of customer relationship management strategies and software internationally. He has held management responsibility for 40,000+ customers, and $36 million in sales. Ross is a certified by Codebreaker Technologies as a B.A.N.K.TM IOS Coach.
What are the two of the biggest problems that you see business owners and executives have?
The key is that they're frustrated with the lack of results they're getting in the business. The teams are working all hours under the sun. They are trying to throw all their resources at it, but the business still doesn't meet their expectations.
And they started saying, “We've got to get more sales and generate more leads.” That's what becomes a real focus on those numbers. Sales is not a numbers game, sales and business. It's a people game now. No longer can you just go for selling. People don't like to be sold to.
So I say business and sales is not a numbers game. It's a people game.
Talk about the Codebreaker Technology Program?
Codebreaker Technologies was founded by Cheri Tree and is the only methodology that has been scientifically validated by independent studies to predict buyer behavior in less than 90 seconds. It doesn’t take a huge amount of time and a lot of brain power to go through the test.
It's been scientifically valid that you've got that prediction, but also to increase sales and influence by up to 300%. And the red, that 300 percent is because you're talking to different personalities.
So by doing that, when we know our methodology all of a sudden you can talk to people in the language and the phrases and the behaviors that you like. And it's not just in business; it's in your personal life because you're trying to influence people.
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Meet Matt NettletonSince 2003, Matt Nettleton has coached more than 175 companies in a wide variety of industries. He has helped multiple companies grow from $1 million to more than $10 million in annual revenue and has helped clients close more than $3.2 billion in new sales.
Why do you believe sales is an honorable profession?
People have this idea about sales and sales people and what sales people do and how, but they forget that there is not a company that has ever existed without revenue. And that revenue never shows up magically. And those people that create the relationships and manage the relationships that generate revenue, they're salespeople who are probably the most honest traders out there. Because the salesperson tells people up front, “Hey, listen. I'm here to see if I can get you to buy something from me. You give me money and I give you a product or service.” And the more honest they are, and the more they do the right thing, the more likely they are to succeed.
So why do you believe business is honorable?
This is kind of an extension of why sales is honorable, but a lot of my clients are family owned businesses, two to 50 million in revenue. And when I talk to them, whether they're first generation, second generation, third generation, one of the things that they'll talk about is the people's lives that they've impacted.
One of my clients was talking about how they hired their third employee right when he graduated from college and here they are 25 years later. They just celebrated that employee's son graduating from college. That business is not just that service that they provide. They actually provide meaning and livelihood for their employees. They provide sustenance for their families. They allow kids to grow up in great homes. They create a fabric and a tapestry of a community. I think we lose sight of the fact that salespeople are doing good work and that companies and business owners are almost what I like to think about is an almost heroic mission to impact their employees, their customers and their communities.
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Meet Scott FloodScott Flood established Scott Flood Writing in 1995 after 13 years with advertising agencies in Chicago and Indianapolis. The Chicago native is a frequent author on copywriting and marketing topics for business websites and publications, has authored two books of local interest, and is also the author of 100 Years: The Story of the Western States Machine Company.
An active community volunteer, Scott has served on the School Board for the Plainfield Community School Corporation since 2000, was honored as Indiana’s outstanding local school board member in 2021, and named Hendricks County Leader of the Year in 2007 by Leadership Hendricks County. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Communications & Theatre Arts from St. Joseph’s College.
Isn't business writing supposed to be grammatical?
That's one of the great misconceptions. Let me step back and say that I absolutely love and adore English teachers. They're amazing people and anybody who can get bored sophomores to get interested in literature and poetry deserves my praise. But one of the unfortunate things that comes out of English class is that people learn a particular way to write. They learn the highly grammatical academic style of writing, which is used nowhere but the academic world. When you get out into the business world, really what's far more effective is to communicate in a more informal way, particularly a very conversational way. So I always advocate for conversational copy.
Is there a simple way to tell that something I've written is conversational?
I think the easiest way to do it is to read it out loud. Once we get out of grade school, we don't often read what we write out loud. But it's good practice because if you pick up something that you've written and you read it out loud, or even let's just say it's a paragraph from you're writing a blog post and you're not sure if it's doing a good job, read that paragraph out loud.
If you find it's easy to read it out loud, if you find that everything comes easily, you've probably done it great. But if you find yourself stumbling or pausing or running out of breath, you probably need to rewrite. It's probably too complex for the situation. That's the easiest trick I can give people.
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The Smarter Strategy for Selecting Suppliers
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Meet Carol CleggCarol Clegg is a small business coach specializing in mindset and accountability, partnering with midlife women. Carol's passion lies in cultivating business balance and establishing realistic goals with an effective accountability structure. A maverick entrepreneur at heart, she founded Classic Exec Marketing a decade ago, embarking on a journey to empower small business owners to share their gifts and expertise.
At present Carol integrates the transformative tools of Positive Intelligence, elevating overall well-being and contentment across all spheres of life. Her ultimate mission is to empower clients to create lifestyle businesses that include flexibility and balance, enabling them to operate from any corner of the globe. With her origins in South Africa and her current base in the USA, Carol extends her guidance globally, transforming aspirations into achievements, one step at a time.
Sometimes it seems like [a four day workweek with themes for each day of the week] works for me at least for about 60 days. And then I kind of start to go off track. Any advice on that?
Absolutely. It's just time to reframe it. I felt that as well. I was like, “Oh, hang on a minute. This is getting a little boring.” So, just change it up. Okay, do something different on Mondays or simplify it, because sometimes you want to get into all the nitty gritty and like break it down into so many steps. And then that's overwhelming. So just change it up.
How do you use positive intelligence for wellbeing?
Well, positive intelligence is something that has been on the outskirts for about two or three years, watching other people using it. Curiosity. And you know how timing sometimes is just when you're ready, you're ready?
So, I started the training with them at the beginning of the year. And it has been absolutely life changing. It's a training system and it's developed by Shirzad Chamine. He's written a book on Positive Intelligence. And there've been thousands of coaches who've now gone through the system, but it's life changing.
And the simplicity of it is it's just a three muscle operating system. What you're doing is you are looking at your negative thought patterns and needing to learn how to intercept that to say, stop, shift. And how can I look at this as a gift and bring in a different component? So it's much more complex than that, but the beauty of it is that not only do you get more calm in your own life, so that's been for the sense of well being, but then it spills out. So as I grow myself and become more calm and cope better with situations, I feel that I'm passing that on. And the instrumental thing, which is something called a PQ rep. And so this is something as short as 10 seconds.
It could be as long as five minutes. There is an association with meditation, but you're being single mindedly focused on stopping the negative thought pattern and just bringing in a sense of touch. So you could just rub your fingers gently together and just immerse yourself in that. So if you and I were sitting here now before going into a meeting, we could just be feeling our fingers getting ourselves grounded, feeling our feet, bringing ourselves back to center, and then stepping into our conversation. And then it's with a loving, joyful, happiness, as opposed to judge and feeling negative. So, there's just so much about it. I am super excited to be now sort of focusing my coaching completely on this and bringing it into the accountability side. But it's a system that you can stay with for life. So it's something that you can use.
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Meet Danielle HughesDanielle Hughes is the creator of the Personality Brand. She teaches clients how to bring more of themselves into their message so they feel comfortable expressing it and can convey what makes them different from their competition, attracting the right audience and repelling the wrong one. Often referred to as a magician with words, while she can’t pull a rabbit out of her hat, she can hone your brand message and deadlift you or your employees, but not at the same time. That’s just irresponsible. (note: Danielle is
available for office party tricks and accepts payment in bottles of Bordeaux.)
What is a personality brand and why does someone need one?
Yes, so personal brand is everywhere. And the word personal means private. So why are we sharing our private thoughts, habits, behaviors with people that we don't know? But our personality is who we are. It's always on display and we dial it up and we dial it down, depending on who we're interacting with. So people that we have just met might get a small glimmer of our personality. Our friends and family get too much of our personality. And so to me, when you cultivate a personality brand, in business, it puts you in control of what you want to share with the people that you're meeting or the people that you're interacting with, or even your clients or customers, and allows you to say this is what I want you to know about me in order to form the necessary connections that we need to do business.
But it also creates a line in the sand of things that you're not going to share because they're no one's business and they will remain private.
What if someone's an introvert?
So, the beauty of personality brand is that you are in control. So, just because you're introverted doesn't mean you're not interesting. Doesn't mean you don't have hobbies. And I always say, think about if you were stuck in an elevator with someone (which I know is a nightmare for an introvert). What is the one thing that you could talk about with this person for an hour and it would not freak you out? And what is that thing that you would love to talk to them about if you found out that they shared that hobby or that passion with you? And we're just starting there. We're just putting that little thing, even if it's at the end of your title your LinkedIn title. And it just says like triathlete or knitter or, you know, lover of pugs.
It's gotta be a little something and that's enough. And you can just start there and then you can baby step it to more if you feel comfortable with more. But I always tell people, just because you're introverted or just because you're shy, you have things that you love to do that I'm sure help you connect to other people.
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Personality Brand Bio Checklist
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Meet Erik DeckersErik Deckers is a professional writer and humorist from Central Florida. He is the co-author of four books on social media marketing, and has been a newspaper humor columnist since 1994. He has owned his own content marketing agency for 14 years, and ghostwrites books for business owners who want to leave a legacy for their families. Erik is the president of the Jack Kerouac Project in Orlando and is the lead organizer of 1 Million Cups Orlando, a networking group for entrepreneurs.
Where do you think most people should spend their time and energy? Analytics, creation of content?
I actually think that people should spend more time talking about and focusing on creation. One of the nice things about analytics is that we can do this with marketing now, where 30, 40 years ago we could not.
You didn't know how many people drove past your billboard or how many people actually saw your commercial on TV or actually heard it on the radio. And if somebody came into your business, which commercial brought them in? Which time did they see it? We didn't know any of that. And now that we can, I think marketers have gone a little bit overboard and they want to measure everything.
They use analytics to drive their content creation, which I think is the backward way of doing it. Your content creation should be first. That should be your highest priority because your analytics should tell you how well it's doing, not tell you what you should write about.
How can one turn their competitors into collaborators and referral sources?
Okay. I talk about this sometimes. I talk about the importance of having your network of people who are out giving you leads. They're making connections for you. And the best way that you can turn your competitors into your sales force is if you each were to specialize. And so one example I use is if, you know, let's say you're a bookkeeper, you might be a bookkeeper and you charge 50 bucks an hour to just do bookkeeping for anybody who calls you up.
But that means that every other bookkeeper in town is your competitor. But what if you were to specialize and you're only going to do bookkeeping for restaurants? Well, if you specialize, you can charge more because if you specialize, you know more, and that means it's worth more. And so you can charge maybe 75 or a hundred dollars an hour. And your competitor decides they're going to specialize and only work on professional services: doctors, lawyers, chiropractors.
So whenever they get a call from a doctor who says you know, “Hey, I need a bookkeeper,” then they're the one to answer that call. But let's say you get a call from an attorney and say, “I need a bookkeeper.” And you can say, “I don't do that. But my friend, Susan does. Susan is a professional services bookkeeper and she can absolutely handle what you do.
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Meet Wayne MullinsWayne is a husband, father of 4, entrepreneur, and the Founder of Ugly Mug Marketing, creator of the Freelance Accelerator, and author of Full Circle Marketing. He's an out-of-the-box, against the grain, thinker and it has more than paid off for his company and clients. He leads from the heart and is passionate and unapologetic about doing so. As Founder & CEO of Ugly Mug Marketing of one of the most unique and successful marketing agencies in the world, Wayne has personally trained more than 20,000 marketers, launched NY Times Bestsellers, and helped a client grow from $20M to more than $600M in less than 5 years.
How do you know if your business's culture is sabotaging your marketing efforts?
Yeah. That's a, that's a great question. And it's a challenging question because to begin, Lori, I think we have to come to the realization that often for us as entrepreneurs or for us as marketers, this thing called our business or the business that we're marketing for, it's our baby. We love this thing.
And sometimes we don't want to admit that our baby is actually ugly. And the truth is that sometimes our baby is a bit ugly and we need to look at it through that objective lens so that we can determine what is actually happening and what is not. So the first place that I love to tell people to start is to get some candid feedback from your actual customers, those interacting with your organization, purchasing your product, purchasing your services. And that can be a little bit daunting and it can be a little bit confusing for people because by default, what we typically do is we go ask the people who we think are going to say great things, right?
We ask our friends, our longtime customers, and those people rarely are willing to say things that are going to hurt our feelings or step on our toes. So, it's important to find those who are willing to tell us the honest truth about what it's like doing business with us.
Why is it so important to engage with prospects and customers on a personal level?
So we live in a world now that is, you know, there's some great quote or analogy here that I'm going to completely botch and mess up, but basically we live in this hyper connected world, right?
Where everyone is connected to everyone online and yet we live in a world where people don't have that many real connections anymore. And so one of the simplest yet most impactful things that you can do is learn to connect with your prospects and your customers on a personal level. So very simple things that you can do that will immediately calls you to stand out, send handwritten thank you notes, send birthday cards in the mail. Any points of personal interaction like that are going to cause you to immediately stand head and shoulders over your competition. Not because they can't do those things, but because they're so busy looking for the next big hack or the next, you know, cheat code or whatever it may be that they're unwilling and undisciplined to do the fundamental things that we know actually do work.
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Meet Henry DeVriesHenry DeVries, MBA, is the CEO of Indie Books International, a company he cofounded in 2014 to work with agency owners and strategic consultants who want to attract right-fit clients by marketing with a book and speech (www.indiebooksintl.com). He is the author of 17 books including Marketing With A Book For Agency Owners. Since 2010, he has ghostwritten, coauthored, and published more than 300 business books, including his McGraw Hill bestseller How to Close a Deal like Warren Buffett. Henry’s articles have appeared in forbes.com, the Associated Press, and various magazines. He can be reached at henry@indiebooksintl.com. Learn more about Henry by visiting the website for Indie Books International: http://www.indiebooksintl.com.
Henry, how does a book help with your authority marketing efforts?
Well, as our friends at Predictive ROI and Agency Management Institute say, a book can be the cornerstone for your authority marketing. And then the real leverage is talking about doing what I'm doing here on a podcast with you. Or I'm going to be giving a speech tomorrow at the University of California at Irvine at their innovation center. A lot of these [opportunities] come from the writing that I do and being an author; that makes sense to be on a stage. So, you use the book as the authority marketing tool. Your sales strategy is talking about the book. And that's what gets you the right fit prospects into your sales pipeline.
Why do you say publishing the book is the starting line and not the finish line?
There are so many people out there who're all about the book, about coaching you to write the book, and/or writing the book for you or their publishing service. And you get your book out. But let me give your audience a hard truth… Nobody gets discovered because they write a book. It's like nobody gets discovered because they put a website up on the internet. Books don't promote authors, authors promote books. And in the promotion of the book with the spotlight being on the book, it reflects on you and attracts people who want to have conversations with you about what you do and how you solve problems for people like them. So, we say publishing the book is the starting line. And it's a marathon, not a sprint. This is a long race you're going to be going on, and I have some minimum monthly requirements for my authors. Here they are. One: Do Two Showcase Speeches a Month. Either podcast or something you host like a Q&A session, or on somebody else's stage where you're a virtual or live presenter. Two of those a month and then send 20 books out a month. Two: People Who Could Book You as a Speaker Could Hire You for Your Service. If you do that on a consistent basis, you're gonna sell enough books to pay for the whole effort. And then we measured a return on investment of 4x to 220x. In other words, if people put in, let's say, $25,000 into this effort, they should get $100 to $250,000 to a half million back in extra revenue. And we have a study that shows that. People are on record with the amount of money that the book has made them. And we're out there with measurable results and testimonials to prove it.
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Email Henry (henry@indiebooksintl.com) to get a free digital PDF copy of his book “Marketing with a Book” or “Persuade with a Story!”
Meet Kurt KleidonKurt Kleidon is the president of Kleidon & Associates, a marketing communication agency in Akron, Ohio. Kurt has more than 15 years of experience in marketing, branding and media relations. He also has experience as the founding editor of an arts and entertainment magazine editor and as a college professor.
In his professional capacity, Kurt focuses on marketing strategy and helping his clients find the right balance between digital opportunities and traditional marketing effort. With a background in storytelling, he truly enjoys developing new ways to convey a message within all the possibilities that are possible in social media and digital marketing.
As the host of his own podcast, Three for Three, Kurt interviews business owners on tips and tricks that have helped them build a successful business.
Kurt is avid in his volunteer work in the Akron area and has a passion for helping organizations that aim to improve the lives of children. Currently he serves on the board of a local arts organization that helps artists establish a sustainable brand and business model.
He is a published writer and photographer with more than 100 articles and photos that have appeared in print in various magazines and journals.
When does on-brand come off as artificial when networking?
Yeah, so we work with a lot of different clients to figure out what is their brand. Where should they be positioned? And sometimes when people think about branding, they think just about maybe the visuals of a brand. But of course, everything that comes with that includes things like mission statements and vision statements and a lot of different wording that goes along with it as well. And part of that is elevator speeches. We talk about networking, and how you keep your branding, and feel both on brand but feel authentic, as opposed to just reciting an elevator speech. So the way I put it here is that I think that an elevator speech really has to match the person who's saying it. Have you ever heard a muscle car drive by? You know that sound even if some of that's really loud and something in the background. So whenever you hear that, you look and you're expecting to see maybe a Dodge Charger or a muscle car. But what if you heard that sound, and you looked and you saw a 20-year-old Subaru? Totally mismatches what you're expecting, right? And if you think about that, with networking, there's nothing wrong with being that loud car if that's kind of a metaphor for maybe that elevator speech. There's nothing wrong with being a 20-year-old Subaru either, but they don't necessarily match. So I think it's really important that when you think about how you're talking about yourself, what you do, or your company, that that really matches how you present yourself. Because that's really important for people to make that feel natural. So when you're thinking elevator speech and sometimes love one of our clients, we write that for them, and you're getting to recite that and just make sure that that matches the M image that you're presenting, but also who you're speaking to as well. You think about that same metaphor, it's a, it's a muscle car. And it sounds like the most car looks like a muscle car. But it's, let's say, you know, at a somber event, well, you can't necessarily come with that same presentation for that. So think about making sure that all those brand elements that have worked so meticulously created, match how you're presenting it and who you're presenting it to.
If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regard to your professional career?
What I think I would do was tell myself to prepare for any kind of meeting or any type of event. We're able to engage with people with maybe just a little bit of research or maybe timely news. So, I would usually come into conversations blind, and let it guide it as it goes in. I think there's a real benefit to being interesting and to be able to bring something to the table. If it's timely or news-oriented, and talking about more than just the weather.
But let's say you go to an automotive conference. Figuring out something that relates to supply chain or to manufacturing problems that are going on right now. That is really something that can make you stand out, make you interesting and make you look like you know what you're talking about. I would have benefited from having a little bit more time that went into that. I think that also makes it interesting and people appreciate that.
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Meet Kris WardKris Ward is creating a movement where your business supports your life instead of consuming it. Kris is the founder of the Win The Hour, Win the Day philosophy.
After the loss of her husband, Kris returned full-time to her work as a marketing strategist. She was relieved that her business had not only survived her absence but was growing. Now, Kris has completely changed the landscape for entrepreneurs by sharing the successful practices that allowed her absence.
Kris has shared the stage with Jack Canfield - Chicken Soup For The Soul, Kevin Harrington original Shark from Shark Tank, James Malinchak -ABC’s Secret Millionaire, Sharon Lechter - Rich Dad Poor Dad Co Author and Joe Theismann - NFL All star and commentator to name a few. Kris has also been featured on award-winning podcasts, radio and TV shows.
Kris is an acclaimed podcaster. You can hear Kris on her own podcast - Win The Hour Win The Day, where she has engaging conversations with dynamic guests covering a variety of business topics so you can get to your next win now!
We keep thinking we have to add more team in order to keep growing, but what do you think is the biggest mistake that most people make when building their team?
I think first of all, we live in a magical time and the resources are just so affordable and so endless. You could have exceptional talent in the winner circle part of our package. We will find you a VA and help you hire, onboard and train them. I would say to most people, two things, just two really big mistakes. One is they'll say, “Okay, I need a VA,” and they maybe go to an agency. I've had clients do that. And in the agency, it's a lot more expensive than working with us. You could be an amazing VA, and then somebody pairs you with someone. Let me give you an example like this. It's kind of like… let's say, Lori, I sent you a chef to work with you and your family. And I'm like, “This is a world-renowned chef, world-renowned. You are so lucky to have this chef,” and they send them to your home. And you're like, “Kris, this is a French cuisine chef and my kids are all about chicken nuggets.” This is not going to work, right?
So what I'm saying is that you can have an exception, you can find somebody extremely affordable and exceptionally talented. But when you're just running around, you know, pivoting all the time, and you're not set up and you're not ready, you're not gonna be able to keep them. And that's one of the biggest mistakes is they're like, “Oh, well, this didn't work. It didn't last.” Yeah. Because you're not set up, right? So, that's a big part of what we do. The other thing I would say is, so many people think about, you know, what they experienced as a team; the hierarchical thing when they worked in any kind of corporation anywhere in the world. And think about it like this… You also tend to think of it as a very parentified system, that working with a team and in a bigger company. And what I would say is the idea of culture, people tend to think when you have a bigger company, 5500 people, you have to think about culture. So, one of the things we talk a lot about in team building, and really implement quite effectively having a really amazing, uplifting, productive culture when you have one, two or three people on a team. Because think about it like this, Lori, if you were seeing an ocean liner like. There's 500 passengers and something happened to that ship. Maybe there's only 100 or 200 people or 75 people that are highly useful, and they're going to be able to deal with that crisis. Whatever the crisis is, the boats going down. But if you're in a rowboat with two other people, you can make sure this is one heck of a team. Because if there's a hole in that boat, that's it, right? So, I think culture is a big thing, and creating leadership and strength and making them little CEOs of their own departments. Instead of...
Meet Andy CrestodinaAndy Crestodina is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media, an award-winning 50-person digital agency in Chicago. Over the past 20 years, Andy has provided digital marketing advice to1000+ businesses.
Andy has written 500+ articles on content strategy, search engine optimization, influencer marketing, visitor psychology and Analytics. These articles reach more than three million readers each year. He’s also the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing.
Andy gives up to 100 webinars and presentations per year and is a frequent repeat speaker at many of the top national marketing conferences.
What kind of content can't be created by an AI?
I love this because I strongly believe that AI will reduce the cost of creating lots of content and especially specific types of content. But there are still types of content that it's not going to be very good at. AI, in my experience, doesn't really have a strong perspective. The technology is really just predicting the next chunk of language in a series. It's not trying to succeed at a goal per se. It's trying to create a piece of language that satisfies the prompt. So, if you want it to create some true thought leadership content or make a stand, have an opinion, it doesn't really do that. I've never seen AI throw a punch. It just isn't built for that. So, if you want to differentiate your content there are several great opportunities to do that.
What is the wrong way to be social online?
I think from a business perspective, it's constant selling at 100%. You're not going to have a following. You're going to lose any sort of followers that you did have. But if you're constantly pitching your service or, or product, you're going to lose interest right away. It's not sell me media. It's social media.
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Meet Clarene MitchellShe is the founder and CEO of TCM Communications, a social media branding firm based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. TCM focuses on empowering success-driven entrepreneurs and corporate leaders to effectively leverage LinkedIn to generate organic results. She holds a BA in interpersonal communications from Cardinal Stritch University.
How is LinkedIn different from other social media platforms?Totally different. I couldn't we could just talk about that question in itself and go on and on, for one LinkedIn was created for the members to generate results, as opposed to other platforms where they're really social entertainment. That was really that's the core foundation, the foundation of LinkedIn is all about members generating results. When you look at the mission of the platform, it says that explicitly, it's about the economic advancement of all the members. So that's number one. The other part of LinkedIn is different than other platforms, I say, is a more comprehensive platform. From my perspective, why do you have to go anywhere else you're using any other platform, when there's so much that LinkedIn offers, whether it's being able to create newsletters or write our articles, or go live in video form or audio form? And just the different features that it has, make it a more comprehensive platform versus I say some other platforms are more limited than with what you can do on them
If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regard to your professional career?You know, I had to go way back, because you know, my age, I think that mentally to go back to my 20-year-old, so I guess the biggest thing I would tell my 20-year-old self is, dreams don't have to die, they can be deferred, meaning so 20-year-old Claire rain wanted to be a broadcast journalist. But my life circumstances didn't allow for the freedom of that. But or the flexibility I needed to go with being in the broadcast journalism sector of communications. It's ironic now, though, where you know, with what I do in my business, and again, going back to the LinkedIn features, the LinkedIn feature, linked in live feature, for me is much of our dream, where, you know, life circumstance happened couldn't be a broadcast journalist right out of college, like I want it to become. But really, I'm fulfilling that dream now as a LinkedIn, live creator and host and all of that. It's like, okay, it could, that dream didn't have to die, I still held it dear in my heart, you know. And I, it became a reality when it needed to become or was able to become a reality. So not give up on my dreams, keep them fresh in my heart and continue to nurture them so that I could seize opportunities when they came up.
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Meet JamieJamie Shibley is the CEO of The Expressory, a strategic gifting agency that believes the key to accelerating your business growth and profitability in the post-COVID era will rely on your ability to maintain personal connections to build stronger emotional loyalty in your business relationships. After 20 years in the corporate world full of it and E-commerce roles, Jamie launched an online brand of her own. Jamie understands the influence of strategic gifts and wants to positively impact the mental well-being in our world by helping businesses acknowledge care for their community members, respected as a market leader. Jamie's work has been featured on Entertainment Tonight and forbes.com.
What are some of the best practices that you see for this relationship nurturing?In this post-COVID era, we kind of have a challenge as business owners, how do we continue to grow and succeed when, when we are working with nurturing our leads and converting more, I think that we've depended so long on this idea of, you know, you get this drilled into your head, this know, like, and trust, people need to know you as you trust you. And so great technology helps us reach more people, right, to reach the masses, and if that's how you're networking, even if that's how you're out first meeting people, that's great. But how do we get into and move people to the lake and trust if we're going to stay just digital and surface? And that's where I think this focus of, we need to bring a mix of a lot more personal touch, touch points with people. And so our best practice, what we always recommend is that you identify when you have prospects that come into your space, identify the key ones, because they can't all be like, like your top dream prospects, right? You know, grab, grab 10 of them, or 20, we say 25, right, your dream 25? Who are those people, and then make a plan so that you are showing up in some way in front of those people, those 25 leads, say, every six to eight weeks, but you need to do so through a combination of digital and physical, maybe even face to face. But how are you showing them that you understand their pain points that you understand where they're at, in, you know, whatever their business needs are, how whatever you serve, right as your company. Be generous with your smarts, and the things you share with them to educate them. And, you know, each time that you're in front of them, it moves that relationship forward a little bit further. And when we say use physical touch points in some way, whether that be handwritten cards, printed material, like your articles or research, the reason we say that is because physical tangible items in hand trigger the part of your brain that is that perceives value. So if I send you something that you are holding, you're already going to think I am my company, my service is more valuable. Because you're looking at something, right?
I'm curious, if you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regard to your professional career?Well, it's funny because when I graduated college, I started working right away for the company that I spent 20 years at and like I said in it, but at the same time, I was so obsessed with this with programming and creating and so I was outside of work. I was creating my own website, right and it was a time when the web was for Starting to take payments. And so I set up this whole crafting website where crafters could sell. I'd rent them space, all this stuff. And I had a bunch of crafters renting from me. However, I wasn't doing a great job getting them business customers. And so what I recognize then is like, well, I didn't know marketing, I had to figure out how to market on the web. And so I went and I searched the web. And I printed out this enormous book on marketing on the web. And then I realized, I'm just starting out my career,
Meet MartinMartin has had a unique career that has spanned both analyst and marketing practitioner roles focused on high technology and related industries. The unifying factor has always been a keen analysis of go-to-market trends while also having achieved success as a marketing leader. Schneider started his career as a journalist covering b2b technologies and quickly transitioned into leading analysts covering application software for the 451 group in New York City, where he specialized in CRM, marketing, automation, and business intelligence analytics technologies. After analyzing the go-to-market strategies of dozens of technology vendors, Schneider made the move to the vendor side, where he led successful go-to-market teams for several startups and established tech providers including Sugar CRM, Basho, technologies, Caspio, and support logic. Schneider brings a wealth of marketing and sales alignment content strategy and other go-to-market expertise to his role at Annuity this research is excited to be merging his two passions in producing research and analysis around modern go-to-market and growth marketing strategies for a broad set of b2b professionals.
So what's driving this interesting evolution and how growth leaders that you're talking about are looking at approaching go-to-market right now?Look, I think I think we've kind of hinted at it, right? I mean, it's the idea that looks, we we've changed the models of like delivery, and like payments, and like we've done all the infrastructure things, billing, you know, all these things that needed to be done in this new recurring model of everything. Subscription economy, whatever buzzword you want to use, right? Yep. But we have like, we never thought about the go-to-market and engagement strategies for the second half of that, right? We've never extended that part down the line. So that's really what's needed. Because what are we being forced with? We keep, you know, what did we hear a week or so ago in Chicago, right? Do more with less, you know, leverage data in ways that you never have. But well, what's the data need to be about? It's got to be about well, what's the customer experience that's driving new opportunities for growth? Right? It's about how we find lift, not just revenue. And how do we focus on the metrics and the KPIs that matter? Not the ones that are like what I would call kind of short-sighted, you know, how many times does a CMO pat the team on the back and said, Look, we did 115% of our lead handoffs, the sales for sales accepted leads were awesome. But the company misses its number. So then fingers get pointed, and people start, you know, and there's distrust and factions, and all those types of things that start to dysfunction, right? But because there wasn't a shared growth plan, there wasn't an understanding of like, well, well, what is a good lead? What are you know? And where did the post-sale? the idea that like, how do we not market these people effectively to get lifting growth inside our accounts, rather than just focusing on that new and blah, blah, blah, right? So I mean, that's really what's happening, right? Like, if everyone's using this term growth, and you see these things like growth hacking, and you use a term like hacking, and I'm like, that sounds a lot like just random, haphazard acts of marketing that are not strategic. They're not aligned to the entire journey. And that's really what's driving this, right, we need to have a full journey, an orchestrated approach that understands, you know, who are the personas for presale? Who are the personas for post-sale? What is that conversation track? What kind of content? What kind of channels? When do we provide that? What are the indicators that say this is upselling versus this is the reinforcement of just baseline stuff, of making sure they're actually using our product effectively, that kind of thing? And, and really building these models' full...
Meet DanDan is the founder and CEO of biz hack Academy, whose mission is to give 10,000 underserved small businesses a simpler way to grow. Dan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former NPR and PBS journalist, turned entrepreneur and educator. He is the grandson of a Philadelphia public school science teacher. That's a notice here of a professional soccer coach in La Liga in Spain. And he carries forward a family legacy of teaching coaching and entrepreneurship. Dan trains business owners in the lead building system, a process proven a proven process for online lead generation, and the thought leadership pyramid systematic approach to content marketing. past career highlights include as the head of growth at two software startups and as Senior Director of Digital Marketing, at the nation's largest Hispanic-owned energy company. He's helped to take offer craft a gamification SAS company in the hospitality industry, from pre-revenue to a 2.5 million run rate in just two years.
How does your journalistic background impact your approach to AI?You know, what a great question. And it's an area that I'm still figuring out because I think all of us are still figuring out AI and AI tools, but they're, they're at least two ways in which my journalistic background has come into there actually three ways in which my journalistic background and come into direct specific play when it comes to AI. So it helps to just give a little bit of background Sure. Ai, in its current form is really dependent on Okay, so AI is called artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is basically getting algorithms or robots to do work for you. And the most popular best-known version of AI is Chachi Beatty. It's what's known as generative AI, which means you ask them a question, and it creates an original new answer. And there are three things that journalists know how to do really well, that are very helpful with generative AI and Chachi PT. So the first is we're really good at precise communication. Right? Like we're very expert as journalists in communicating things clearly and simply and that's a really important skill when you're writing a prompt. Yes. The second is we're really good at fact-checking. And one of the big problems with AI is it, quote hallucinates. It's actually the word that they use the technical word for making shit up. And so journalists are really good at sniffing out bullshit and fact-checking. Sure. And then the third, the third thing that we're really really good at is interviewing. And if you actually look at what the quote prompt and Engineering are, which is the back-and-forth between an AI bot and a human being. It isn't a form kind of interview where you're continuously deepening and asking new questions and getting original responses and replanting returns. So I, you know, I've taught all these topics in journalism, I practice them as a journalist, and I'm finding generative AI and catch up at like, a very comfortable space for me.
Can you elaborate on what me too marketing is and what your perspective is?Yeah. So first of all, my passion isn't marketing. My passion is business storytelling, and more specifically, helping businesses grow. And I feel this is an important distinction because it was a big realization on my in my life that marketing is interesting to me. building my business and helping others build theirs is a life passion. I am so on fire on that. And marketing is an instrument for doing that. But it's not, in and of itself, a passion of mine, what I'm passionate about. And I do this a lot seeing a business and helping them get to the next phase. And particularly I do really well with small businesses from micro-enterprises to sub $50 million base witnesses and, and really like they can mark it before and after where biz hack and I have been in their life and glory like there's literally not enough money in the world to replace that feeling of just deep...
Meet AndyAndy is the founder of On Milwaukee, he's a Milwaukee native, he lived in Providence, Washington, DC, and Baltimore before returning home in 1996. Andy launched onmilwaukee.com LLC in April 1998 as a way to channel his passion for Milwaukee, journalism, and tech into a cutting-edge media company. He's a graduate of the George Washington University and worked at the White House Office of Communications, the Dallas Morning News, Washington Barrel, and to Milwaukee PR firms before branching out on his own at age 23. And he is more passionate than ever about Milwaukee's mission statement to grow communities and businesses through engaging digital media.
What would you recommend for how a business does PR?That's a good question. Because I've worked on both sides of the business. I've been in PR and media relations, and I've been in journalism, and I've gone back and forth. And sometimes my role continues to be on both sides of things. So I know what it's like to pitch and I know what it's like to be pitched. And what I always tell people is to make sure you have a relevant story for the outlet that you're pitching it to. If I looked at my email inbox right now, it would probably be about 700 messages today, mostly people trying to get coverage of things, and most of the time, it's not relevant. So people are spending an awful lot of time putting energy into things that don't really match who they're talking to. And it makes it more difficult for us to sort through it. Back in the day, media relations equated to news releases. And now that's, that's just one piece of it. So I would recommend that anyone working in public relations considers all the different tools that are available to get their message out and do it in a way that resonates with the journalists on the other side.
So what are some mistakes you see businesses making in getting the press's attention?If you make it too hard on the journalist, make your job easier, right? So so let's just start with, like the basics of news release writing, like, if it's a sales pitch, if it's full of typos if it's faxed, you know, it's like, Give me something not as much as they used to. But I mean, you know, give me something that a very busy Junior writer, if they wanted to, could pretty much copy and paste, I would never tolerate that, from our journalists. But, you know, the best news release is one that is already written in APA style, if that's what the publication uses. It's not, you know, it's, it's, it's not, it's, it's not an ad, right, you know, people can pay for that this isn't native content, like, show me why it's newsworthy, and write it is such, the biggest mistake is pitching things that are relevant, and then, you know, getting annoyed, why it's not working, and being blocked, you know, blowing your shot on that. And something, when you could have something else that would work. Because it's a relationship, basically, you know, some stranger, coming to me and asking for favors. It's like, you know, this, this is hard work. And we have a lot to choose from. To understand what we are, I get a lot of pitches addressed to the wrong publication. And it's like, come on, like, that's a pretty much surefire way to, not to know like, you know, hear the wrong name, you know, who you're talking to. And then I think that being respectful of the way that reporter wants to communicate, so for me, like I don't, I don't want to do this over Facebook Messenger, or I don't want to do this over text. And that's how people pitch me all the time. And I'll say, you know, could you please send me an email, but other people will say, like, you know, fire me off a text or something. And remember that you're asking a journalist to do something. And if you make it too hard, and you don't respect the deadlines, you don't respect what they need. You're just hurting your chances of success.
If you could go...
Meet JaimeJaime is a coach's coach. She sees individuals’ God-given talents, helps them connect to their true calling and courageously step into the vision of their future self. After 20+ years of developing employees in multiple family business leadership roles, Jaime has created an innovative, holistic approach that evokes rapid, transformative growth. When Jaime isn’t hosting her podcast "The Business is You!" or leading her coaching firm Believe Crew, she loves to kayak and hang out with her husband and 6 sons.
So what's your vision? What's your why?So when I first started coaching, I was actually in a family business in a leadership position, but it was more like a position of leadership. And yet, I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know a lot about myself, I just, you know, again, I was in the family business. And so, you know, you just help wherever you can. And eventually, you know, you start to get into positions where you know, more than someone else about that. And so, you know, maybe it's the right position, maybe it's not, but I wanted more, I wanted to be better at management at leading more, how could I be a better person. And so I started hiring a coach as well as getting trained on how to be a coach. And yet, I mean, in the family businesses that I was in, my dad was a serial entrepreneur. And so there was constantly a new business that we were starting. And so when I looked into the coaching industry, I was like, What is this? How do you start a coaching business like this just doesn't even make sense. There are no guidelines or rails, it felt like to me, and so I wanted and I could see this vision of like, how could we make coaching? How can we make it more possible for entrepreneurs to get coaching and to get it from a variety of coaches from one source? And how do we make it easier for coaches, to have a business without needing to do all the things themselves find all the people you know, all the VAs all the social media, posting, and so believe, whose vision is just this hub of coaches working together, and then ultimately, towards that bigger vision of empowering individuals to recognize, you know, their gifts and talents and be able to work in those gifts and talents. Like we're all called to something different. So we want to help, you know, create a community that can empower individuals through the power of coaching does that explain it in a short couple of sentences?
So what are some resources for business owners?Well, I love to think about who can help, you know, who are we called to work with? And not just like, How can I do this myself? I feel like business owners when they're first starting in business, it's like, like you said, the hat closet is really deep. And sometimes we don't even permit ourselves to spend the money because we're like, well, I need to be making money first. And it's sort of a chicken in the egg concept like how do you know? Do I need this person? Or do I need a client first? And what I found is that it comes down to being true to our values, like what you value, what is so important to you that it's worth investing in because that's what your business needs. And that's what you need. And really, resources can be as simple as software, it can be as simple as a business bestie a power partner, you know, someone that you have on the calendar once a month that you connect with because they're, you know, maybe a referral partner, maybe there's someone that works with your clients. Before After you do, like resources can come in, in the form of people software. I'm just sorry, every industry has its own, like associations. You know, sometimes there are connections there. But I love to think about what can we create. That's so amazing because we've partnered with other people on our journey.
If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of...
Meet KateWith over twenty years of experience in marketing, Kate is passionate about helping businesses cut through complexity and ‘busy work’ to create intentional growth strategies that actually make an impact on what matters most.
In addition to running her agency, Kate also teaches students the fundamentals of marketing at Husson University and Eastern Maine Community College, is an avid adventurer, and occasionally dusts off her journalism skills as a business and travel freelance contributor.
So what exactly is happening with Google Analytics, and what does that timeline look like?So if you own a business, or do marketing, you've probably heard about the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4. It's not anything new. Google actually released GA4 Back in 2020, they told us this was going to be happening last year, and they kind of started really poking and reminding us every time you logged in, it would say, Hey, we're transitioning to GA4. And now it is officially happening in July. So as of July, you're no longer going to have access to your Universal Analytics property. And so it's very important that businesses set up their GA4 property. So where we are in the timeline now, right around March, Google started kind of doing it for people. So you may have logged in and seen that Google has created your property for you. Some accounts may not have had it created for them yet. But it's really important that everybody kind of logs in and sees where they're at because there are some critical action steps that you want to be able to take. So come July, you're not left without the data that you need to make key decisions for your business.
So what exactly does this mean, for businesses like what should a business do?So what it means for businesses just to kind of take a step back really quick. So Universal Analytics and GA4 are essentially different data models. So while Google does give you the option to let it migrate your Analytics account into GA4, it is advised that if you're using it for anything that's not super simple, like just tracking pageviews or sessions, kind of some of the more simple metrics, it really you should go in and make sure that you're creating your data and your reports yourself. Because Universal Analytics is mostly focused on pageviews sessions, and user interactions with individual pages on your website, whereas GA4 is a little bit more focused on events. So everything in GA4 is an event. And it's important to know how to create those events so that you have the right kind of data and know what is happening with your website.
How important is google analytics as a tool and what are some pros and cons of leveraging it as a tool?So analytics, to me, is really the hub of how you get information if you're in digital marketing, right? It's really how you get the information and know what's happening. It allows you to see how many people are coming to your website, where they're coming from, what pages they're landing on what pages they're going to next. If you're tracking something like a lead or a purchase, you can look through behavior flow and see exactly you know what path that person is taking. And through that information that you gather, you can then make decisions not only about what you do on your website and the user experience on your website, but where to invest marketing dollars in terms of you know, are you doing PPC campaigns, are you running social media is most of your sales or most of your activity coming from your email list? It really can give you perspective on where to focus, what areas to kind of try to improve, and give you a bigger picture of How all of your marketing is working by having that all kind of plugged in together.
If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regard to your...
Meet EricHe's the CEO and founder of Myaderm, a manufacturer of skincare and pain relief products that use CBD as a key ingredient. Modern products are sold nationwide and retailers like Dick's Sporting Goods GNC and Rite Aid. He has worked in the pharmaceutical and food manufacturing industries with companies that included; Teva, Edwards, Lifesciences, and Dean Foods. From 2009 to 2010 Eric owned a professional us continental cycling team that received international recognition. He has been featured on network and cable television podcasts and has written articles for national publications. He's earned a BA from the Citadel and Charleston, South Carolina, and an MBA from the University of California.
How do we innovate?Well, I would expand on that to say most businesses do not innovate. It's more of a rarity than it is a rake regularity. And that's not surprising, because it's difficult. So and just understanding what innovation is largely misunderstood. It's not just a novel thing. So people conflate innovation with novelty, certainly, innovation has novelty in it. But what it is, is there's either an invention of something new with utility, or there's a new combination of things that create way more value than the independent parts. And that's a difficult thing to do. But it's a great thing to strive for. And certainly, if you want to have a great company, a great organization, if you want to do great things, you're going to have to be innovative. There's just no choice around that. The other option is to find a monopoly, that's a great way to do it too. Or, yeah, just have more money than anybody else. Those are your only other options.
What should entrepreneurs not do?My favorite topic, because I've, I've made all the mistakes. So I feel people's pain out there. Well, I mean, the first one is right in line with innovation. So do not do more of the same. I'm sure you as a marketer, the last thing you want to do is go out and spend all your time and energy promoting and building brands that are just copies of something else. That fair? Oh, yeah, 100% of yours. That sucks. That's no fun, and interesting. So and low probability of success. So if you're doing the same thing, you're just a different color or a different something, but is the same thing. Don't do that, do not do that. So what you want to strive for is innovating to create something that has new utility, or is significantly different than what's in the market that customers will want. So that's the first thing you don't do is more of the same. And the second thing is just as important, maybe the most important in all of the business. Don't be the very first and don't be the very last Don't be either the early adobe the very first I'll be very low. So timing, and the academic literature. unlimited amount of experience across the business world for the past 200 years will tell you, nothing's more important than timing, because you have the best ideas and even be able to execute but the timings are not right. It ain't gonna win.
Can you share your most successful or favorite networking experience that you’ve had?Well, I do have networking stories. And I want to start by saying, like, I don't like networking, introvert. I like making things I enjoy the process of building things. But I'll tell you this much, you're not gonna get anywhere in life. If you don't know, folks, if you don't spend time networking. So this is my recommendation for folks who are like me who don't naturally want to do that. Take what you're doing. So especially if you're doing something innovative, especially if you've got a lot of energy about it, and realize that that's the mechanism for energizing your ability to go out and meet people because naturally, you don't want to talk about that. And in business, if you have something interesting to share what you're doing what your work is, and you're...
Meet StuartStuart is the founder and CEO of Waymaker.io, an intelligent business management platform that helps leaders build a better business in 30 days. Stuart is a thought leader in strategy systems and leadership development. As the founder of waymaker.io, he has led the creation of the way makers' leadership curve, a relevant, revolutionary way of building clarity, alignments, and remarkable results in any organization.
So what are the three keys to growth for any organization?Well, I would say this is very high-level and very simple. But number one, clarity, number two, alignment, and number three focus. The clarity in the fundamentals of what we're all about alignment in our team, whether it be 1 or 2, or 10, or 20, or 100, or 1000. And focus on the work that really matters, the priorities that matter. And so those three keys; clarity around what business we're really in, and then the alignment of our team around that and the growth of our team. And the focus, only doing the things that matter. We do an awful lot of things often in business that don't matter that much and chews up an awful lot of time. And so our ability to focus is one of them the third key to making a difference.
Why is strategy confusing to regular business owners? And how can they be more strategic leaders?That's such a good question. It's a big question. You know, I come from the school of thought that strategy is not a set of actions, but rather a position to hold in the market. And that's often confronting to a small business owner, if you Google the word strategy, you're going to get a definition from Google, that says, a set of activities. And in part, it's kind of mostly right, but it's also mostly wrong. And I love how I think it's Professor Michael Porter from Harvard puts it, strategy is not a set of plans that we do. But rather, it's a position that we create or hold inside a marketplace. And that marketplace could be as big as your local neighborhood, or as big as the world. And I think that's the first big distinction to make around strategy. Strategy is a position we seek to be or we are in the market, and clarity of that position is fundamental to establishing the activities, or the other improvements we would make around holding that position. And I think most business owners missed that fundamental first step of saying, this is the position we want to hold on to be or our and, therefore, focus on doing lots of things thinking that strategic, whereas, in reality, you only need to do the things that hold your position.
How can a leadership team use the waymaker leadership curve to scale?Sure, sure. The loser curve and you can jump onto our website when america.io hit the Learn tab, and you'll find a bunch of resources on there so you can read about it. That gets some get some free resources to help you in your business. The leadership curve works in this simple way. It says, if we want to build market leadership, then we're going to go through several different stages of growth. Think of our organization like a child, the first stage of growth is ideation. Who, what's the idea for this business, which is kind of like the moment a child is born? The as, as an organization goes through those stages of growth, it'll conquer certain skills and set systems. And those, the maturity in the competencies in those skills and systems will allow them to break through those maturity stages, which ultimately increases the value of that organization. So think of a curve from bottom left going to top to right, go to top right, the bottom axis is time. And left-hand axis values, the longer an organization continues to build those skills and systems into maturity, then the higher the value can be created. So long as those skills and systems are generating value toward your end destination. What do I mean by that, if you're a small business owner, maybe you're a one...
Meet SherrySherry is the founder of Goldman Communications Group an award-winning public relations agency. Sherry works with companies and nonprofit associations and their leadership, helping them tell their stories and effectively reach key stakeholders. The agency offers strategic counsel messaging, media relations, corporate communications, thought leadership programming, community and industry relations, and crisis communication. Sherry is also an adjunct professor at the City College of New York.
What's the biggest challenge for companies today that want to be seen, be successful, and be known in today's business and media environment?I think the biggest challenge is being seen and being believed, there is so much stuff out there. Okay. And it's so hard to reach audiences because it's such a fragmented communications environment these days, I mean, you can get your news from whichever channel aligns better with your political views or not. So everyone's not watching the same T. Everyone's not watching the same newspaper on social media, which is fabulous. You choose to follow people who support your already known beliefs, interests, or commonalities, and it amplifies in your bubble. So you're not being exposed to everything that's out there. For companies or organizations, it's hard to crack into that bubble. It's hard to reach people who might be interested in what you're doing, or what you're offering, if they're not in your system, so to speak, if they're not following, and then I think the other big challenge and kind of running all over the place is being authentic. People put stuff out there because they want people to have it. But are they authentic? Do they know who their brand is? Is? Do they know who their target audience is? And how are you making that connection and maintaining that connection? I just think it's so challenging in this fragmented environment to build those relationships and keep those that you need as a company and an organization to succeed. And you know, this, Lori because you deal a lot in digital marketing. Companies put stuff out there. And that's important. But are they taking a step back and understanding who they're trying to reach? And I don't mean targeting them with your math. Because your people are very good at targeting but are they understanding the audience? And the audience cares? What's in it for me? And why should I care? So they understand the value proposition for who they're trying to reach. And then really looking to solve that pain point for that problem. And I think that's a challenge. It's a challenge in the environment we're in where everybody wants something immediately what everybody is, there is so much content out there. So you can say that a company necessarily won't be heard of. But if you and three of your other competitors are out there, how is your target? Customer, your target consumer, your target employee, differentiating you from the competition? And that's where public relations or other things have to factor in, you know, you know, what your brand is, but what's your reputation? How are you demonstrating? What you're telling people about your brand is? How are you showcasing it and being a resource? And that's where I think organizations are relying too much upon, at least that's what I've seen as well as just post it out there. And thinking it's out there, and people may know that they're gonna come and believe, and trust. And I think it takes a lot more to get people to believe and trust, we're a cynical society. There's a lot of competition out there. You know, a little plug from public relations which is what I do. And certainly digital and online is a very big piece of the puzzle and thought leadership. But how are you demonstrating that I mean, there's something to be said if someone's heard of three organizations, but one of them was written up about in the newspaper because the reporter thought had prevented...
Meet BruceBruce is the CEO and founder of BKM Marketing a Boston-based integrated marketing agency focused on helping clients grow their businesses. BKM marketing creates about 100 campaigns a year for clients, typically producing millions of direct mail pieces, online display ads, emails, social, social media posts, and more. But he's not here to talk about that today. Two years ago, Bruce became interested in understanding how his firm contributed to global warming. So he engaged a class of MBA students to measure his firm's carbon footprint and examine the marketing industry's carbon impact as a whole.
What prompted you to spend so much of your time and energy on climate change?Well, you know, it's really interesting. First and foremost, I live in the Washington area, and we have an ocean nearby. And everyone's concerned about how you know how high those oceans going to get. And, you know, when you start looking inwardly, it's, why is there so much concern about climate change right now, and it's because of human activity. So I own a small business, and we do a lot of stuff that might be part of the problem. So I wanted to take a good close look at what it is my company does, how what kind of impact that has, and also the industry. And it was enlightening to see how much damage we are doing as and not just our industry, lots of industries are like this. And so we wanted to measure it and see what we could do to offset what we're doing and reduce what we're doing. And believe it or not, that helps me make sleep a little bit better at night. And we were very lucky to find out that we can offset not only our impact but all the client work that we do. And so far, it's been very well received. And one of the things that we get asked some follow-up to is that all the time is okay, do business customers care about whether or not the companies that are doing business with actually really care if the company cares about the environment? And the answer is overwhelming. Lots of different studies on this. Probably the most interesting fact is that 92% of customers are more likely to trust a company that supports any kind of social or environmental issue. That's nine out of 10. When you look at millennials 68% of millennials buy a product with a social environmental benefit. More often than not, they seek it out It's whole, it's really good business, in addition to good for the environment. So how can our listeners go about making their businesses net zero now?Well, there are several ways to go about it, the first thing you have to do is learn what is your carbon footprint, and it varies from business to business, of course, and industry to industry. So one of the things we ended up learning is how little knowledge there is about US-based businesses, and what the impact they make on the environment is to do a whole lot of research. And most of that research will point you to a bunch of resources coming out of Europe, Europe is certainly I don't know how many years but a half a decade, decade ahead of the United States in terms of really trying to combat sources of global warming. So I can, you know, walk you through an example of what we ended up doing, or how we went about it. Yeah. And, but I do want to make sure that this isn't about, you know, us looking great. Doing, this is something that we think every business can do. So we didn't know the first thing about it two years ago. And so we found an MBA class at Suffolk University in Boston, that was looking for a partner to become the topic for the course. And so we had about 29 Students take a look at, our business and our industry. And we asked them to figure out how can we actually calculate the carbon impact our business has on the environment, and not just us. But certainly, you know, all the work we do for the clients. And with Greek, we do a lot of direct mail work, as you mentioned in my bio, outside looking in, boy, that means you're cutting down trees. And...
Meet AnnieShe is a former Disney storyteller, Best Selling Author, six-figure founder, and branding expert. In 2013, she quit a dream job telling stories at the Walt Disney Studios to start her agency, Greatest Story Creative. Since then, Annie has branded 125+ businesses spoken for 1000s. And release two best-selling books, including her newest, Established Yourself, Brand, Streamline and Grow Your Greatest Business. What's the best way to grow a service business without living on social media?This is what I get all the time. Because you know, nobody, nobody that I know in real life wants to live on social media wants to like have to be on all the platforms and posting what they had for dinner. And so many people feel like they don't want to put themselves out there in that way. And, you know, I think it's possible to grow a service-based business without relying on 24/7 social media. And I had to carve that path out for myself. That's a little bit of how I've been able to grow my business to consistent six figures by letting go of what the Guru constantly says about how you have to do this 24/7 Bro marketing approach. I tried all that it almost burnt me the heck out. And back in 2016, I decided you know what, I'm gonna double down on relationships. I'm gonna double down on making the business I already have the best possible business it can be and not stressing about my follower count and my likes and all of these things that seem like they're important, but weren't moving the needle for me. And that's, you know, you just mentioned my new book. That's exactly what I'm sharing and establish yourself. Is that process? How do you take your existing business and make it take it to a new level of passion and profit without it being all about social media, there are so many ways to grow a business. And I know that's something you talk about a lot, Laurie with those that you interview, because with this being social capital and being about relationships, right, like people just forget that even the things you see online happen because of those behind-the-scenes relationships. And so what I teach and what I practice myself is to not stress about 24/7 marketing, but instead optimize the people you already know your past clients, your current clients, your referral partners, and make sure those relationships are fantastic. Get in front of them consistently. And if you do those kinds of things, you can have a sustainable business that you love that loves you back and not have, you know, more than just a couple, a handful of followers on social media. Lori: I agree with that. And I've seen several startups or I like to call them solopreneurs where their corporate turned into entrepreneurs. Focus on building their social media. But really, that's just one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot of movement and area that you can lead to traction can happen without even using social media. Social media is a great place to have one message communicated to many people at once. But it takes time and consistency but it shouldn't be the end of all How do I stand out with my marketing?That's like I think everybody's favorite question to ask like how do I stand out? And I like it but I'm going to ask are a different way, which is it's the wrong question altogether. Okay, because I think that everybody is. So I think everyone thinks that their kind of main consideration with marketing is standing out that, oh, I need to come up with something original. So I get people's attention. And I'm sort of of the mind that nothing, there's nothing original under the sun, like, you're not going to create something that is just so different from what everybody else says that that is going to be your marketing, that is an efficient strategy. And sort of, you know, there are only so many words in the English language, for example, to describe what a leadership coach does or doesn't do. And people are kind of trying to search for this elusive perfect...
Meet AnnieShe is a former Disney storyteller, Best Selling Author, six-figure founder, and branding expert. In 2013, she quit a dream job telling stories at the Walt Disney Studios to start her agency, Greatest Story Creative. Since then, Annie has branded 125+ businesses spoken for 1000s. And release two best-selling books, including her newest, Established Yourself, Brand, Streamline and Grow Your Greatest Business. What's the best way to grow a service business without living on social media?This is what I get all the time. Because you know, nobody, nobody that I know in real life wants to live on social media wants to like have to be on all the platforms and posting what they had for dinner. And so many people feel like they don't want to put themselves out there in that way. And, you know, I think it's possible to grow a service-based business without relying on 24/7 social media. And I had to carve that path out for myself. That's a little bit of how I've been able to grow my business to consistent six figures by letting go of what the Guru constantly says about how you have to do this 24/7 Bro marketing approach. I tried all that it almost burnt me the heck out. And back in 2016, I decided you know what, I'm gonna double down on relationships. I'm gonna double down on making the business I already have the best possible business it can be and not stressing about my follower count and my likes and all of these things that seem like they're important, but weren't moving the needle for me. And that's, you know, you just mentioned my new book. That's exactly what I'm sharing and establish yourself. Is that process? How do you take your existing business and make it take it to a new level of passion and profit without it being all about social media, there are so many ways to grow a business. And I know that's something you talk about a lot, Laurie with those that you interview, because with this being social capital and being about relationships, right, like people just forget that even the things you see online happen because of those behind-the-scenes relationships. And so what I teach and what I practice myself is to not stress about 24/7 marketing, but instead optimize the people you already know your past clients, your current clients, your referral partners, and make sure those relationships are fantastic. Get in front of them consistently. And if you do those kinds of things, you can have a sustainable business that you love that loves you back and not have, you know, more than just a couple, a handful of followers on social media. Lori: I agree with that. And I've seen several startups or I like to call them solopreneurs where their corporate turned into entrepreneurs. Focus on building their social media. But really, that's just one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot of movement and area that you can lead to traction can happen without even using social media. Social media is a great place to have one message communicated to many people at once. But it takes time and consistency but it shouldn't be the end of all How do I stand out with my marketing?That's like I think everybody's favorite question to ask like how do I stand out? And I like it but I'm going to ask are a different way, which is it's the wrong question altogether. Okay, because I think that everybody is. So I think everyone thinks that their kind of main consideration with marketing is standing out that, oh, I need to come up with something original. So I get people's attention. And I'm sort of of the mind that nothing, there's nothing original under the sun, like, you're not going to create something that is just so different from what everybody else says that that is going to be your marketing, that is an efficient strategy. And sort of, you know, there are only so many words in the English language, for example, to describe what a leadership coach does or doesn't do. And people are kind of trying to search for this elusive perfect...
Meet AnnieShe is a former Disney storyteller, Best Selling Author, six-figure founder, and branding expert. In 2013, she quit a dream job telling stories at the Walt Disney Studios to start her agency, Greatest Story Creative. Since then, Annie has branded 125+ businesses spoken for 1000s. And release two best-selling books, including her newest, Established Yourself, Brand, Streamline and Grow Your Greatest Business. What's the best way to grow a service business without living on social media?This is what I get all the time. Because you know, nobody, nobody that I know in real life wants to live on social media wants to like have to be on all the platforms and posting what they had for dinner. And so many people feel like they don't want to put themselves out there in that way. And, you know, I think it's possible to grow a service-based business without relying on 24/7 social media. And I had to carve that path out for myself. That's a little bit of how I've been able to grow my business to consistent six figures by letting go of what the Guru constantly says about how you have to do this 24/7 Bro marketing approach. I tried all that it almost burnt me the heck out. And back in 2016, I decided you know what, I'm gonna double down on relationships. I'm gonna double down on making the business I already have the best possible business it can be and not stressing about my follower count and my likes and all of these things that seem like they're important, but weren't moving the needle for me. And that's, you know, you just mentioned my new book. That's exactly what I'm sharing and establish yourself. Is that process? How do you take your existing business and make it take it to a new level of passion and profit without it being all about social media, there are so many ways to grow a business. And I know that's something you talk about a lot, Laurie with those that you interview, because with this being social capital and being about relationships, right, like people just forget that even the things you see online happen because of those behind-the-scenes relationships. And so what I teach and what I practice myself is to not stress about 24/7 marketing, but instead optimize the people you already know your past clients, your current clients, your referral partners, and make sure those relationships are fantastic. Get in front of them consistently. And if you do those kinds of things, you can have a sustainable business that you love that loves you back and not have, you know, more than just a couple, a handful of followers on social media. Lori: I agree with that. And I've seen several startups or I like to call them solopreneurs where their corporate turned into entrepreneurs. Focus on building their social media. But really, that's just one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot of movement and area that you can lead to traction can happen without even using social media. Social media is a great place to have one message communicated to many people at once. But it takes time and consistency but it shouldn't be the end of all How do I stand out with my marketing?That's like I think everybody's favorite question to ask like how do I stand out? And I like it but I'm going to ask are a different way, which is it's the wrong question altogether. Okay, because I think that everybody is. So I think everyone thinks that their kind of main consideration with marketing is standing out that, oh, I need to come up with something original. So I get people's attention. And I'm sort of of the mind that nothing, there's nothing original under the sun, like, you're not going to create something that is just so different from what everybody else says that that is going to be your marketing, that is an efficient strategy. And sort of, you know, there are only so many words in the English language, for example, to describe what a leadership coach does or doesn't do. And people are kind of trying to search for this elusive perfect...
Meet NickiHer passion is empowering leaders to challenge and expand their thinking to increase performance, well-being, and joy in their lives. She is a life and executive coach with over 10 years of experience helping individuals and organizations achieve remarkable results. Nicki will help you achieve your power, live your purpose and create the freedom to live the life that you want. She loves delicious food traveling and adventures with her husband, Michael, and dog Pico de gallo. So what do you recommend to others who struggle with finding out what it is that they want to do?Yeah, I hear this. Often, I think, you know, most people can relate to that when they're fresh out of college or even earlier now, I was in a conversation with one of my nieces who's only 14. And she's already grappling with what she wants to be when she grows up. So whether it's, you know, trying to figure it out, what do I want to be, or people that are already established in careers, whether it's five years 10, 15 or 20 years or more and, but want to explore whether they want to do something different or not. I'm a career changer, myself, I made a decision that I needed my career to be something I'm passionate about. And I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do. My background is in politics and government, I was Deputy Press Secretary for a state official when I lived in Pennsylvania. And it was an amazing experience and education and you know, to see how the government works and be a part of it. But I was deeply sad because I didn't have that fulfillment that I knew I wanted. And not everyone needs to have that fulfillment or passion throughout their career. But I knew that I wanted that. So I hired a coach to help me figure out, you know what I wanted to do. And after much exploration, I fell in love with coaching, because I experienced and felt the exercises and tools and got the massive impact it had on me in my life. And there were a few things I had to take look at a really hard look in the mirror. Lori: Wow, yeah, I agree. And I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, and just my journey and a lot of different buckets, I don't even know where to start with some of that. But one of the things I think you'll find this quite entertaining, you're talking about, like this negative talk that goes in our head. And through some of the coaching that I've gone through, you learn to kind of give it a name and tell it to shut up. I call mine a drunken monkey you're drunk go home. But learning in that process to just realize that I am in control of the situation. And I am in control of you know, creating my destiny has allowed me to be who I am today and where I am today and build the path that I want to be in and you know, take take the long road or the fast path, you know, whatever route I want to go based on the experiences that I want in life and that's what I find brings me the most joy is having new experiences. I think that's what makes me bolder and stronger and gives me greater power. perspective. But it took me a long time to realize that. What advice do you have to offer on the balance between work and life?Yeah, this is a hot client issue. I mean, not even just with my clients, it's everywhere. And I think everyone's trying to crack the nut and figure it out. So I do see it in all fields and industries. I think if you're an entrepreneur, the irony is most likely that you chose to do that to be your boss and have that autonomy. And then most of us, at some point, fall into that black hole of being a workaholic, which is the lesson that I learned, which I'm no longer by the way. But if you know, the same thing with an executive leadership role, time and time again, I just hear people say, Yeah, I took a role or took a promotion or want to do it. But my health and my family time, and my personal life is suffering. So it's a widespread issue. And I would say the first step is that balance, like what that means to you,
Meet NickiHer passion is empowering leaders to challenge and expand their thinking to increase performance, well-being, and joy in their lives. She is a life and executive coach with over 10 years of experience helping individuals and organizations achieve remarkable results. Nicki will help you achieve your power, live your purpose and create the freedom to live the life that you want. She loves delicious food traveling and adventures with her husband, Michael, and dog Pico de gallo. So what do you recommend to others who struggle with finding out what it is that they want to do?Yeah, I hear this. Often, I think, you know, most people can relate to that when they're fresh out of college or even earlier now, I was in a conversation with one of my nieces who's only 14. And she's already grappling with what she wants to be when she grows up. So whether it's, you know, trying to figure it out, what do I want to be, or people that are already established in careers, whether it's five years 10, 15 or 20 years or more and, but want to explore whether they want to do something different or not. I'm a career changer, myself, I made a decision that I needed my career to be something I'm passionate about. And I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do. My background is in politics and government, I was Deputy Press Secretary for a state official when I lived in Pennsylvania. And it was an amazing experience and education and you know, to see how the government works and be a part of it. But I was deeply sad because I didn't have that fulfillment that I knew I wanted. And not everyone needs to have that fulfillment or passion throughout their career. But I knew that I wanted that. So I hired a coach to help me figure out, you know what I wanted to do. And after much exploration, I fell in love with coaching, because I experienced and felt the exercises and tools and got the massive impact it had on me in my life. And there were a few things I had to take look at a really hard look in the mirror. Lori: Wow, yeah, I agree. And I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, and just my journey and a lot of different buckets, I don't even know where to start with some of that. But one of the things I think you'll find this quite entertaining, you're talking about, like this negative talk that goes in our head. And through some of the coaching that I've gone through, you learn to kind of give it a name and tell it to shut up. I call mine a drunken monkey you're drunk go home. But learning in that process to just realize that I am in control of the situation. And I am in control of you know, creating my destiny has allowed me to be who I am today and where I am today and build the path that I want to be in and you know, take take the long road or the fast path, you know, whatever route I want to go based on the experiences that I want in life and that's what I find brings me the most joy is having new experiences. I think that's what makes me bolder and stronger and gives me greater power. perspective. But it took me a long time to realize that. What advice do you have to offer on the balance between work and life?Yeah, this is a hot client issue. I mean, not even just with my clients, it's everywhere. And I think everyone's trying to crack the nut and figure it out. So I do see it in all fields and industries. I think if you're an entrepreneur, the irony is most likely that you chose to do that to be your boss and have that autonomy. And then most of us, at some point, fall into that black hole of being a workaholic, which is the lesson that I learned, which I'm no longer by the way. But if you know, the same thing with an executive leadership role, time and time again, I just hear people say, Yeah, I took a role or took a promotion or want to do it. But my health and my family time, and my personal life is suffering. So it's a widespread issue. And I would say the first step is that balance, like what that means to you,
Meet NickiHer passion is empowering leaders to challenge and expand their thinking to increase performance, well-being, and joy in their lives. She is a life and executive coach with over 10 years of experience helping individuals and organizations achieve remarkable results. Nicki will help you achieve your power, live your purpose and create the freedom to live the life that you want. She loves delicious food traveling and adventures with her husband, Michael, and dog Pico de gallo. So what do you recommend to others who struggle with finding out what it is that they want to do?Yeah, I hear this. Often, I think, you know, most people can relate to that when they're fresh out of college or even earlier now, I was in a conversation with one of my nieces who's only 14. And she's already grappling with what she wants to be when she grows up. So whether it's, you know, trying to figure it out, what do I want to be, or people that are already established in careers, whether it's five years 10, 15 or 20 years or more and, but want to explore whether they want to do something different or not. I'm a career changer, myself, I made a decision that I needed my career to be something I'm passionate about. And I struggled to figure out what I wanted to do. My background is in politics and government, I was Deputy Press Secretary for a state official when I lived in Pennsylvania. And it was an amazing experience and education and you know, to see how the government works and be a part of it. But I was deeply sad because I didn't have that fulfillment that I knew I wanted. And not everyone needs to have that fulfillment or passion throughout their career. But I knew that I wanted that. So I hired a coach to help me figure out, you know what I wanted to do. And after much exploration, I fell in love with coaching, because I experienced and felt the exercises and tools and got the massive impact it had on me in my life. And there were a few things I had to take look at a really hard look in the mirror. Lori: Wow, yeah, I agree. And I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, and just my journey and a lot of different buckets, I don't even know where to start with some of that. But one of the things I think you'll find this quite entertaining, you're talking about, like this negative talk that goes in our head. And through some of the coaching that I've gone through, you learn to kind of give it a name and tell it to shut up. I call mine a drunken monkey you're drunk go home. But learning in that process to just realize that I am in control of the situation. And I am in control of you know, creating my destiny has allowed me to be who I am today and where I am today and build the path that I want to be in and you know, take take the long road or the fast path, you know, whatever route I want to go based on the experiences that I want in life and that's what I find brings me the most joy is having new experiences. I think that's what makes me bolder and stronger and gives me greater power. perspective. But it took me a long time to realize that. What advice do you have to offer on the balance between work and life?Yeah, this is a hot client issue. I mean, not even just with my clients, it's everywhere. And I think everyone's trying to crack the nut and figure it out. So I do see it in all fields and industries. I think if you're an entrepreneur, the irony is most likely that you chose to do that to be your boss and have that autonomy. And then most of us, at some point, fall into that black hole of being a workaholic, which is the lesson that I learned, which I'm no longer by the way. But if you know, the same thing with an executive leadership role, time and time again, I just hear people say, Yeah, I took a role or took a promotion or want to do it. But my health and my family time, and my personal life is suffering. So it's a widespread issue. And I would say the first step is that balance, like what that means to you,
Meet PieterPieter is the founder and CEO of Mobilo with the smart business card, he has had his fingers on the pulse of technology since the 1990s. Starting multiple companies and taking on 3d printing. After a period of consulting and failed startup projects. Peter stumbled upon RFID and its untapped potential. This led to the launch of Mobilo. How are you tying in networking versus advertising?I think networking is often scary. And advertising is a little easier, even though you're putting yourself out there in a different way. It's a little less confrontational, right, running an ad is, is easier to do. Networking might be a bigger step for some people. On the other hand, it's all about strategic fit. So when I think about networking versus advertising, look back at your product and figure out what's important for you. Do you really prefer to meet a couple of people? And can that make your a month or quarter? A big time? Or do you really need to be with the masses and find the right fit there? So what do you think Laurie? What was your first thought you heard about this? Lori: well, networking, I thought you just had to be in the big in the, in the sea of the masses. My perspective has changed a lot though. I mean, this is definitely what I'm fascinated with. And it's, it's more about the investment, the long-term investment with a few people as opposed to, you know, short snippets of time with many many people. How can they collaborate and cooperate together?Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I've heard, which makes me think about something I've heard an artist not too long ago rapper, saying, Hey, I'm going to build my fan base one fan at a time, add one fan per day, basically. And I imagine that right if you build your network to be three or 65 people, by the end of the year, you could organize an event. And if all 365 people are legit, gentlemen. If fans are interested in what you have to say or, or good community then that will be worth it to organize the events by itself, right? If you fill a room with 200 people, it would already be a great event, I think even 50 people would already be would be fantastic. So that's what you can do with networking. Obviously, if I would stand outside here, New York City, and I would go outside and walk up to Times Square, I would meet 120,000 people every single day. But if I don't have anything to tell them that resonates with them, I'm shooting I'm shooting in the dark. Lori: I 100% agree. And that's where those two, advertising and networking kind of tie in together because you're getting some conciseness with your messaging, and clarity with your messaging is what ultimately attracts people to you. When you have that initial conversation with him like you're the speed networking. I mean, you've got 30 seconds to wow, someone you want to have a really polished message. And that's kind of where the marketing and advertising come into play. How do you see potential in undervalued technology?Well, first of all, I am a real techie. And I think I, my father have brought me very early on in touch with computers. And so my love for technology really, really grew. And we, beyond the necessity, the necessity of technology, but I consider myself a geek, a nerd. But now that technology is really taking taken over so much of our lives. I, I really think it's important that technology is there as an assistant, it should be on the side. But it should be catching wherever we, as human beings can be served and helped and maybe some friends I'll give you an example. I think one of the reasons why I love Mobilo is because it helps me stay in touch with people in the perfect way. I still need to make it personal. That's what I have to do as a human but I forget that I've met people or forget what I've spoken to them about. And as I'm super jealous of my wife who doesn't forget anything, whenever we go to birthday parties, or in general she always whispers in my
Meet PieterPieter is the founder and CEO of Mobilo with the smart business card, he has had his fingers on the pulse of technology since the 1990s. Starting multiple companies and taking on 3d printing. After a period of consulting and failed startup projects. Peter stumbled upon RFID and its untapped potential. This led to the launch of Mobilo. How are you tying in networking versus advertising?I think networking is often scary. And advertising is a little easier, even though you're putting yourself out there in a different way. It's a little less confrontational, right, running an ad is, is easier to do. Networking might be a bigger step for some people. On the other hand, it's all about strategic fit. So when I think about networking versus advertising, look back at your product and figure out what's important for you. Do you really prefer to meet a couple of people? And can that make your a month or quarter? A big time? Or do you really need to be with the masses and find the right fit there? So what do you think Laurie? What was your first thought you heard about this? Lori: well, networking, I thought you just had to be in the big in the, in the sea of the masses. My perspective has changed a lot though. I mean, this is definitely what I'm fascinated with. And it's, it's more about the investment, the long-term investment with a few people as opposed to, you know, short snippets of time with many many people. How can they collaborate and cooperate together?Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I've heard, which makes me think about something I've heard an artist not too long ago rapper, saying, Hey, I'm going to build my fan base one fan at a time, add one fan per day, basically. And I imagine that right if you build your network to be three or 65 people, by the end of the year, you could organize an event. And if all 365 people are legit, gentlemen. If fans are interested in what you have to say or, or good community then that will be worth it to organize the events by itself, right? If you fill a room with 200 people, it would already be a great event, I think even 50 people would already be would be fantastic. So that's what you can do with networking. Obviously, if I would stand outside here, New York City, and I would go outside and walk up to Times Square, I would meet 120,000 people every single day. But if I don't have anything to tell them that resonates with them, I'm shooting I'm shooting in the dark. Lori: I 100% agree. And that's where those two, advertising and networking kind of tie in together because you're getting some conciseness with your messaging, and clarity with your messaging is what ultimately attracts people to you. When you have that initial conversation with him like you're the speed networking. I mean, you've got 30 seconds to wow, someone you want to have a really polished message. And that's kind of where the marketing and advertising come into play. How do you see potential in undervalued technology?Well, first of all, I am a real techie. And I think I, my father have brought me very early on in touch with computers. And so my love for technology really, really grew. And we, beyond the necessity, the necessity of technology, but I consider myself a geek, a nerd. But now that technology is really taking taken over so much of our lives. I, I really think it's important that technology is there as an assistant, it should be on the side. But it should be catching wherever we, as human beings can be served and helped and maybe some friends I'll give you an example. I think one of the reasons why I love Mobilo is because it helps me stay in touch with people in the perfect way. I still need to make it personal. That's what I have to do as a human but I forget that I've met people or forget what I've spoken to them about. And as I'm super jealous of my wife who doesn't forget anything, whenever we go to birthday parties, or in general she always whispers in my
Meet ScottScott is hired by millennial entrepreneurs to build and pass on wealth, because most feel stressed out by debt, confused about what to do with their money and don't trust banks or Wall Street just like he doesn't. So he helps millennial entrepreneurs recycle their dollars to either start or supercharge their investments. Bottom line, his clients, reverse engineer banks and the wealthy to do what they do rather than what they tell us to do. And learn how to make bank like a bank. Why is debt such a huge problem in our society?While a number of reasons, the system itself is designed to keep us in debt, the way the lending institutions work, the way that government regulators, you know, let them do crazy things that are in their favor, rather than the borrower. And even the get-out-of-debt industry plays a huge part. Because what these financial entertainers do is contribute to people feeling like they are broken like they are the problem. When really, that's not the case. The whole focus on getting out of debt contributes to people staying in debt. Because when you think about it, Lori, getting out of debt is working your way up to zero. Who wants to be at zero? To truly have a sound financial plan, we need to go way beyond zero. And we need to know not just how am I going to get to zero but how am I going to go above and beyond. What tools am I going to use to supercharge my plan and follow the right path to the right destination? Lori: Yeah, wow. That's I mean, that's important. I agree with the mean, being at zero isn't exciting. I mean, it's a win to get dug out of the big hole that you're in. But I think the bigger picture, the real work comes in after you do that part. What is the plan after getting to zero? The way I like to illustrate that is if you picture the beginning of a marathon, Boston Marathon had 27,000 runners on one street. So you know, picture what a mess that is. If you're at the back of that pack, you've got a long way to run just to get to the starting line. And then you've got 26.2 more miles to go to get to the finish line. Well, financially speaking, getting out of debt is just reaching the starting line. That's not the finish line. You're already tired by the time you reach the starting line. Well, what is the finish line? Financially speaking, it's financial freedom, passive income, retirement, however, you think about it, however, you frame it. That's the finish line. And if we say youths spend all that energy and effort to get to the starting line, you're already tired. But then a race official sees you and says, Laurie, come over here. I saw how far you had to come just to get to the starting line. And that's not fair. What I'm going to do is drive you into the course and shorten that race. Wouldn't you appreciate it? If that's the opportunity that you had? What I do is help people to take that energy and effort that they expend to just reach the starting line, and then teleport into the course to shorten that race to passive income. Retirement financial freedom. Lori: Interesting. It's an interesting analogy. Yeah. Okay, so let's, let's talk about that a bit. What's the best way for someone to map out that financial future?The best way is to reverse engineer what we know works. There are three main problems that people have when it comes to managing their money. The first is trial and error, they just guess. And that is a financial agnostic, they try a little of this, a little of that sample a little over here, and hope they stumble across a solution around something that helps them to feel good. The second is listening to their broke friends, even though they know they've got no idea what they're doing with their money. That's a financial atheist. They figure there is no such thing as financial truth. Therefore, I'm going to just stick with what I can see touch, and feel around me and focus on that. The third is listening to one of those financial entertainers that...
Meet ScottScott is hired by millennial entrepreneurs to build and pass on wealth, because most feel stressed out by debt, confused about what to do with their money and don't trust banks or Wall Street just like he doesn't. So he helps millennial entrepreneurs recycle their dollars to either start or supercharge their investments. Bottom line, his clients, reverse engineer banks and the wealthy to do what they do rather than what they tell us to do. And learn how to make bank like a bank. Why is debt such a huge problem in our society?While a number of reasons, the system itself is designed to keep us in debt, the way the lending institutions work, the way that government regulators, you know, let them do crazy things that are in their favor, rather than the borrower. And even the get-out-of-debt industry plays a huge part. Because what these financial entertainers do is contribute to people feeling like they are broken like they are the problem. When really, that's not the case. The whole focus on getting out of debt contributes to people staying in debt. Because when you think about it, Lori, getting out of debt is working your way up to zero. Who wants to be at zero? To truly have a sound financial plan, we need to go way beyond zero. And we need to know not just how am I going to get to zero but how am I going to go above and beyond. What tools am I going to use to supercharge my plan and follow the right path to the right destination? Lori: Yeah, wow. That's I mean, that's important. I agree with the mean, being at zero isn't exciting. I mean, it's a win to get dug out of the big hole that you're in. But I think the bigger picture, the real work comes in after you do that part. What is the plan after getting to zero? The way I like to illustrate that is if you picture the beginning of a marathon, Boston Marathon had 27,000 runners on one street. So you know, picture what a mess that is. If you're at the back of that pack, you've got a long way to run just to get to the starting line. And then you've got 26.2 more miles to go to get to the finish line. Well, financially speaking, getting out of debt is just reaching the starting line. That's not the finish line. You're already tired by the time you reach the starting line. Well, what is the finish line? Financially speaking, it's financial freedom, passive income, retirement, however, you think about it, however, you frame it. That's the finish line. And if we say youths spend all that energy and effort to get to the starting line, you're already tired. But then a race official sees you and says, Laurie, come over here. I saw how far you had to come just to get to the starting line. And that's not fair. What I'm going to do is drive you into the course and shorten that race. Wouldn't you appreciate it? If that's the opportunity that you had? What I do is help people to take that energy and effort that they expend to just reach the starting line, and then teleport into the course to shorten that race to passive income. Retirement financial freedom. Lori: Interesting. It's an interesting analogy. Yeah. Okay, so let's, let's talk about that a bit. What's the best way for someone to map out that financial future?The best way is to reverse engineer what we know works. There are three main problems that people have when it comes to managing their money. The first is trial and error, they just guess. And that is a financial agnostic, they try a little of this, a little of that sample a little over here, and hope they stumble across a solution around something that helps them to feel good. The second is listening to their broke friends, even though they know they've got no idea what they're doing with their money. That's a financial atheist. They figure there is no such thing as financial truth. Therefore, I'm going to just stick with what I can see touch, and feel around me and focus on that. The third is listening to one of those financial entertainers that...
Meet KarleyBusiness Growth Accelerator & Brand Strategist Karley Cunningham takes businesses from overcrowded, competitive spaces into blue ocean territory where they can confidently stand out and thrive as brand leaders in their sector. Her international client base benefits from accelerated growth, profit and stability as her innovative Surefire Method provides them with a sure-fire strategy and toolkit that enables them to charge a premium, attract ideal clients, and outpace their competitors. What is the strategy before the strategy? And how has it helped motivate business motivated business owners to accelerate their growth and success?One of the questions we get a lot from business owners and leaders or a management team at the top is how do we align everyone and everything? And what they're essentially asking us is when they're delivering when anybody is coming into a touch point with their company, how are we ensuring that people are acting in alignment? And that they're making the right decisions? This is delivering the right customer experience? Or it could be a supplier experience? How are we strengthening those relationships and building our reputation with every touchpoint? And so the strategy before the strategy is a piece that we recognized about three years ago, that was saying, Well, how are we guiding everyone and to simplify? Sometimes when I say strategy, I know people's perception, their brain goes, “Oh, no, this gets complicated.” And this is what I tell people: to think about strategy as the overarching “how”. It's just how we go about doing everything. And so business owners and leaders are often feeling like they're walking around all the time telling people okay, don't forget that this is our purpose for existing. And don't forget that this is who we are. And this is how we need to show up. And if we look at the higher levels in management, each manager is in charge of the strategy for their departments. So when you've got marketing, doing one strategy and HR doing another strategy, and I know, for you in digital marketing, that's probably your worst nightmare, because all of a sudden, you've got two brand things going on. Yeah, yeah. Right. So we looked at, okay, how can we give them a simple strategy to align everyone and everything? And it's a simple set of questions. If you can empower your team with these questions, anybody at every level, then they'll start thinking about making purposeful and aligned decisions. And it's simply that if they're going to make a decision, consider or take an opportunity, make an innovation or take an action, they need to ask themselves: will we be acting in alignment and living our organizational purpose? If we do this thing, will we be acting in alignment and living our values or guiding principles? Will we be acting in alignment with our brand character and making people feel the way we want them to feel? And ultimately, if we're making this decision, is it going to move us closer to achieving our short mid term goal and inner vision? What is the thing that you found most businesses are missing, that prevents them from filling their pipeline and closing the deals or bringing in new customers?This was shocking to me when I went back and looked at our past client list because I like data, and I'm sure you'd like data. And I realized that 98% of the businesses that come to us to help them build their brands, help them get core clear communication, don't have a clear understanding of who their target audience profiles are, who their target audiences are. And I'm not just talking about clients, there's also some misses in there as well. But when I say, people will come to us with a persona, a slight description, but we need to go really deep, understanding the problems that we solve for our ideal clients, understanding their mindset, and what they believe and what their worldview is. And often the other misses are, yeah, we all have clients, but we all have...
Meet KarleyBusiness Growth Accelerator & Brand Strategist Karley Cunningham takes businesses from overcrowded, competitive spaces into blue ocean territory where they can confidently stand out and thrive as brand leaders in their sector. Her international client base benefits from accelerated growth, profit and stability as her innovative Surefire Method provides them with a sure-fire strategy and toolkit that enables them to charge a premium, attract ideal clients, and outpace their competitors. What is the strategy before the strategy? And how has it helped motivate business motivated business owners to accelerate their growth and success?One of the questions we get a lot from business owners and leaders or a management team at the top is how do we align everyone and everything? And what they're essentially asking us is when they're delivering when anybody is coming into a touch point with their company, how are we ensuring that people are acting in alignment? And that they're making the right decisions? This is delivering the right customer experience? Or it could be a supplier experience? How are we strengthening those relationships and building our reputation with every touchpoint? And so the strategy before the strategy is a piece that we recognized about three years ago, that was saying, Well, how are we guiding everyone and to simplify? Sometimes when I say strategy, I know people's perception, their brain goes, “Oh, no, this gets complicated.” And this is what I tell people: to think about strategy as the overarching “how”. It's just how we go about doing everything. And so business owners and leaders are often feeling like they're walking around all the time telling people okay, don't forget that this is our purpose for existing. And don't forget that this is who we are. And this is how we need to show up. And if we look at the higher levels in management, each manager is in charge of the strategy for their departments. So when you've got marketing, doing one strategy and HR doing another strategy, and I know, for you in digital marketing, that's probably your worst nightmare, because all of a sudden, you've got two brand things going on. Yeah, yeah. Right. So we looked at, okay, how can we give them a simple strategy to align everyone and everything? And it's a simple set of questions. If you can empower your team with these questions, anybody at every level, then they'll start thinking about making purposeful and aligned decisions. And it's simply that if they're going to make a decision, consider or take an opportunity, make an innovation or take an action, they need to ask themselves: will we be acting in alignment and living our organizational purpose? If we do this thing, will we be acting in alignment and living our values or guiding principles? Will we be acting in alignment with our brand character and making people feel the way we want them to feel? And ultimately, if we're making this decision, is it going to move us closer to achieving our short mid term goal and inner vision? What is the thing that you found most businesses are missing, that prevents them from filling their pipeline and closing the deals or bringing in new customers?This was shocking to me when I went back and looked at our past client list because I like data, and I'm sure you'd like data. And I realized that 98% of the businesses that come to us to help them build their brands, help them get core clear communication, don't have a clear understanding of who their target audience profiles are, who their target audiences are. And I'm not just talking about clients, there's also some misses in there as well. But when I say, people will come to us with a persona, a slight description, but we need to go really deep, understanding the problems that we solve for our ideal clients, understanding their mindset, and what they believe and what their worldview is. And often the other misses are, yeah, we all have clients, but we all have...
Meet TimTim Ash is an acknowledged authority on evolutionary psychology and digital marketing. He is a sought-after international keynote speaker, and the bestselling author of Unleash Your Primal Brain and Landing Page Optimization. Tim has been mentioned by Forbes as a Top-10 Online Marketing Expert, and by Entrepreneur Magazine as an Online Marketing Influencer To Watch. He is a former digital agency head, international keynote speaker, and marketing consultant to top companies. How does evolutionary psychology help us to understand our social natures?Well, our brains evolved for a reason. And we share things with the earliest forms of life on Earth, like insects and more primitive or let's say, more ancient forms of life. And then, as we evolved, we layered on different things so that at the very end of our evolution, we gotten some really, really bizarre to species level stuff that makes us unique. In fact, I'd say that's why we took over the whole planet. And so understanding that evolutionary path, and some of the things that we inherited along the way, helps us to understand how to be in relationships with each other, whether that's in business, or in personal relationships. Why is storytelling important? And, more importantly, how does it work?I like to go back to first principles and evolution to define all this stuff. And so I like to ask the question, why is storytelling even something we do? Why do we have language? Why do we tell stories? And we're highly cultural creatures, we'll probably talk about that in more depth as well. But one of the things that we can do is learn from each other. So you know that you can learn from your own mistakes or other people's mistakes. And by being able to learn from other people's mistakes, we avoid danger, we increase our chances of survival. So if I said, hey, Lori, if you keep going down that forest path, and around the bend, you're gonna run into a really angry mama bear and it's gonna tear you to shreds. I got the scars to prove it right here. I'm still bleeding from the encounter with the bear. Right? That's probably useful information to you. Can we agree on that? Absolutely. So basically, what I did just saved us the danger, or the time investment, and the uncertainty of dealing with that situation by telling you about it. So what I did is I kind of transferred my experiences into your head. I don't know if you've ever watched the old Star Trek show. They had Mr. Spock, he was a very logical Vulcan and he could do this Vulcan mind meld where he'd put his hands on your skull and transfer his experiences directly into your head. And it seems so far-fetched, but that's essentially what stories do. They've shown on brain scans that if a teller is telling a story with a very slight delay, the recipient on the other end is activating the same parts of the brain. So you're really doing a kind of a mind meld and transferring your experiences into someone else by telling a story, a very powerful way to help you survive. Lori: I love that. Your focus sounded like it was heavy on the education side of things, but also storytelling, from my perspective. And just the way that people connect is and want to be part of a conversation or pull more information is not only education, but also entertainment. I think it's a combination of the two. Well, again, from an evolutionary standpoint, I don't think entertainment is a goal. But I'd say that entertainment helps the medicine go down. So if I'm telling you an experience, I might choose to be funny about it and then that makes you more engaged with it, which forms a stronger memory of my story. So absolutely, that's important. One other thing too, that's super important, is knowing that the morals that people get from the same story are going to be very different based on our experiences and our cultural beliefs. That depends on which tribe we're in. So the same objective reality will land very differently when I tell that story...
Meet TiffanyTiffany is a mother of three, wife, content creator, forever sunkissed & CMO (Chief Marketing + Customer Officer) at Wantable. She has over 15 years of experience in marketing and retail. Prior to taking on her role at Wantable, Tiffany was the Vice President of Marketing for a large multi-billion dollar retailer before the age of 30. In addition, she’s had the opportunity to consult for Fortune 500 companies, helped lead several major retailers, and mentor teams across the country. What's your vision for Wantable as a brand? How does that align with your personal brand?Yeah, I was fortunate to get in, in managing and leading a number of teams at Wantable, about four years ago, we've definitely evolved in a brand and my perspective on branding is that it is a living, breathing thing that you consistently work on and evolve and elevate based on your customers because they're dynamic, and so forth. So where we are today is that we're here really to fuel self confidence in our customers. I've said this in many other spaces in many other conversations, but clothing and what you wear and what you put on is a material thing, but it's really the value that we create and how it makes you feel, finding the right fit, making sure that you feel confident and taking whatever it is in the world that you have to do that day, whether it's just running to the grocery store, doing chores, or, you know, going into the office and going into a big meeting. So how you look is how you feel on putting their confidence back in women's lives so that they feel ready to take on the day is something that we get behind and is our mission and brand purpose. How does that align with my personal brand? Well, I've always believed in confidence, you kind of have to look the part you have to like, walk the talk. I'm so bad with analogies but so I think that how it aligns with me is I am always looking to lift up others. It's why on the side, I started to get into some things on a personal level. That around life coaching and career coaching. So giving people confidence, that validation, just to make changes and feel good about what they're doing is something that I personally believe in as well. Can you tell me how you approach building a successful team and good culture?Yeah, I think this is probably a good spot to explain a little bit about Wantable. And why the unique business model that Wantable has has helped me build into some teams and get experiences that I've never had before. Wantable is I always say a cross between retail and relationship banking or insurance companies. It's really a relationship brand. We are a subscription try-before-you-buy retailer. So that is really different from my past retail experience where it's just kind of direct to consumer purchase online or purchase in a store. For that reason. We've got a service model and we have an E-commerce model. So as far as building teams, the cool part about what I've learned at Wantable, and what I've been able to take on as an executive there is building out teams from customer service to personal stylist to photo and creative and marketing. And also to some extent helping build out our engineering team and at times our merchandising team. So what I've learned, I guess, is that whatever the discipline is, there's always different types of people that you work with. Sometimes people are focused in a specialty or a specific area, and they really want to become a subject matter expert. And some people are really great at people management. What I found is that people earlier on in their career, or sometimes even mid career, feel like growth comes just from moving up. And it's like, oh, if I want to grow, I need to manage people, or I need to take on this leadership role. And then isn't what career growth always looks like, becoming a subject matter expert, and the best in a space can be just as rewarding and just as important and valuable to accompany as someone...
Meet BobBob is an experienced technology leader with 25 years in executive roles in cloud-based SaaS companies, including InterCall, West Corporation, http://freeconferencecall.com/ (FreeConferenceCall.com), and now Notiphy. Always taking a collaborative approach and being involved in all areas of the businesses, he endeavored to always improve decision-making with data. This led to starting Notiphy which tells you what your people did, where and when they did it, what data they collected, and how long they did it for. With an aging workforce and hiring being an issue today especially in industries like manufacturing and warehouse/distribution, how can technology help?Well, it's a great question. I've spent a lot of time really looking at, you know, all different areas of the labor force and work workflow, process management, and have had the opportunity to speak to so many people in manufacturing and other areas of the supply chain. And, and found, I mean, obviously, you know, there's been difficulty in hiring, especially now post-COVID. While we're sort of toward the tail end, but in this time period, it's been so hard for manufacturers to get frontline workers, and hiring young workers is, you know, to make it attractive, and manufacturing has been very difficult. And, you know, as you probably know, I mean, there's so many different factors that go into maintaining and hiring people, but you have to really show them that you've created an environment where people and technology are really balanced. And so they can see that they can safely and effectively perform their job and be, you know, and be a differentiator in the company. We know technology in general and the technology that we've developed can make workers more accountable, which by all studies is what they want. They can make them more efficient, productive and safer. And, you know, people have, you know, listened. We know that people have good days, people have bad days, you can't rely on them to remember everything, retain information on a stressful day, or execute the work without, you know, having information and the access to information at their fingertips. We don't need to replace paid people, but it really needs to enable them to be able to increase their performance and increase the company's performance. You know, additionally, technology, you know, helps maintain data that they didn't have before. So workers can, you know, input data into technology, transfer that data to other people. So as people leave, that data can be shared and not, it doesn't walk out the door as people are leaving the workforce. Where can technology help companies and their people be more productive and efficient?Well, you know, technology can really help tremendously. But people being more productive can really help the companies understand their data, so they can understand the labor efficiency, the actual labor, labor efficiency of their workforce, so they can continue to, you know, sort of move the ball forward and to what their expectations are. When you look at a lot of what happens on the floor of manufacturing or other areas of the supply chain, oftentimes, you know, you're gonna see a little chaos, right? I mean, you're gonna see people running around, you know, looking for paper, looking for manuals, waiting for somebody to answer a question to help. I mean, there have been some studies out there where people spend, you know, over five hours a week waiting for assistance, and, you know, two thirds of the time that can take, you know, a lot more time. I mean, as I sort of said before, I mean, technology can put that information, those videos that people might want to access, and those manuals at their fingertips, and really help them to, you know, to get that information while they're doing the job. It also can help with more on the job on the job training. And so gives them the ability to access that information while they're working. So it helps them be much...
Meet BudWith nearly 40 years of sales, marketing, and management experience at multiple Fortune 500 companies, Bud started Ascend Performance, LLC, powered by Sales Xceleration, utilizing his experience to help small to medium-sized companies obtain optimal results. He also works in talent selection, assisting companies in finding the right person for the right seat using state-of-the-art assessments. These assessments can also be used to understand skill sets as a basis for training and self-development. What is an outsourced VP of sales?I think in my bio, you talked about that I was a sales professional. I was in business for 40 years. So before I tell you what I do, I'd like to tell you why I do it. And those 40 years was really a curse and a blessing. And I worked for those two Fortune 500 companies, great organizations, I took away much. But I found myself over that time period traveling a lot. And what happened was that I traveled 80% of the time across the country and even across the world. And this caused me to miss a lot of family events, birthdays, school events, etc. And although I lived in Brookfield at the time, for over 20 years, I wasn't really part of the community. In fact, I really didn't even know my neighbors. And I'm ashamed to say that. So about a year and a half ago, I decided to make a change. And what I want to do is take that experience, knowledge and skills that I gained, while being a part of those organizations, to smaller companies in my community. And in doing so I can spend more time with my three grandchildren, enjoy our cabin up in the north woods and make a difference in the lives of small business owners, many of which now today I call my friends. So what is an outsourced VP of sales? Well, what I do is I come in to small-to-medium-sized organizations and I place a sales infrastructure within them. And what that means: it's a sales strategy, a sales process. I introduce KPIs to help drive the right sales behaviors toward company goals. I write job descriptions for sales professionals. I work out incentive plans. I focus on an outbound sales strategy, and that's the cold calls, and the prospecting, and the seven steps to selling that I implement within the organization. So once they get sales and revenue up, and that's what it's all designed to do: to help small to medium sized owners grow revenue, then I can either exit the business by hiring a replacement, or help them hire a replacement. Or I can train one of the sales professionals that they have within their organization to take over, and then periodically monitor and make sure that they're on task. It's a great job, I love every minute of it. It helps me spend a lot more time at home. And it helps me really gain fulfillment and joy in my job. And it's, it's not the old grind that sometimes we all face in a career, it's something that I really enjoy doing. And you know, sometimes I like to tell a story about how I got into it, and what the difference is, and how it kind of all works together. So I was called by a gentleman by the name of Michael Patrick Cola, and Michael ran a small food company in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And if you've ever been to Elizabeth, it's the place that you don't want to go to at night. But I remember going into Michael's manufacturing facility, and it was about a $7 million organization at the time. And I was walking up these big steps. And I looked into the office, and he had the corner office on the second floor of the manufacturing company. And I looked in there, and Michael was 52 years old at the time, and he was an Irish, Italian. And he had red hair and had these big red cheeks. And I looked at him and he says, "I need some help." He says, "I spend 12-14 hours a day in this place, I've got to run the operation, I've got to run the supply chain, I've got to buy raw materials. And then I had two sales guys over there in another room. And I don't know what the heck they're doing." So he says, "We've been
Meet DinoAntonopoulos Legal Group LLC represents closely held companies and financial institutions in corporate/business law, real estate law, civil litigation, commercial financing, estate planning, and probate matters. The number one goal of the firm is to help clients succeed and to protect them by continuing to be a difference-maker and game-changer in the legal world by applying our principles - honesty, hard work, loyalty, and a commitment to fight for our clients. How do you minimize litigation risk when hiring from a competitor?Yeah, so we see this, obviously, more and more. In today's world it's a little bit of a litigious world. But as we have our companies and companies out there that market and recruit various potential candidates and recruits, some of these recruits sometimes are under an employment agreement. Or it could be under various documents, such as handbooks or policies, commission agreements, and stock option agreements. And there are what we call restrictive covenants. So it could be a non-compete and non-disclosure of some sort. But these various restrictive covenants might limit the opportunity they have with that new company that they're going to be onboarding with. So as part of the interview process, you want to ask the potential recruit whether they have any restrictive covenants that they know of. But you got to dig a little bit deeper and say, "Okay, what have you signed? What have you received in your employment with your current employer?" And then ask those specific questions. Do they have an employment agreement? Do they have some sort of bonus plan, a commission agreement, a stock option agreement, or any sort of compensation agreement? The more that you dive into asking those specific questions the more it might trigger that recruiters say, "Oh, yeah, you know what, I did sign an employee handbook. Let me just take a look at that and see what that says." So you start there first. And then ultimately, if the recruit says no, and the interview goes, well, and you're ready to hire this recruit, then eventually you'd like to have that same sort of written confirmation from that recruit, which will be your employee, saying that no restrictive covenants exist. If one does exist, as that employer, that potential employer and you want to hire that individual, then you should get a copy of it to see what the restriction is to see whether it's enforceable or not. And that's where the legal starts to come in on that. So as we represent closely held companies, you know, we'll come across this issue all the time. And the ones that stay ahead of this are in the better position, where they'll contact us in this case, ask us to review this employment agreement or wherever these restrictive covenants are found and whether it's enforceable or not. And if we say yes, it is, then we kind of do a hard pass on that employee or we can always go back and negotiate some sort of buyout with or a resolution with that current employer as well. The ones that it becomes a little bit more pricey on and expensive and a little bit more of a headache or the ones that just kind of blindly hire the employee. And then a month or two down the line, you get a letter from a law firm saying that, hey, that employee was under some sort of restrictive covenant, and you're part of that right now and you're torturously interfering with that. And all of a sudden, we got a kind of a scramble and an issue with that. So there are the steps that we can take to minimize the risk, assess the risk, and then make a determination like anything in business. And as something that, you know, our key. Companies are really honing in on more and more today. Is that a conversation you have early on in the interviewing process?Yeah, I think if the interview is going well, for you, and you really feel like that's a strong candidate, a strong recruit, yeah, I would put that out there, whether it's in the first go-round that you're having a good...
Meet StevenSteven Novick is the CEO & Founder of Farmstand. Farmstand cooks & delivers fresh, fast, healthy, and affordable meals to businesses and consumers that they personalize. Their website is http://www.eatfarmstand.com/ (www.EatFarmstand.com). Steven previously built 2 billion-dollar businesses & climbed seven summits (including Everest - the very top). Beating cancer made him passionate about food and the environment, and growing up working class made him appreciate affordability and convenience, which is why he started Farmstand. With so many meal delivery services out there, how is Farmstand better?Like you said, there's certainly a tremendous amount of meal delivery services out there. And how we distinguish ourselves is really in four ways: we're affordable, we're fast, we're healthy, and we're also zero waste. So we describe the Farmstand formula as: we're $7 a meal, five minutes to heat, zero added sugar in zero ways. So it's “seven, five, zero zero”. To add a little bit more to that, we think, ultimately, we're 10 times better than the competition. Firstly, as much as we do a direct-to-consumer service, and we deliver directly to homes, what makes us highly unique is that we have large contracts with Office caterers and large institutions. But what makes us 10 times better than the competition is we're fresh, versus frozen or a meal kit. So we're ready to eat. We're 50% less expensive. We're 90% faster to cook, and we have 100% personalization. And oh, by the way, we take up 90% less fridge space than a HelloFresh would. You're not available in the US at the moment, correct?Yeah, at the moment, we're just in the UK. We cover the UK nationwide. But a contract that we've signed with a food service provider called ISS and the UK's largest bank, Barclays, that contract, although it starts in the UK, is a subscription agreement (because we’re a subscription-only business) allows us to expand into Europe and the US. And so our hope is to be in the US starting on a B2B basis as early as the first quarter of 2023. You've previously built two billion-dollar businesses. How have you done that and what's important to get right from the very beginning?Yeah, so prior to starting Farmstand, I co-founded an investment firm that now manages about $2 billion invested in private companies. And then prior to that, I was head of business development at a health tech business that raised about $50 million in venture capital. We scaled to $20 million in revenue, and it filed for an IPO of $650 million valuation, which in today's dollar might be about a billion dollars, and then that business was acquired. So I think the fundamental thing is like, when we started Farmstand, I think that the foundation of everything is our values, behaviors, and ultimately what you stand for as a business. In any business you start or you join, I think you have to be very values-driven. And so for us at Farmstand, that's been a real big driver. And so one of our big values that we really centered around, especially in the environment we're in, is making sure that what we're doing has zero food waste, zero packaging waste. We're a B Corp certified business, just like Patagonia or Ben and Jerry's. So these are kind of some of the things that are really important. I think that if you don't have the right foundation when you start a business, you can't grow from that. So it comes down to what you believe, that's going to help attract the type of people that align with your thinking and philosophy?Yeah, I think that's right, and ultimately your customers are going to follow you and get excited based on what you do. So we ultimately want people to take a stand – and take a Farmstand for that matter. So it's on affordability; you know, healthy meals shouldn't just be for the wealthy. And you ultimately want these meals to be healthy. So no added sugar is a really important thing. I mean, 73% of the US population now is overweight or obese,...
Meet David: Dave is the principal operations consultant at the Crysler Club and host of the Everyday Business Problems Podcast. Entering entrepreneurship after spending nearly 20 years working for a publicly traded corporation, Dave quickly realized there was a tremendous need within small businesses to have access to the tools and support that were commonplace in a large corporation. Dave developed his operations framework to help small business owners reclaim their life and grow their businesses. Dave, welcome to the show. What are some key areas that business systems connect and how does that work? From my standpoint and what I like to talk about from the operations perspective are four core areas. Which are planning, people, process, and technology. No matter if you are dealing with a challenge in your business or you are working on planning to have future growth, either the challenge or what you're trying to tackle is going to be in one of those core four areas. And so, I like to talk about them in that particular order. I will never change the order of them because you can't have one without the other and if you start to layer in technology before you do appropriate planning or have people or have a process in place, it's a little bit like putting the cart before the horse, as the saying goes. Do you see how people might want to change the order a lot? Yes. Very often. When you're up against a challenge as a business owner, or if you're on a leadership team probably, the two quickest things I see people fill the gap is with people and technology. And what happens most often is if you're filling the gap with people first, without doing the prior planning and if you don't have documented process even though that comes after the people aspect, what tends to happen is that you have fairly underutilized people. So, we hear a lot of people talk about the efficiency of processes and what they're doing throughout the day. But the thing that a lot of people don't talk about is the utilization of those people, right. So, when you're filling the gap with a person or multiple people, because you're overwhelmed, or you've got too many things on your plate, you've got too many processes or responsibilities tasks that you're responsible for without a well thought out plan or documented processes in place, more than likely, you're going to be wasting a lot of time with those people and there's a lot that goes to that. Over the course of time, if you continue doing that, it's going to have an impact on your culture and many other things. So, I don't want to get too deep into that, but that's kind of problem number one if you're going to fill the gap with people. Problem number two is if going to fill the gap of technology without again having the planning people process part in place, what often happens is that over the course of time, the leadership team business owners, they're going to be pretty unhappy with the overall implementation of that technology. It too often fails either during the initial implementation or over the course of time, because again, you've not had a well thought out plan going into it and maybe that seems a little arbitrary saying that because people I will often hear, now we've evaluated ten to different software, we've gone through all of the sales demos and so on and so forth. But what I'm really talking about from that planning standpoint is understanding, 1. Your business model; and 2. Your business processes; and how you can, by understanding those, leverage that technology to automate and streamline what you're doing. So again, it gets back to increasing the utilization of the people that you have, and if you're freeing their time up, ultimately you can take those resources and redeploy in other areas, hopefully generating additional revenue, or what have you. What is the best way to get started in systemizing your business? The best way to get started is to make a...
Meet Nandini: Nandini is a co-founder and CTO of Speakfully, the organic, ever-evolving human-centric platform to address workplace mistreatment known for humanizing tech solutions. Nandini is ensuring the success of the Speakfully mission by integrating social and emotional intelligence into the overall technical roadmap of the brand; a passionate proponent of women in stem, Nandini supports access to diverse talents while enabling women to grow to learn to their fullest potential. Can you talk about ways you're supporting and how to be an ally to enable women in tech to progress with their goals and agendas? It's a very important topic to me. I think we all, as women, especially in the field of tech, know that we are underrepresented, so it's very important to be able to support each other, and we can do it in various ways. So, I think one of the easiest ways is to create a little safe space for women to get together or anyone that associates as women to be together to celebrate the highs and lows, losses, and wins together. I think it's important to show some level of compassion, lean in into the other women, and sort of also be a sponsor for them to be able to grow in their careers. We all like to face a lot of different things as we're going through, growing, and learning. I think it's important to make sure that especially if you take on a leadership role. It's important to be able to go out there and mentor someone else, take the opportunity, ladies if you're out there as, especially women in leadership positions. Many people could do with a sponsor, a mentor, and someone who can be a good ally to share your experiences. I think it's very important to lean into them, and I believe in it very passionately. I mentor a lot of folks in my network, and I love doing it. I think it works both ways as far as I'm concerned. I learn from it, and hopefully, someone else learns from it too. And it's a very important thing to mentor and pay it forward and help elevate those around us. I think we owe it back to society in some ways. Why is it important to humanize tech products? What does humanizing tech products even mean and how do you do it? I get asked that a lot. Like when I’d say I love to like trying to humanize tech products. So, suppose someone asks me what it is. In that case, it's essentially thinking of it as you're building something that would present use for technology in a sense that allows you to connect with other people and other humans and also put you a little more mentally and emotionally in charge of what you're trying to accomplish. And the irony is when you think about tech products, and I'm talking purely from a software aspect because that's my skill set. If you look at technology products, the irony is a lot of it is meant to try and connect people, but in the process, I think the communication process has become completely discombobulated in many ways, especially now, in the world that we're living in. In a pandemic or a post-pandemic world, people create that human connection and we're all sitting in front of our computers, and we are all having to deal with various products that we are using in our day-to-day lives. But how many of those products are putting you in the front seat emotionally? And how many of those products are allowing you to engage with them where you are in charge of making that final decision? You don't want to build software solutions that are just meant to be there to make just for the sake of automation. For example, I don't want the software product to tell me what clothes I need to wear. I want them to maybe give me a range and to give me different factors, for example, and say, here's the weather, here's the situation, or here's the place you're going to go to. And then I would still want to be in charge of what I'm going to wear as opposed to a software solution or a bot telling me what I should wear. So, that's a subtle difference, but that can essentially...
Robert Cruess is an original Founder and the President of ZeroNox. Mr. Cruess is an Entrepreneur and Businessman, having obtained a Business degree from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2009, and also holds a Real Estate License and Mortgage License. Mr. Cruess’ experience and expertise include starting and running several businesses, sales, product development, real estate, loans, youth outreach, and community growth. Mr. Cruess’ Business contributions include patents for products he has designed, starting multiple business’, and doing Multi-Million Dollars in Real Estate transactions through his Real Estate Investment Companies: Rico Property Group, Invia Investments, and HCS Investments. Mr. Cruess was born in Spokane, Washington but has lived most of his life in Porterville, California and the San Joaquin Valley, is married and enjoys time with his wife and 5 children, volunteering in the local community, and is an avid sports fan.
Meet Alex Alex is the co-founder of Ike Media and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Alex is the host of the top rated Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee Box, Milwaukee Brewers and Wisconsin Badges Podcast on the Apple Podcast Platform. He loves producing original music with, you can find that at Ike Music on Spotify and currently resides in Oslo Norway, where he has been working to expand the influence of the Ike brand internationally. How has moving to Norway added value to the IKE brand and impacted you as an individual? Well, it's been so big for the international presence of Ike. So Ike, we've always had this goal of creating an international brand. That is something that we strategically thought about from the beginning when we set up the brand and how do you make that a reality, right. So, the first step actually was, when I was in school at Madison, I was invited to an international sports conference in Switzerland. I was one of 50 international global challengers, that's what they called it, or disruptors to the sports industry because of what we did on Twitter and that kind of really just got my brain going because I got to meet all different cultures here, all these different perspectives on sports, make all these great connections all over the world. And it just felt like my time or my chapter in Europe was not over. It just wasn't that we got the conference. I had to continue to expand those relationships and the influence of the brand. So, when I moved to Norway, it was definitely one of the craziest things I ever did. And sometimes I can't even believe that I did it. I think the word that describes it was brave but it's something that's so, I think, relatable and people have to take a chance in life at some points, whether it's starting a business or moving to a new city. And what always happens if you embrace that opportunity is good things and that's been exactly what's happened for Ike. We've been able to not only connect with athletes then in the United States but sprinters or athletes in Europe, soccer players, models, all sorts of new people and it's expanded the way I view the world. I view it through a much larger lens now, and that has been so great for my personal development as well as Ike's content strategy, it's positioning, it's brand positioning, the type of music we create. So, it really stems down deeper into the brand. It's not like I can point to one thing that it's specifically changed, but it's had a huge impact and influence on the brand. And it's brought in a ton of international listeners. That's something we're very proud of on our podcast network is that we have over a hundred countries listening to our podcasts. And so, sometimes you have to pinch yourself that you can go to Norway. And one of the best athletes in Norway is listening to your Milwaukee Bucks podcast and then you talk over that and it's just kind of a smaller world than you would imagine. But it's really helped define that Ike is not just a United States brand, it's an international brand, a global brand. It’s definitely something that I think I'll remember forever. I can speak a second language now so that's always been a personal goal of mine as well, and to learn a second language without being bilingual. That has also given me the confidence that I can learn other things that are complicated. For someone who wants to start a podcast, but hasn't yet, why should they create one in 2022? Because it's how you create genuine connections with people today. It's so hard in a world of social media, a world of constant small and shorter content. We're all trying to intake shorter content to really create a genuine connection with people. And the real way I first kind of got the hint was through the music we produced, is that people who listen to your music, they don't just listen once they listen multiple times and then they feel like they almost know you at a personal level. And so, podcasting is...
Meet David After 28 years as a highly-skilled employee, David was told that his job was over. Despite the immediate trauma and fear, he knew that as his next step, he’d rather work for himself and have more control over his destiny. That was in 2006. Today, David is a thriving community builder, podcaster, and speaker. He helps high-achieving professionals, who have had a late-career job loss, build their consulting or coaching business, so they can do what they love and get paid what they’re worth. How did you learn to network and develop business relationships? As I was thinking about our discussion today, I reflected on the 28 years in my career that I was an employee, before I started my own business in 2006. I always was involved in building relationships outside of my job and outside of my organization so I would always find opportunities to network with colleagues. I would join associations of people that were doing something similar to what I was doing, I would take advantage of opportunities to learn and to get some professional development. When I started my business, one of the things that I realized within the first year is that the network that I had, as an employee, was not necessarily the network that was going to help me build my business. And, although I did maintain the relationships that I had, with, with colleagues and friends that I had built up over the years as an employee, and in fact, those relationships helped me get some of my first consulting clients. I had kind of an eye-opening experience, with a friend of mine, who also went from being a longtime employee to being self-employed. About a year before, I was having dinner one night, and she said to me, "I'm part of this organization and I think you might find it interesting to come to a meeting." It was a BNI meeting, and I'd never heard of BNI or knew anything about business networking. I immediately realized the power of being in a room with other entrepreneurs, not just with professional colleagues and so I ended up joining. I have to say that not only do you get to network in networking organizations like BNI, but they also teach you networking. That's one of their goals as an organization is to try to help everybody do better at business networking, as well as build relationships as they do that. Even though I'm not currently a BNI member, I have relationships and still have clients that emerged from BNI. Some of my best friends as entrepreneurs also came out of that BNI experience and so that was sort of my first foray into business networking, and I got to be pretty good at it. I would not only do networking in my chapter, but I got to know a lot of people in other BNI chapters. The next thing for me in terms of networking, and building relationships, as an entrepreneur emerged from content creation, and in particular podcasting. I'm sure you know, as a podcaster that if you're doing interview-based shows, you get this opportunity to have in-depth conversations. Often they feel like intimate conversations with someone new on a regular basis and you get to build relationships with those people and you get to share your mutual knowledge with your audiences. I found that since I started podcasting seven years ago, it has enabled me to build relationships with new groups of people that I didn't know before. And I'm based in New York and even though I'm pretty well networked in the New York metropolitan area, podcasting enabled me to develop a whole new network that was international, which is great. What is the connection between your relationships and the evolution of your business? Well, for one thing, as far as the relationships themselves are concerned. One of the things that I've learned to do over the years, and I encourage other people to do when they're trying to build relationships, is focus on the relationship. So that means being curious, asking open-ended questions and I recently learned a framework for questions that I
Meet Ben Ben has been helping his clients communicate for the last quarter of a century. He is the author of two books on personal branding and leadership, the host of the 5 year and syndicated YourLIVINGBrand.live show and the executive producer of the Communicate Your Why program. Ben's mission is to help companies, and the people within them communicate more effectively internally. To create opportunities for people to listen, understand and act in ways that drive culture, goals, and profitability
Meet Jennifer Jennifer Shaheen is the founder and President of The Technology Therapy Group. She is recognized as an expert in planning, implementing, and translating digital marketing and technology. Over her twenty-year career, Jennifer has worked in a myriad of industries as a digital advisor: finance, banking, manufacturing, design, construction, luxury, retail, and travel. Jennifer is a digital transformation expert, user experience enthusiast, and data insights specialist. How important is mindset when we think about digital marketing and today's technologies? I love this question because mindset has a big thing to do with being successful today. As you probably know, Lori, doing what you do, it's gotten more difficult to do certain things. Why I say that is because oftentimes we're looking at being much more personalized in our digital marketing and mindset is important to get you into that headspace of saying, "I am trying to do the best thing for my customer or client who's trying to reach me, and not always the easiest things for us, as marketers," and I think that's a really important part of talking about digital marketing today. Is it important to be on all digital marketing channels today? Being on all of them can be somewhat overwhelming! I do think it's important that you protect your brand and reserve your names, and oftentimes, depending upon the size of your company, I think it's important that we are very specific about understanding the return on investment per channel. To be on all of them may mean that you're on none of them, right? It's kind of like if you spread all your money around, you don't often have an opportunity to focus it. So depending upon what your budget is, you always want to look at protecting your brand, but you may want to think a little bit about how you're putting your efforts into the channel based on who your audience is, and what success or return you're getting. As you said it right at the beginning, Lori, you're most active on LinkedIn and I would guess you're probably most active on LinkedIn because that's probably where you get the most return from your activity. How can you know if your digital marketing channels are working? One of the things that I think you need to look at is the metrics for those channels. So if you understand your audience, then if you look at that particular channel, let's go ahead and use Instagram for a moment. If your account is set up as a business account, you will be able to see information about the demographics of your followers. The same is true for Facebook and the same is true for LinkedIn so looking at that information is extremely important to understanding if that the audience that you said you wanted to be talking to, if you are getting those followers there, and then what I often do is have people follow that through and see if it's coming through any inquiries or outreach. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? So I used to teach a networking class and I had four keys to being a successful networker. The first was to listen and how we translate that into the digital world now is by reading the comments and the actual posts that people put in there. That is what I now call digital listening. Years ago, when I taught that class, we would listen to someone speaking verbally but it still works! The second tip is to ask thoughtful questions and the third is to give. What I mean by that is to give something of value or feedback, it doesn't always have to be a lead with networking, but a tip, a direction, something that shows that you as the listener and the person looking to grow that conversation is engaged and paying attention. My fourth tip is always to record. Why that is so important is because when I started my business in the late 90s, I was very into keeping a record of all of my conversations and everyone I met in a CRM or customer relationship...
Competition Is Better Served As Co-opetition Lori: Hello everyone, welcome back to the third Episode in our Manufacturing Mavens Podcast Mini-Series! Let’s get started by introducing my co-hosts for the series, Kristina (Kris) Harrington and Erin Courtenay. Kris Harrington is the President and COO for GenAlpha Technologies. During her time with OEMs in the mining industry, Kris and the other founders of GenAlpha saw a need to find a better way for B2B manufacturers to do business. This led to the development of Equip, an eCommerce, eCatalog, and Analytics solution for manufacturers and distributors who want to grow their business online. Erin Courtenay is VP of Digital Services at Earthling Interactive. Erin loves watching programmers work their magic, opening up the possibilities of the internet to small and medium businesses with powerful websites and custom software. Calling herself a “digital empathy practitioner”, Erin is determined to help clients move thoughtfully and compassionately into their digital future. I’m going to start today’s episode by leading with a bit of a story of what I learned over my years of running my business. When I started, I was ignorant and thought that I had to do it all on my own and figure everything out by myself even though I truly had no idea what I was doing! For some reason, I had the belief that when I figured something out, I shouldn’t share it with others because they should have to figure it out on their own as well. As I have developed in my professional career, my thoughts around that have evolved and I actually feel the opposite way now! A couple of years ago I attended a networking event and met a new agency owner. She was in the same mindset as I was when I first started my business so I offered to connect with her and I just shared everything I learned in the 10 years I had been running my business. She was amazed that I would be so open with my experiences and from that connection, we now have such an amazing relationship where we share wins and send opportunities to each other. That brings us to today’s topic which is cooperating with your competition. Lori: Let’s dive into it! How would you two describe competition and co-opetition? Erin: When we're looking for definitions of competition, I think the good thing that competition does is it drives us to do better! Ultimately, competition is about the drive to achieve. There are a bunch of unhealthy things that can go with that, but that's the part that we need to keep alive and we need to kindle in our business and throughout our business. But co-opetition is a behavior and it's the behavior that helps you do better, and that helps you be better. So who or what is a better resource for achieving greatness than other folks doing what you do? So the co-opetition is really about achieving with your peers. Kris: When it comes to I guess the definition, I like to think of a pie and when it's competition, one company gets the whole pie and oftentimes there's a winner, and there's a loser because someone gets 100% of the pie and the other gets zero. But when it's co-opetition, there could be some sharing of the pie, and often, when we think about it in terms of business and going after a business deal and being rewarded and earning the business of a customer, my hope is that when we are cooperating with our peers to solve a problem for a customer, maybe the circumference of the pie can grow. Now, you might not get 100% like you were in competition, but if you're doing well for the customer, the customer wins and we win in helping to bring our strengths together to solve the problem for the customer. Lori: At what point did you start to think differently about your competition? Kris: I've always been an athlete, and I have been in individual sports like I ran cross country, and while there's a team aspect to cross country, there's also that individual aspect. I also played
Manufacturing Mavens Episode 2: Digital Transformation In The Manufacturing Industry Today’s episode is Part 2 of our 3-part Manufacturing Mavens - a BROADcast Mini Series. I’ve got 2 guest hosts with me for this mini-series! Kristina (Kris) Harrington and Erin Courtenay. Part 2 is going to be Guest Hosted by Kris Harrington. Kris is the President and COO for GenAlpha Technologies. During her time with OEMs in the mining industry, Kris and the other founders of GenAlpha saw a need to find a better way for B2B manufacturers to do business. This led to the development of Equip, an eCommerce, eCatalog, and Analytics solution for manufacturers and distributors who want to grow their business online. Take it away, Kris! Kris: Thanks, Lori! Happy to be here. Let’s start this show with a quick introduction to our hosts. Erin Courtenay is VP of Digital Services at Earthling Interactive. Erin loves watching programmers work their magic, opening up the possibilities of the internet to small and medium businesses with powerful websites and custom software. Calling herself a “digital empathy practitioner”, Erin is determined to help clients move thoughtfully and compassionately into their digital future. Lori Highby is a podcast host, speaker, educator, and founder of Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency. Using her vast multi-industry knowledge - gained from experience and education, She can see the potential of greatness within the already established good of a business. Through strategic actionable moves, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as ABB and Syngenta to micro-business owners, to achieve their marketing goals. Lori carries her energy and drives into her professional engagements in order to empower and educate other fellow life-long learners. Thank you, mavens, it is such a pleasure to be here with you both today. As a former leader in a global manufacturing organization responsible for growing equipment and aftermarket sales, and now a leader of a digital eCommerce company, I am often reminded how much things have changed in just the past twenty years. I mean, I can remember when I was so excited to get a Blackberry phone (remember those?) so that when I was traveling to remote mining areas and arrived at my hotel, I wouldn’t have to hook up my laptop to the dial-up hotel internet connection just to check my emails to make sure I didn’t miss anything important before going in to visit my customer the next day. It was so much faster to check them from my Blackberry, and for me, this was roughly 2007. Fast forward to today, now if a manufacturer were to roll out an eCommerce solution like Equip, if I were still that same sales leader visiting my customer, I would be able to stand next to their machine in the pit and pull up full product bills of materials, identify the products from a 3D interactive drawing, add them to a shopping cart and send them a quotation all from a smartphone or tablet. The customer experience opportunities are incredibly different today for those manufacturers who are ready to make the leap into digital self-service. And this is just one example of the type of digital services available. This takes us to today’s topic - Manufacturing and Digital Transformation where we’re going to talk about manufacturers and their journey toward digital transformation. Let’s get into it. To set the stage, Erin and Lori, I would like to hear how each of you define digital transformation for the manufacturing industry? Erin: One thing it always goes back to his business goals. Your business goals should define your approach to digital transformation. In manufacturing, I see a couple of things that define digital transformation. The first is digital transformation as cultural transformation. So opening the business culture to digital tools, be in sales, operations production is a cultural change. And so the digital transformation has an impact...
Social Selling In Manufacturing Today’s episode is Part 1 of our 3-part Manufacturing Mavens - a BROADcast Mini Series. I’ve got 2 guest hosts with me for this mini-series! Kristina (Kris) Harrington and Erin Courtenay. Part 1 is going to be Guest Hosted by Erin Courtenay. Erin Courtenay is VP of Digital Services at Earthling Interactive. Erin loves watching programmers work their magic, opening up the possibilities of the internet to small and medium businesses with powerful websites and custom software. Calling herself a “digital empathy practitioner”, Erin is determined to help clients move thoughtfully and compassionately into their digital future. Erin: Let’s start this show with a quick introduction to our hosts. Kris Harrington is the President and COO for GenAlpha Technologies. During her time with OEMs in the mining industry, Kris and the other founders of GenAlpha saw a need to find a better way for B2B manufacturers to do business. This led to the development of Equip, an eCommerce, eCatalog, and Analytics solution for manufacturers and distributors who want to grow their business online. Lori Highby is a podcast host, speaker, educator, and founder of Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency. Using her vast multi-industry knowledge - gained from experience and education, She has the ability to see the potential of greatness within the already established good of a business. Through strategic actionable moves, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as ABB and Syngenta to micro-business owners, to achieve their marketing goals. Lori carries her energy and drives into her professional engagements to empower and educate other fellow life-long learners. I’m super excited about today’s topic because social selling is really what brought the three of us together. Kris and I have been guests on Sam Gupta’s awesome eCommerce LinkedIn Live panel. That’s how we got to know each other and now we’ve become good friends. Lori, this podcast has been a favorite for a long time and I’ve really gotten to know you through your wonderful content. Together we’ve all utilized content and digital platforms to build relationships. We are able to move our prospects through the funnel in a way that is warm, genuine, and provides value - even though it all takes place online. That’s the beauty of social selling. But social selling isn’t just about content and friendships, all social networks exist to provide content and relationships - the key part here is business development. Successful sales have always been inherently social, because as our friend Greg Mischio reminds us (frequently!) your prospects must know you, like you, and trust you to move forward with the sale. The pandemic era obviously drove a lot of selling online, both in B2B and B2C. As a result, so many more sales professionals are using the tools of social sales like LinkedIn, podcasting, video-sharing, and CRM-related applications. So there’s the social side, which I think all sales professionals are naturally gifted at, but the technical side can be a bit of a head-scratcher - so that’s what I’d like us to focus on a bit today. Sound good Ladies? Lori: We’re ready! Erin: How do you guys use LinkedIn as a social selling tool? I mean, beyond the obvious - what are some of your special tips and tricks. Next, tell us about one other tool you use and why you think it is great. Lori: Probably because I spend hours on it on a daily basis, actually, and people are surprised when they hear me say that. The first thing you want to look at on your LinkedIn is optimizing your profile. I know you both understand that word optimizing, but not everyone that is listening really understands what that means. It's just making sure that when someone is searching for something that you're the one that shows up as a resource. We've heard of optimizing your website for Google, it's the same...
Meet Scott Scott has spent the past 35 years working in the financial services industry. In his career, Scott has been fortunate to work with consumers and small businesses in several capacities and has worked closely with businesses that have been successful as well as businesses that had to close shop. He's listened to the owners talk about what worked, what didn't, and what they wish they would have done. How has your experience led to where you are today? I've had to do a lot of research on companies and a lot of internet searches. I've worked closely with friends and family that are business owners and we've gone through this process. We realize a lot of their struggles have been just trying to connect with people and trying to find information. So many of them don't have resources that I for example have because, in my capacity at the bank, I've gotten to know accounts, I've gotten to know attorneys and all the support services where that makes me a little bit different than a lot of small businesses that don't have those resources, and they don't know where to go to find them. As we talk to more and more people about this, including customers and friends, we learned that they do need a resource. If you go to a Google search, a billion results will show up and it's really easy for that small business owner to get buried in the back pages of a search. But then they get frustrated when they're looking for somebody so that led us to build the one search direct platform. Can you tell us a bit more about the platform? The way the platform's designed, you set it up right now, where there are four primary areas. The first one is called a need where I'm looking for something and I can go to the website, I take what we're calling specialty news which is simply what somebody does. If I'm looking for marketing, I type that in, I type a brief description, and then hit send. What that does is it goes to the site and it will look for other people that are involved in marketing in my geographic area and that person if they're signed up on the platform, will automatically get the second tab, which is called the lead. So it's a way for a user to connect directly with one another on a topic that's a common interest between the both of them, and they don't have to do an internet search. There are no search results, you remain totally anonymous so that if I search for marketing I don't get hit with a bunch of phone calls or emails from marketing companies looking to reach out to me. So those are the first two primary tabs that we have on our platform right now. The next one is called an offer. So let's say if you as a marketing person wants to offer a free website inspection for prospective customers, you could actually do that to the platform. So you could go out there, do a brief overview of what you're looking for, and when you submit that offer it will go out to any users on the platform that says they're looking for marketing tips. But it's a great way to promote yourself. On the other side of that, as someone that would receive that, it's a great way to find only the things that I'm looking for which is exactly what the platform is designed to do. I can take marketing, and I would get that offer right away. Then the last tab is our Articles tab so when you talk in the intro about your tips, this is a way for you to send tips directly to people. It is very similar to the Offers tab, the biggest difference is that the offers have an expiration date, where articles would stay out there until you remove them. So there are four primary tabs and we felt that those were the ways that businesses at this point communicate most often so. Over the past seven years, what have you learned about all this? My biggest experience was going from someone who had to listen to other business owners talk about what they need to actually be someone that has experienced it. At one point, I needed to find some developers and that was an area...
Meet Tatyana Tatyana St. Germain is the founder and CEO of Great People Management, a consulting firm located in Kenosha, WI, serving clients nationwide. They offer leadership coaching, hiring and development assessments, talent optimization tools, and talent management consulting. Tatyana is an expert at understanding and solving complex people challenges in the workplace and helped over 1000 clients worldwide select, retain and develop the right people who get results and smash the competition. How can companies improve their chances of hiring productive employees? The biggest challenge I'm finding with my clients and with conversations I'm having in my business network is actually finding people. That's the biggest challenge and that's probably a whole separate conversation. But once you have a candidate, if you're lucky you may have a couple of candidates, the best way to ensure that they're productive is to look for job fit and look for culture fit. This is where some of those resources out there can really help and one of those resources is predictive assessment tools that companies can use to help them understand their people. These assessment tools are not designed to screen people out because what I'm hearing right now is, "Tatyana, we don't even have any people apply, how can we talk about screening people out or using any kind of tool for job matching?" Well, it's really to ensure the productivity, engagement, and long-term retention of the employee. That's the information that the assessment tools give you. So don't skip that step, the vetting step, and do the due diligence on the front end when you're hiring employees, even if you just have one to choose from. What can managers do to keep their employees? Once you get somebody in place, and congratulations if you hired a warm body, the next question is now what? How do I ensure that I have a productive onboarding experience to engage them? It starts with understanding what people really care about. Your onboarding and your retention start with the interview process. You want to make sure that you understand your employees, ask deep, meaningful questions and then once they are on board, you have everything in place for them. Obviously, the benefits, their desk, their computer ready, and all the logins, but also the next step is building a deeper relationship with the team. One of my clients shared a great success story that he incorporated those assessment tools in the onboarding process, generating a team report that shares with each team member what their differences and similarities are, what their talents and challenges are, and having maybe a 90-minute conversation with a new team member over lunch is going to help the new team member to ask some questions, maybe laugh about some of the quirks and personality that other members on the team have. Most importantly, focus on the talent. We're all behaviorally diverse when we're working on the same team and the key here is to complement each other instead of perceiving our differences as difficulties, which is how we are wired psychologically to be, that's the knee-jerk reaction. When we meet new people there's a lot of uncertainty and that creates that wall and engages fear factors in the brain that shuts down the rational brain. So it takes multiple months, and sometimes years to get to know your co-workers to build a productive relationship. But utilizing assessment tools, you are actually able to build that relationship within the first week and that's what my client shared. It's feasible that you can squeeze your onboarding, the length of onboarding from months, to just weeks. Bringing onboarding into the conversation about retention starts to build loyalty and connectedness. This is what people care about. Yes, they do care about bonuses and compensation and benefits packages that are being revamped right now with many organizations. But with those tactical transactional items, you can only go...
Meet Mayra Marya Wilson, PhD is the Principal and Organizational Dietician for MW Advising. Marya has an extensive business and industry career in the areas of manufacturing, information management, telecommunications, ISP, and the semiconductor industries of the Silicon Valley, CA at the companies 3M, Imation, and Pentagon Technologies, and various others. She is also the Director of the Leadership Institute and an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. She teaches in the areas of organizational leadership and behavior, operations management, quality management, training and development, and sustainable management. Her research interests include psychological contracts, trust and emotions in the workplace, and organizational exit. Her current research involves the understanding of the lived experience for professionals who are pushed out of their careers. Marya serves the manufacturing, service, higher education, non-profit, and government sectors. She brings not only first-hand knowledge to the learning experience but also a clear understanding of the underlying emotional processes that drive behaviors and create individual and team success. She has a BA in Psychology, MS in Management Technology, MA in Human Development, and a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems. Why is trust so important to the success of an organization? So along with my entrepreneurial endeavors, I also teach at The University of Wisconsin Stout so I have a pretty extensive research background as well. The research that I get into is in organizational exit. So why are people leaving organizations? Usually, I get a sort of that "Duh'' look because most people think they know why people leave, but there's so much more to it. It's so important for organizations to really understand why people are leaving, especially their high performers. Pretty much the number one reason that people leave their organizations is because there's a betrayal of trust. There's this trust factor that is so important in organizations and so one of the things that I do is work with leaders and work with organizations to strengthen that trust between the individuals of the organization as well as the leaders and their organizations. Losing people isn't just a financial hardship, it's a really big hit on morale and the overall organizational culture. The last thing any organization wants is to hit that toxic realm and it's easy to do when we're not paying attention to trust and not paying attention to those relationships that are part of that organization. Yeah, we've got a job to do, there's no doubt about it. We've got things to do, we've got expectations to meet, we've got goals to meet, we have customer expectations, but that relationship side of the organization is as important as getting the job done, sometimes I'm fairly certain it's a little more important. So trust is a big factor and it's one of the things that I love to talk about and love to continue to research too. Is organizational trust the same in face-to-face and remote work environments? March 2020 was one of the most disruptive changes we've seen in almost 100 years. The definition that I use for trust is an individual's belief and willingness to act on someone's actions, decisions, and words. The truth of the matter is that there's no difference between that face-to-face and in the remote or the virtual. It's all in our actions, it's all in what we say, it's all in how we interact. Is it different? Of course, face-to-face is much richer, you can see the nonverbals, you can see body language, you can see those facial expressions. There's just so much there that you can see that you can't necessarily see in a virtual or remote environment. But one of the things that have been interesting the last couple of years is listening to leaders go, "We need everybody back and we need them back now because we don't have good relationships anymore." So I'll ask them why that is and...
Meet Nick Nicholas Hammernik is the Vice President at Hammernik & Associates. He is an Enrolled Agent, which is the highest designation assigned to tax professionals by the IRS. Nick uses his background in coaching and marketing to educate his clients on their tax situation with straightforward advice in a language that is easy for them to understand. Nick's main goal is to make sure small business owners are paying the least amount of tax legally possible to keep more of their hard-earned money. What is the difference between an accountant and a tax planner? I think on one of your prior podcasts you had talked with someone who described how accountants prepare financial statements and everything, but it really doesn't get into the full picture of the bottom line and saving a business owner money. At the end of the day, the greatest thing that a business owner is looking for, and I think everyone in life is looking for is how you can pay the least amount of money to the government and how you can make the most money, and that's through tax planning. We try to utilize our knowledge of tax laws to devise tax plans for business owners which means that we're instituting tax laws to reduce their tax bill. A normal accountant is preparing tax returns, making sure everything's filed on time, keeping you compliant and that's all very important, but at the end of the day, when we're filing your tax return in April, it's too late to save money in tax. There are a couple of small things that can be done, but if a taxpayer comes in and they realize they're owing a lot more in tax than they thought they should, or used to in the past, that becomes a problem. Then it's about focussing on what we can do next year to make sure that doesn't happen. So being proactive throughout the year by implementing tax strategies, reduces that tax liability and we kind of write the story of what that tax turns going to look like at the end of the year, instead of the story already being written when we file tax returns. How has COVID-19 affected the tax industry? It's been one of the craziest years ever for people and I definitely impacted not only the tax industry but small business owners in general. A lot of small business owners were forced to either shut their doors or change the way that they operate. There were things that became available as far as loans, credits, all these things to help keep cash flow in those small businesses. So it presented us with a lot more opportunities to advise small business owners as far as here's what's available that you may have already known about, but here are some more in-depth tax things that might be available that are going to save you some money right now and help you through these times. A lot of clients that we work with were actually able to thrive through the pandemic because it forced them to do things differently than they're used to, which opened up new opportunities for them. But it did help that these credits and loans were available to them even though the new tax laws with the stimulus payments created a crazy environment that changed the way that we had to report things on tax returns and presented opportunities for additional tax filing. At the end of the day, tax laws are always changing. This just happened to be a thing that came out of the dark, where tax laws were popping up every single day where we didn't know what the final tax law was gonna be with unemployment. So we had to play a lot of things by ear and spent a lot of time studying what was going on, but it did present opportunities for small business owners to take advantage of certain things that became available through tax laws because of COVID. How will the impending tax laws from the Biden administration affect taxpayers and small business owners? Anytime that there is a change in Washington, as far as the presidency goes, they're going to want to put their new tax plan in place. Part of their pitch when they're...
Meet Dan Dan Schneck is CEO & Founder of WJI Networks Business Solutions, an IT agency firm in Brookfield, Wisconsin specializing in providing engineered technology & cybersecurity solutions, building, and integration of IT systems & support for the modern business office, warehouse, or automated production facility. He hosts the IT Records podcast, which features discussions with business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals about the human side of business, how technology affects personal and professional development, and what motivates guests. As his creative passion, Dan performs jazz, blues, and funk music on the Hammond B3 organ with his group, B3 Groove. What is digital transformation and why should I care? Digital transformation actually has a personal connection to me and it's why I really started my company. I think the whole pandemic really accelerated all of this for all companies. Digital transformation, to me, is about what your goal is for the future, how you can get there, and how you can leverage technology to meet your goals in your business growth. It's really that simple. As you said, it's kind of a buzzword that's out there, but really it's taking a deep dive to assess what you want to get out of your business using technology. How is automation changing the world of business? Where do I start with automation? First of all, it's changing the landscape of how we connect with customers. From my perspective, sitting in an IT and engineering and support world, click to chat, digital chat, ways to connect, communicate with customers on service calls, that's all evolving rapidly. It's making it easier to connect and communicate with customers. Number one, it's presenting a lot of new challenges and going out and finding new business. I know there's a lot of automation happening with email, and CRMs, and things like that, but my background is a little more as a technology integrator so I spent a lot of time in automation facilities and manufacturing companies that are implementing a ton of automation. It's really fascinating to see that shift from robotics to packaging lines. That automation world is taking off like crazy lately and it's really helping companies produce more, faster, better and the level of knowledge is really rising within those companies on how to automate processes and procedures. It's really fun. How do I find technology resources when I need advice? My answer to this is a little nuanced. First of all, everyone needs a good technology partner these days. So my answer to that would be to do your homework, communicate, talk, interview different technology companies. There are a ton of tech companies out there and I always like to say you can throw a rock and hit an IT company, but all of us specialize in different nuances and areas. Our strength is really what we opened with digital transformation, taking the customer on the journey from good to better, and finding cost savings on existing technology. So you need to ask questions and attend events. There are such great cybersecurity webinars happening and informational webinars happening. If you visit our website, we have some content posted, we run webinars all the time, and just be willing to have a conversation and ask questions. It's a little overwhelming for customers at this point because of the explosion of technology, but we are certainly here to help answer any questions and that's what we like to do. We like to be your concierge and your quarterback so we think we have the answers and feel free to ask. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? Recently, one of my most successful networking experiences was finding a group called Vistage. I joined this group a couple of years ago as a peer, entrepreneur, and CEO group. That really has been a godsend for me! It's been a great group to connect with other like-minded business owners and...
Meet Shane Shane is a serial entrepreneur and podcaster, living in Linden, Michigan with his family. How can you consistently stand out from your competitors? I think in this day and age, everyone's so bombastic and trying to stand out especially in the social media world, I think to do the opposite. Remember the old cliche, the loudest one in the room is the weakest one. I think when we can understand that, without even going into the layers of it, it's easy to just kind of kickback be a little bit quiet and draw people in. We're so eager to talk about ourselves and talk about our reviews or certification or whatever it is, but when we can hang back and just be present at the moment, that is what's going to draw people in and create real interest. When you can be that warm, fuzzy blanket and make yourself stand out from the noise that we live in. How can you create raving fans in your marketplace? So my obsession in my service company was the customer experience. If you were to break down and rank on a 1 to 10 scale, all the different parts of your business from service, to sales, to follow-up, most people never focus on the experience. How does it feel to do business with your company? There was a certain point in time with my service company that we were literally double the price of our competitors and we did the same exact thing, but the way it felt to do business with us was significantly different. It's like a good song where you might not know the words or the lyrics or what the song means, but you just like the way the song makes you feel. That's how you create an amazing customer experience and stand out in your market. How can you win by embracing your authentic DNA? I think a lot of times we view weakness as some sort of sin. It's bad about our business, it's bad about us, but in reality, that is the thing that's going to humanize you. Perfection is intimidating, but when it's real, that authenticity, that's what that is, it's real, it's transparent. That's when you connect to a real person, an authentic real person. A lot of times our weaknesses, when we know and understand them enough become an actual strength. When we can write down what we're not good at, when we can meditate on it, when we can marinate in it, that is the thing that is going to make you stand out, it's gonna develop a connection with you. As I said, perfection is intimidating so I think I think it's a great way to go to embrace your imperfections and the things you're not good at. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? When I started my first company, BNI was the thing that got us off the ground, and as a 25-year-old kid, it was hard at first. But man, it really got me going, it forced me out of my comfort zone, it forced me into some relationships that ended up being extremely profitable. I'd say get over yourself and start to network, if it's a Chamber of Commerce, if it's BNI, relationships are so much a part of business and so when you can understand that you'll start to develop those relationships. Life is what you do with fear and so when you can get over those social fears, you will create allies and create a lot more money when you can develop those relationships. How do you stay in front of and best nurture the relationships you’ve created? Don't be clingy or needy, but stay top of mind. Relationships are everything so stay top of mind. Whatever industry you're in, make sure people in your town in your circle of network now that you're the person that does that and attend as many as you can, but don't be the person who's begging for leads or begging for work. Be the person that provides value, that they themselves would want to do business with. Don't be so dependent on your network that you need them for leads, but referrals are the best type of customer to have because there’s no customer acquisition cost. I think I think networking...
Meet Liz Liz Nead is an adventure speaker, traveling the world and taking on challenges to find lessons of leadership, communication diversity, and inclusion. A diversity speaker and researcher for over a decade, she specializes common language and daily communication around race and cultural differences in the workplace. Liz uses a direct, humorous, and vivid style from the stage to create opportunities for communication around differences. She shares life with 7 kids and her husband of 21 years. How do you work the room with diversity and belonging in mind? It's funny that you asked that question because just like everyone else, I am in the middle of growth and change, and I deal with my own humanity and the humanity of others. Sometimes when I see these thought leaders that are like typically on Oprah super soul sessions, their vibe is very mellow. For me, the first thing about networking is to be authentic and the second thing about being authentic and networking is that you don't take it personally which is constantly a juggle. How do you do that in networking with diversity, stay authentic, but not take it personally. What are the questions to avoid? It's a tough one and the reason why it's tough is because life has changed so much and honestly what was acceptable, even two years ago, like let's just say pre-COVID is no longer acceptable. The kinds of questions which are very superficial like where are you from and what's your ethnicity and you have such an interesting look or what's your take on this? Someone might ask me what my take is on something related to this. diversity in the news, not because I'm a diversity speaker, but because I'm a person of color and some of those assumptions that people are okay with you jumping in right away into their personal life are just not okay anymore. I think the expectation has changed, we have an increased expectation that people will understand what is acceptable and what is not and we're not forgiving ignorance as much anymore. So rather than say, people are too sensitive, a better thing is what's your experience with this? What do you find important? If you had to choose between these two things what would you choose? So you're getting deeper into what someone's interests are, or perspectives rather than the superficial differences that we can see with the naked eye. What is the biggest thing you hope people take to heart in 2022? The thing that I love to teach as a trainer and a speaker, and I've niched myself into diversity for the first time in 15 years because I think that my country needs help in strategies to build confidence around differences. Our confidence is at an all-time low which is why you see so much conflict is because the only people who are left talking are the ones who don't care what you think. Everybody else has become a bit silent because they're afraid that people will be offended and they know that that's not what they want, but they're not sure how to say it. What I hope is that first of all people understand it's not about intent, it's about impact. We all mean well and nobody goes to a networking event to hurt some feelings or to make people feel discluded. That's just not why you go to a networking event. However, the things that you say may have the opposite impact on your intent and then that's where the work starts. If you didn't intend for it to be that way, it should be pretty easy to change what you're saying, because you want the impact to be a positive one. I think that one thing can change a lot of things. A lot of ways that people connect with each other. I think confidence can be built back up and then the second thing that I'm really hoping Is that people understand that you can have the same situation but experience it differently. So one, let's say there was a temperature in the house 69 degrees. One person is wearing sweaters and mittens, and the other one has actual sweat rolling down their cheek, because you can...
Meet Lynn Lynn is the owner of Data2Profit Consulting. He helps small to medium-sized companies make more money with their data by using financial ideas and tools he learned at Procter & Gamble. He has a unique ability to help clients think big picture, while at the same time digging into the details of their results. When you feel you have a lot of numbers around but no answers, Lynn will make those numbers work as hard as you do, and turning your data into profit. There are lots of different people out there who help businesses keep their finances together. What makes you different? There are lots of part-time accountants out there, there are lots of types of bookkeepers, you get your part-time CFOs and where they're focused oftentimes on the preparation of your finances, and taking a very traditional view of here's your income state, here's how you look at it, here's your balance sheet, here's what it can tell you, what I do is take those numbers and reverse engineer them to not only be able to tell people what happened, but why it happened, and more importantly, give them recommendations about what you should think about doing next. That is a completely different perspective than I think a lot of business owners get from their accountants and their CFOs. In one of your blogs, you said that what accountants report isn't enough. Can go talk about what you meant by that? Absolutely. It really comes down to what the accountants give you is a score, right? It's where are you at, at the time. What happened last month and what were your results over the past year? And they give you that which is good, but again, it doesn't always give you an idea of what you should be doing going forward because the perspective is getting a gap financial statement. You're your business owner, and you can always say "Okay, how much profit did I make that month?" But the real question is where's the profit because you can't spend what's on the balance sheet. What is your profit, how did it get there, most importantly, where is it, and finally, when can you actually spend it? I can say that I made all this profit by selling this stuff, but if nobody's paid me for it, yet, I can't spend that money. Or if I look at my bank statement today, it may say I have $10,000 there, but it doesn't tell you five days from now you may need 15,000. So what will happen with the other 5000? It's a moving piece that if you just rely on that static perspective, without both and understanding how you got there, and where you're going, what's coming up, then you're really missing a big chunk of what's going to impact your business results. I've heard you you say that the numbers that business owner should look at are more than dollars and cents. What else should business owners be looking at? Everyone says that their sales are growing, but the question is, why or how? And again, you could look into very easily say these customers, or this particular region or this product line, but when you put that all together, who are your most valuable customers? How many most valuable customers do you have? I worked with a business for a long time and they said we love all of our customers and while that is true, everybody loves all their customers, you may not love them all equally. How many of them really depend on that? How many times are they buying? What's their average purchase order spend? How many lines are they buying? What number of products are they actually buying? When you look at your gross margins, there are seven different groups of people within your company that can impact your gross margins. Which one is it? Is as your customers? Is it your salespeople? Is it your marketing people? Is it the logistics people, the manufacturing people, the purchasing people, or is it just simply a mix? And so you really have to dissect a lot of the numbers that you look into and look at the activities that people are doing and that's really what it comes down to?...
Meet Steve Steve is the founder of The Globally Conscious Leader & Dotcomjungle. His ability to absorb information about brands, strategies, and technologies, then impart their context and opportunities in simple language, has proved invaluable as a trusted advisor to owners & CEOs. His use of Spousal KPI is a humorous, effective way to help executives develop healthy lifestyles & thriving businesses. Dotcomjungle is his technology team supporting companies in making and implementing wise technology choices. Why do you talk about 'Spousal KPI' and 'River KPI', and why does it matter? I came across this because in my work as a trusted adviser with owners and executives of CPG companies, oftentimes the question is how do I measure effectiveness? I found that what's true is that the executives that end up getting to know me and that I work with, need someone like me, because they're lonely, frankly. They might have a set of managers inside their business or a Board of Directors, but they're still sitting alone at the top of that heap. When you're someone who's made something with your hands, and it's somewhere along the line said, "Gosh, if I sold these to people, I can make a lot of money," which is a lot of what manufacturing is the United States, you have an ownership responsibility and an emotional stake in the company than someone who's an executive of let's say North Face, doesn't have. So you go home every night to your spouse and you often take the emotions of that day with you. So with Spousal KPI, what I try to do is I say I want to meet your wife or I want to meet your husband, and we're going to go to dinner because I want them to know that if you're happy when you come home, that their life is going to be better and if that's what's true, then I've done my job. So the KPI is the key performance indicator and as I said, if you have a better relationship with your spouse because you're not bringing home all the crappy stuff that happened that day, and dumping it on their table, then I'm doing my job. The other one, the River KPIs, I happen to be a fisherman and I like standing in the river and I know when my businesses are going well, I spend more time in the river and I get better ideas when I'm standing in the river, and I come home refreshed and go to work refreshed. That's where those come from and I say it with a smile on my face, but they're very real because you change the lifestyle of the owner and you often change the culture and the lifestyle of all the people who work in the company as well. How do you go about discovering the underlying needs of your business and how do you turn that into actionable value? Well, this is more thinking along the lines of what my trusted advisership leads to which is often bringing in Dotcomjungle, which is my technology arm to understand the true challenges that are happening in a company. The first thing is you have to ask that question of what's going wrong with your business, or where do you think the struggles are? The main answer to that question is something that we like to call engaging your MBWA, which is different than an MBA, it's management by walking around. We work with a lot of manufacturers and as I said, they're usually salt-of-the-earth folks who invented something with their hands and 20 years later, they're the CEO of a $40 million company that's shipping to Home Depot and Cabela's. That management by walking around is something that a lot of executives kind of forget, and part of it is just the nature of a company. As you grow, you build up a team of people who are workers who do the stuff, they do the shipping, you got the janitor, you have somebody answering the phone, and eventually, you have managers, and then you have managers of managers. What gets left behind is that MBWA, and the typical example would be, let's say a company that is worth 120 million. They have an executive management team that includes the CMO, the CTO, the CFO, the...
Meet Nicole Over the past 30 years, Nicole has empowered 1000s of business owners and entrepreneurs to play to their strengths, grow their business, and make a greater impact. As a coach and strategic advisor, she is passionate about helping leaders shift their perspectives and solve complex business and relational issues with the aim of creating a better world for everyone. She is the founder of Discover The Edge and The Leaders of Transformation Podcast, reaching listeners in 140 countries. What are the fundamental steps to creating transformation in our business and relationships? I think it all starts with self-awareness and being present with yourself and others. Too often, we are so worried about what we're going to say and how we're going to say it, and what we look like, and all of that we lose connection with the person we're actually seeking to connect with. That's why self-awareness is really important. Presence with yourself and knowing how you're showing up and knowing also then recognizing what's going on for the other person. That's number one, number two, I would say is choosing to care. Having a real sincere interest, and empathy, and just an interest in what is going on with the other person. I think especially nowadays, we need to encourage each other because we don't know what people are going through. To have that spirit of encouragement for other people is really important. The third thing is follow-through. Do what you say, have integrity. If you're not going to do something, don't say you're going to do it. That goes for also saying things like "Oh, yeah, let's do lunch," when you know, in your mind, you're not ever planning to do that, well, then don't say it. Because what it does is number one, it breaks trust with them, because they actually might think that you're going to follow through on that and you don't. But even more importantly, it comes back to yourself, how do you feel about yourself. If I'm constantly saying things and not doing it, even if the other people don't, nobody else knows, I know. So it's really important in creating the transformation that we're looking to create that we have some foundational pieces in place. That applies to business, applies to relationships because of course, every business is a people business. Can you talk about how we tailor communication and networking styles to match the different personality types that are out there? It really comes down to going into the other person's world first. So often, we operate from our point of view, and you got to realize in order to connect and relate to different personality types, you have to understand how they receive information because communication is the response you get. Predominantly, I use the disc model of human behavior. That really describes the 4 primary personality types and there's Myers Briggs and all these different ones that you can use. I'll just give you a quick run through it. What's really cool about this tool is that you don't have an opportunity to meeting somebody new, you don't have an opportunity to have them do a full assessment, Myers Briggs to figure out what they are so that you know how to relate to them, you've got to have a way to connect quickly. So there are two questions you can ask yourself: Is this person more outgoing or more reserved? The second question is, are they more task-oriented, or people-oriented? You can get a sense of where they are operating, at least in the moment by answering those questions. So the outgoing task-oriented personality is the D personality and they are dominant. They like to get to the point, lead, and be in charge, they like results and they want to know what are we doing, where are we going, what are we going to make happen. The I personality, which is outgoing and people-oriented are the inspiring type. They like to have fun, and they like to express themselves, they like recognition, they're motivated by recognition, and they want to...
KJ Eichstaedt KJ is the Co-Founder of Ike Media, the international sports brand started in Wisconsin and is now found in 90 plus countries across the world. He's a designer, dealmaker, consultant, podcast host, video producer, and graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with degrees in International Business and Marketing. Words that describe KJ are optimist, bold, creative, and driven. KJ currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he helps athletes, businesses, and individuals grow their brand. Could you tell me about the origin of IKE and what you do? IKE is an international brand that helps individuals, athletes, and businesses position and grows their brands through creative media vehicles and podcasting. We have an international reach, but we have local roots. On Twitter, there are a lot of people who follow IKE specifically for the IKE Packers podcast, or IKE badgers podcast, or our Brewers and Bucks podcasts which allows us to have a very strong local footprint because that's what we're all about. Home and family are some of our biggest values, but also having international backgrounds we work with anyone throughout the world. We enjoy being creative, we model and position all of our work after some of the highest brands in the world. We love helping anyone grow, helping them grow their business, helping them grow their brand, helping them bring their dream to life. They say the best companies have a story and we like to think of ourselves as the pen and paper to help them write that story. Why do you think people in companies need that strong brand? Frankly, people are starting to see through the BS. They're seeing that these companies aren't as sincere as they portray themselves as, and they aren't sure if these big Fortune 500 companies really care about them. People are getting smarter, they're getting smarter with their emotional intelligence, they're getting smarter with their actual intelligence and I think people in today's world which is so run with media and technology, crave a genuine connection which is why we're seeing a lot of local brands, regional media networks really rising up. The big fortune 500 companies really having to do a lot of whether it's donations, whether it's PR, they have to kind of prove to the world that they are actually good for the world. It just allows people to connect with the little guy, the local person down the street, the woman with the flower shop, the athlete who is going to Wisconsin who wants to take his dreams to the NFL. Everyone has a story and it's really hard to stand out in this digital landscape without one because there's just so much media. People have no shortage of it and the story is one of those things that cuts through the noise. It's really something you have to have and if you don't have one, you're behind the game. What would you recommend are some of the best ways to build a brand in 2021? At IKE we take an approach that's all about deeper connection. What I mean by that is, there are certain crazes going around, whether it's tik tok or Instagram. An overall trend is that video keeps getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. We love data as a society, companies love data because it tells a story. What we try and cut through the noise of is that maybe you get a million views on a tik tok video, but maybe someone only watches it for seven seconds. How many of those people can you actually make a genuine connection and in seven seconds? How many of them are just going to scroll past and go and laugh at the next thing? We take the approach where in a world where long-form content seems to be getting pushed more and more to the back burner, we don't even care. We'd rather make 10 deep, meaningful connections with people we can help, form a relationship with, help them grow their dreams, help them follow their dreams, help them grow their business, their finances, whatever it might be, help them get in touch with a...
Meet Colleen Colleen is an award-winning peak performance consultant with over 20 years of experience, has launched over 340 businesses, is an international speaker, author of a number one international bestseller, Anatomy of Accomplishment and Step Into The Spotlight To Expand Your Influence. The CEO of three businesses, including Lead Up For Women, a community that boasts 10s of 1000s of female entrepreneurs that are driven by their passions, support and promote others with the purpose to fuel female voices. Why is joining a community essential for growth in a business? Let's just think about anyone who's ever launched a business or anything we've ever done in our lives out there. When we worship, we go in a community to a church, right? When we learn, we are in a classroom, or we're in a group of children. When we are learning a sport, we drop our children off at sports teams that have a coach. If you think about everything we do in our life, it's all about the team, it's all about the community. Football teams would be nothing if they didn't have the community of the supporters that they have that are their fans. So when we think about that, it shares a different light on what community is. When we move into a neighborhood, we move into a neighborhood to be part of the community. We were born to crave others and community. With that being said, when you're launching a business, it's one of the hardest times of your life. It really is like when you're having a family or getting married or doing something new that you've never done before. Imagine doing that on your own. I think about traveling and hiking Mount Everest, something I've always wanted to do and I know that if I had a guide if I had a community of people that were supporting me and given me advice, I would be able to do it step after step, day after day to put those pieces together with that map. So many people tried to do this feat of building a business on their own, and why not tap into the likes of others who've already done it before you? Why not learn from them? Why try and reinvent the wheel all by ourselves and not utilize the fuel of a community that can open up so many doors for you and create additional exposure for you? What are the biggest hurdles that women face as entrepreneurs? It's different than what men face. It has to do with our makeup of centuries and centuries and decades and decades of how we were raised. I was even raised in my younger years to get married, have babies, not to start a business. That's not how my mom raised me. So if we go back decades and centuries, the females have always been mothers and nurturers, right? That's why we have the ability to have babies and the men are the providers. So with that being said, they have this view of building businesses as providing for their families and that's why they're doing it. The only reason why they're doing it most of the time is to provide for other people, whether it be their employees or their family. Women are nurturers, so because we tend to nurture, we nurture our clients, we nurture those people around us, we nurture our contacts when we're networking, we are actually some of the best business builders out there, but we lack self-esteem and the self-confidence for what the worth piece is. The worth piece is about selling your products, knowing that someone else out there needs them, that you're solving a problem. I've seen this across the board that so many women struggle with their worth of bringing in a million dollars as an entrepreneur because it scares them. They don't feel like they have that ability to be this powerful businesswoman, and a mother and a wife and a sister and an aunt, etc. So we struggle with identities and I say we because I've been through this already, I struggled as my children got older and moved out of the home because I identified as a mother and I put Colleen on a shelf somewhere where she got really dusty. Then when I brought her...
Why is marketing automation so important? Marketing automation is something I have been an advocate of for a long time and people often ask me why it is so important. Marketing automation is the future of marketing and it is already happening because everyone wants to create efficiencies within their marketing efforts. When you think about marketing automation, it allows you to do more with fewer resources. The trend in marketing and business, in general, is to create efficiency and you can improve your overall customer experience with automation. One statement I saw online that I liked was it streamlines your digital marketing efforts, which ultimately reduces human error and helps to achieve better results. Instead of performing these manual repetitive processes, you're able to focus more on strategic tasks, such as planning, design, goal development, conducting research, establishing your brand, and consistency. What is marketing automation? I like the definition that Salesforce gives: Marketing automation is a technology that manages marketing processes, and multifunctional campaigns across multiple channels automatically. Let's dive into that a little bit. I want to break up some of these words and get clear on what exactly is the depth of this definition for you. So technology nowadays, this is typically a web-based solution that used to be more of a canned packaged solution from a CRM automation standpoint, but it's web-based and it could come in many shapes, sizes, price ranges, and offerings from its doing a little bit, to do the whole gamut of things. Marketing processes consist of many things and have unique definitions based on the goals and the objectives of an organization, but at its core, marketing processes are a mix of managing your contacts and your leads, your content marketing, measuring, and analysis. The next statement in that definition was multifunctional campaigns and a variety of these activities can take place at once. So for example, at this very moment, the marketing automation system that we have going on, we have our guided profits campaign, our manufacturing white paper campaign, webinar attendees campaign, the campaigns for this specific podcast as well as another podcast that we have in house, we have our monthly newsletter, and many more. So we have eight different campaigns happening simultaneously that are being tracked independently, and automatic functions are happening. The last component is the multiple channels. So marketing automation allows you to manage emails, social media, video calls, and ultimately, you can keep track of any traditional direct mail activities as well. The basics of marketing automation I want to cover a few high-level basics of marketing automation that will help you master any sort of automation within your CRM tool. Quality information is key First and foremost, it all comes down to the quality of the information that you have going into the system, which will give you quality information out. You want to make sure that your leads and your contacts and all that information is really clean. So the basics of any system along these lines are collecting data and making sure that you're inputting quality data related to the name, the email, the company, phone number, mailing address, and whatnot. One of the things that the systems can do which is really powerful is going beyond just the type of activity that they're doing and providing you actionable insights so you can actually target your leads with more personalized information. For example, if you see a certain individual is engaging heavily with a certain type of content that you're sharing, then you can have targeted content that is going to continue to engage them as opposed to keeping them on a general list and sharing general information to them. Creating lists and segmenting your contacts Another component that's important, and I see a lot of businesses not necessarily...
Meet Roger Roger is a motivational speaker who helps you create teams and companies people don't want to leave. You hire him for his expertise in emotional intelligence and appreciation. He doesn't give up on people, he believes they will find a way to move forward and improve. Roger lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and currently serves as the president of the National Speakers Association of Wisconsin Chapter. He loves to travel bike and read science fiction. He's a big fan of baseball, pinball, and all things Tesla. Can you just tell us what is emotional intelligence? You bet! It started with Daniel Goleman who has been called the father of emotional intelligence. Quite simply, it is your self-awareness and your social awareness. So following Goleman, there are two parts of self. There's the self-awareness part and the self-management part, right? How we're aware of ourselves and how we manage ourselves. Then the social part is how we're aware of others, how we respond to others, their emotions, their actions, their behaviors. Then the other component in there is relationship building, hmmm, Social Capital much? That's how emotional intelligence is defined and then Goldman and others also put components of empathy into emotional intelligence. Tell me a little bit about how you got into speaking because this is kind of the main offering that you provide, correct? Right. I got into speaking and training and I got back into it actually. So way back early in my career, I was into training. I actually trained on all things Microsoft, I trained on operating systems, spreadsheets, Word, PowerPoint and then I also dabbled in a little bit of programming, and then I was also a resident expert on databases. So I love training and I love seeing the lights come on for people. So fast forward into a career in tech support and then while I was in tech support, I got recruited into project management and that's how I fell into project management. So I did that for a number of years and I got really good at both the science and the art of project management, I got into the soft skill and the tech part, but I found that I really had this passion for the soft skill part like facilitating and how we get people past barriers and how we get them to do work. So at my last job about six years ago, they were downsizing, and rather than playing the roulette wheel and figuring out where I wanted to go next in project management, I'm like, you know what? I want to get back into the speaking and the training! I decided that was a great time to start my business. I never knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but it was like this calling to get back up on stage. The more I got up on stage, the more I realized it was, I originally thought, you know, there was this big thing, like, you're going to be in lights, it's about you, and blah, blah, blah, and applause applause applause and I was totally wrong. It's about the audience and the people and creating that connection and that emotional spark and sharing knowledge with them, and seeing the lights come on for them that way. So it was about six years ago, that I decided to hang out my own shingle and get back into the world of professional speaking. Can you share the difference between emotional intelligence and communication? It's interesting to put them into both categories because I get that question a fair amount. So if we go back to what I was saying before, a couple of key components are of emotional intelligence are how you show up. One of the ways we show up is how we communicate. So we all have choices about how we communicate, the words we use, the expressions we use, the body language we consciously or subconsciously use. So just because we're communicating doesn't necessarily mean that we have emotional intelligence, and vice versa. I think the two are definitely intertwined. Don't get me wrong, they are intertwined. For example, one of the things that happen when I deliver...
Meet Katie Katie is the founder of Paper Lime Creative, a branding, and design agency in Edmonton. Her love of design and art took shape and a young age and since then she has been soaking in as much knowledge about art, business, and design as she can. She takes the time to listen to people's unique stories and goals to deliver stand-out work. It's one of many reasons why Paper Lime Creative is known as a collaborative design agency. What is branding and why is it important? I define branding as every interaction people have with your business. So there's often a misconception that your logo is your brand, but it's actually a lot more than that. So it's our job at Paper Lime Creative to make sure that those touchpoints that your clients have with your business are impactful and meaningful and get you the right customers to serve. How does a business owner start that branding process? We recommend that business owners start that process by figuring out who they want to work with and who that ideal customer is and what that ideal customer is buying so you can put the right time and effort into marketing the right product or service that you have and marketing it to the right people because that's where you'll get the biggest returns on your branding. How can branding help networking? Branding can help your networking because it helps you know where to go. I have a great client story for this. I was working with a good friend of mine on really defining her ideal customer. We realized all of her customers were the same type of person, they all dress the same and I joked that I realized that they all have really well-kept beards. So now when she goes to a networking event, she can go and physically find those people. She knows what they look like and chances are they'll be in an industry that she can work with. So really understanding your customers is important, right? Absolutely because then she can know what networking events to go to or where to show up online for networking. Like you were talking about LinkedIn in your intro and then to know what people to introduce herself to in those events. It saves you so much time. Obviously building relationships and just growing your network is important, but if you're looking to convert someone to a client from a networking event, knowing who to walk up to and introduce yourself is really important. Can you share the story behind the name of your business? I say it's our fresh and fun approach to print design and branding. So my background started in print design and then it evolved into everything else because you can do quite a bit with print design, but you can help your client way more when you understand the brand strategy behind it. Can you share one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? I think my favorite networking experiences are when you realize how small it all is. The six degrees of separation, which I think they're saying is more like three or four. I had one actually where an old friend of mine that I hadn't seen or heard from in years had actually married someone that I was actively networking with. I found out after the fact, which and I was like, "I didn't realize you were married to her!" We worry so much about getting business or meeting people or having to be extroverted and put ourselves out there. But it's all about relationships at the end of the day and I think some of those fun coincidences make life so interesting. How do you stay in front of and best nurture your network and your community? On an ongoing basis, I track who I network with, and be sure to send follow-up emails or book follow-up coffee dates. I think it's just making a part of your regular schedule. I always have some sort of networking event or a one on one coffee booked with someone in my calendar. It's just a part of doing business and I can't imagine a week where there isn't something in there. What advice would you offer...
Meet Claire Claire is a personal brand strategist and the CEO and Co-Founder of Claire Bahn Group. She has been helping high-achieving entrepreneurs, investors, founders, and executives create their best personal brand for over 10 years. As an entrepreneur and influencer with over 70,000 followers on social media, she has learned the importance of creating and maintaining your personal brand. Claire helps entrepreneurs leverage their personal brand to develop the authority, influence, and trust they need to exceed their business goals. Can you share what personal branding is and why it matters to you so much? Basically, there are so many different nuances of personal branding. But really your basic personal brand is essentially what people think about you when they do a Google search on you or they meet you for the first time in person. It's literally someone's initial reaction to you, and how they feel about you whether they want to work with you and that sort of thing. So that's your baseline personal brand. How can entrepreneurs and SMBs boost revenue by showcasing their subject expertise and leveraging their authority? I always look at personal branding from an aspect like when we sign on a client, we take a strategic approach to personal branding. We look at social media as well as Google, SEO in blogs, and SEO in videos. Because Google and YouTube are search engines, you can find out what people are actively looking for and the type of questions that people are actively asking and wants to know answers for. They want to find experts to help them find a solution to the problem that they're currently having. So ultimately, one of the best possible ways that someone can build that know, like, and trust with an ideal client is to create content, whether it's a long-form blog or a video or both that specifically answers a question that somebody is looking for. So ideally, you want someone to do a Google search on a certain subject, and they find something that you created, and they're like, "Wow, I really liked this person." So many times people find me that exact way because they search a topic that I'm an expert in, and they find a piece of content that I created or video that I created and they're like, "Oh, wow, Claire really knows her stuff." So that's ultimately how you really build ROI, you get customers that are committed and trust you, and value your input. The goal is to hopefully work with them, but trust has to be one and it's not something that everyone gives for free. For small and medium-sized businesses, is it important to have the individual or the owner of the organization versus building up the brand of the company itself? People connect with people and people want a connection, especially when you have you know certain younger demographics. They want to know your values, what you stand for and that is done through people. If you think of some of the very well-known, multibillion-dollar corporations, those CEOs branded themselves. Think of Elan Musk! Tesla's cool, but Elon Musk is cooler, if you think about it, right? He has more followers on social media than Tesla does, because when Elon says things it has so much more weight. So if you just think about these real-world examples, you see exactly why it's more important that the person be branded and then they talk about their business because the people are going to have that know, like, and trust factor, not a business. Why does ignoring personal branding negatively affect your ROI? If you really think about everything that I've talked about like if someone does a Google search on you, specifically. They're like, okay, who's this person, should I work with them, and there's nothing there, they're definitely not going to want to work with you. You should have some information, especially if you are an expert, which most people that have their own businesses are an expert in something, right? So you kind of wonder why can't I find...
Meet Paul Paul is popularizing the concept C-com, the science of conversion, conversation, and automation. He founded Amplify C-Com, which helps grow businesses past seven figures through 80% human-like and 20% human experience. Amplify combines human psychology and automation to create more profits in their customers’ pockets. How do you apply the 80-20 rule to automation? So we find a lot of the time that people try and automate either 100% or not a bit. So they will go, "Let's automate everything, you know, I want to make everything evergreen so I can sit on a beach and drink pina coladas and not have to do anything." But when you do that you lose that human touch, and especially post-pandemic, people are looking so much more for that personal customer experience that I've been able to speak to a human, but in a way doesn't take up a lot of their time and they can do it in their own time so there's that instant gratification. What we look at is, how would you normally speak if you're having a conversation? So if you would just send in an email to me one on one, Lori, what kinds of things would you say? If you were sending an SMS or a text to someone, how would you usually phrase that? So we write that in the same way as we normally would and then we automate that. So then we automate the start of the conversation and then hand it over to the 20% of human-like experience to guide the people through a more personalized service. What are embedded commands and why are they so important in marketing? Embedded commands are all about, starting to plant the seed, so to speak with whatever kind of conversation you've gotten into. Lori, if I was to speak to you, right now, you may be thinking, as I started to say this, you may be thinking of a pink elephant in the corner of the room. Now, as you probably try harder and harder not to think about that pink elephant in the corner of the room, then that image is probably getting more vivid and vivid in your mind. You probably see that pink elephant right now we've got roller skates on as well, can you see that? Well, don't think about that. Whatever you do, Lori, don't think about that. You can't think about it, right?! We start starting to use some of these embedded commands in the way that we write copy. So if you want to guide someone towards a certain direction, then you use some of those language patterns throughout the copy. So for example, if you want to bring up an objection that someone's having, and to be able to handle that objection, rather than like, brisk over it and try and hide it, say you might be thinking right now this or maybe you're thinking this and then you go "Great, now we can crush that objection." So you bring the objection up and then crush it. You may already start seeing yourself achieving that goal. I don't know what it is for you, it might be you want a new car, you might want to move houses, you might just want to spend more time with the family and see yourself go into Disneyland. But whatever that is for you, then you probably know what that is in your mind right now. So you can see if we break down that sentence, for example, you create the future pace in the mind and then adding things like "right now" at the end of it, you're starting to see that in your mind right now. So it's like these hypnotic language patterns that are being used that guide people towards the sale, but you can also do it in a conversational way. For example, another way is not so much of an embedded command, but another language pattern that we use a lot is ask for a no instead of a yes. So I learned this from Chris Voss. Chris Voss is an FBI hostage negotiator and he wrote a book called Never Split The Difference and one of the things he wrote in there was about asking for no. Most people, like if I said, "Hey Lori, would you like to have me on your podcast?" And then you kind of like, they'll say yes, or say no. But if I say, "Hey, Laurie, would you be totally...
Meet Ashley Ashley is an ex-corporate marketing executive for a $4 billion company turned to online marketing consultant who has helped hundreds of six, seven, and eight-figure online entrepreneurs create customer-centric marketing and sales strategies. As a certified NLP practitioner, Ashley believes the power of marketing is to teach your ideal clients how to think, not tell them what to do using a combination of psychographics and human behavior in your brand messaging. What is the number one mistake you see when it comes to messaging? It's kind of hard to narrow it down to one. But what I really see a lot specifically with clients that I've worked with is a lot of the time people will create content that doesn't really reflect their ideal client. What I mean by that, and one of the biggest things that I've found, especially through my NLP training and working with all these clients, the one thing that I've found that was so transformational was that your messaging and marketing is a reflection of your mindset. So a lot of the times I see when it comes to messaging, people will try to create messaging that attracts a certain type of client, but their mindset does not match the client they're trying to attract and I'll give you a quick example. A lot of the times when I read content, I can see where that person's mindset is coming from and what they were thinking in the moment they created that content, or they created that message, and why they were bringing in a certain type of person that they were bringing in. One of the examples I really like to use is one of my clients. She is a physical therapist that specializes in concussion recovery and she is phenomenal and amazing at what she does and when the pandemic hit, she turned into an online business. She created this membership program for patients who have had concussions. She is very out of the box, very different from the industry norms, which are the people I love to work with. So she created this webinar to promote this new membership that she had and she had almost 3,600 people sign up for this webinar and she had a very great ROI conversion. But when she got the clients into the program, she started to realize that a lot of them were in a victim mentality mode and they felt very defeated. They felt like they were helpless and when we started digging into her messaging, one of the things that she was saying in the webinar was I'm going to help you navigate your concussion symptoms. When I asked her why did you specifically choose, "I'm going to help you navigate your concussion symptoms?" And she said, "Well because when I created this, I was, I felt very helpless because my brick and mortar with the pandemic had to shut down so I went from making all this money to having to shut down my practice." So she was in this mentality of like, I'm helpless, I have to do something, it was this I don't know how to navigate my life now. So she used that word and what she found was the people who came into that program came in looking for her to solve their problem, they didn't take responsibility for their own recovery, they didn't take responsibility for their own actions, they were basically creating a codependent relationship on her. And because she felt helpless, she was turning around and bending over to their every need, and jumping in and doing more and doing all these things, because again, she set that container. So when we went in, and we restructured her messaging, we legit only changed the title of the webinar and the title of the webinar, the second time she launched was Regain Control of Your Life After A Concussion, and it was night and day. The reason why was using even the word regain on a psychological level, it makes you think that something was taken from you and it's your responsibility to take it back. When you have that, it changed the mindset to where she's gonna guide me and they took responsibility. So the second round, she had about 200 new
Meet Tom Tom Andrews operates Andrews Media Ventures an independent PR communications consultancy based in Hartford, Wisconsin. Tom's background includes 35 years of major market broadcast news and public relations experience. Tom and his team have aligned professionals to help corporate and nonprofit clients raise their business and organizational profiles through services such as creative writing, PR console, media relations, spokesperson training, video production, voice talent, and special events support. Besides using conventional online, print, broadcast, advertising, what other ways might a business or nonprofit organization consider to help raise public awareness about their products or services? Well, I'm not at all saying that conventional advertising and such are bad avenues to take. But in conjunction with that, I encourage my clients to think about earned media, grassroots type of methods of getting your message out. Earned media means coming up with angles that your company has that could be potentially newsworthy, and then pitching those to television, radio, print, whatever. Also, the advent of the digital world has given us social media. So there are opportunities now, as you never had before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all these different methods that people have to get their word out. Another thing that I encourage them to do is to consider what I call side door advertising. You have an opportunity to be a part of community events, sponsorships, opportunities to get where you're not necessarily the focus, but by the side door, people have to know who you are, they have to be ident you have to be identified. Same thing if your company is featured in a news story of some sort. Maybe the story is not how great Keystone click is, but maybe the story involves Keystone click and they tell people who you are. So there's a variety of different ways to get your message out. All in addition to if you have an advertising budget, all the better. But sometimes I've worked with companies and entities that really didn't have much of a budget to do that. Particularly nonprofits maybe don't have the money to do that. So I look for other avenues to get the word out, get creative. As someone who came from the news business, how important is the use of video in telling my company story and doesn't have the impact it once did in the b2b world as well as reaching the general public? I spent quite a bit of time with video, and I still do I still am involved in video production. So I'm getting my biases out there for you right away. I still think that video when it's done well, has a tremendous impact as much today if not more than ever, because companies used to produce a video, and it has basically one use, they produce it, it'd be a DVD, they'd get it out, send it to their prospective clients or people that they wanted to work with and that was the end of it. Well today, when we shoot videos, we shoot them for repurposing, we shoot them so you can take some sound clips, video clips, and you can put them on Twitter, you can put them on Facebook. So you've got golden opportunities to reuse, if you will, the same material and augmented and refresh it all the time. I think video has a tremendous impact because I think it's the best mode of conveying human emotions. We talk about doing things in person, or the big thing is why is it so effective? Because you get to see the facial expressions of the person you're speaking with. There are silent little signals that don't come over in an email, they don't come over in a post on Facebook, or some social media, but you sit down with somebody and you get to know them, and you get to understand where they're coming from and I think that's a very effective way to get your messages across. When telling a company's or organization's story, can you address the importance of the people aspect in storytelling? That's the in-person thing I've just mentioned. When you’re...
Meet Lindsey She is a principal and owner of McMillion Consulting. Lindsey believes in the power of influence and is a connector to the core as a national and international speaker, writer, and prospecting trainer. Her expertise is founded on equipping successful professionals and teams to profitably connect with purpose on LinkedIn. She has worked with 1000s of people to help them drive millions in revenue. Lindsey believes teaching should be practical as learning is actionable love that she loves helping her clients win. Building relationships is all about establishing trust. How do we go about building trust on LinkedIn? I always talk about how LinkedIn is this powerful online tool, but at the end of the day, business and networking and connecting have always been social, even before the internet existed. Shaking hands, kissing babies, following up to people knocking on doors. So I like to just remind people that and part of this is just to let down the anxiety and fear that comes with using a powerful tool like LinkedIn. So many things that I say and speak about this tool are similar to what you would do offline in many ways. So how do you build trust on LinkedIn? You do it just like you would offline so you have to think about your reputation. When you think about your reputation offline, and the credibility that you have, you want to make sure that that's mirrored online, specifically through your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn loves keywords, just like Google does so the more you can strategically and completely build out that LinkedIn profile with keywords, you're increasing your likelihood of coming up in a search result on the platform. If you were to Google somebody's name, LinkedIn and Google love each other so there's a high likelihood that it's not the first result, the second or third result on that first page is going to be that person's LinkedIn profile. Also, people do not have to have a LinkedIn account to see your profile because it's public. So I always like to emphasize that remembering the foundation of any success on LinkedIn is going back to your LinkedIn profile. The other thing I like to incorporate, here is authenticity. My motto for McMillion Consulting is connecting with purpose and when you're connecting with purpose, as it relates to LinkedIn, what does that mean? Well, it means personalizing your outreach, following up to start a conversation, getting offline. Sometimes parts of the conversation can be in LinkedIn, but you still want to meet them in person because at the end of the day, we're all in the human to human business so we want to think about just being authentic, connecting with purpose, personalizing our outreach, following up, asking people if they want to have a conversation offline to continue the discussion that was started. So I think of reputation, I think of authenticity, I think of generosity. We have to be servants of our knowledge, and our networks, and what I mean by that is you are Lori, an expert in marketing and many things in advertising. You and I were recently speaking about marketing automation and so many things that I have no idea about, but some that I do. So it's this idea that you are very intentional, as I was sharing our knowledge with our networks on LinkedIn. What I always say, when I think about generosity on LinkedIn is it's not just about being a good steward, and a good servant of your knowledge, but it's also about recognizing when others do the same. It's also about being generous with your network and introducing people. I loved your opening comment, "Hey, if you know anyone else who should be a part of this podcast in the conversation and let me know," and we have to tell people that so that they do think of us when they think of someone in their network who's a great speaker, who should be interviewed by you on their podcast. Then lastly, I would say is this consistency. So one client goes into LinkedIn, he's very consistent, every Sunday and
Meet Elizabeth Elizabeth started her career in technology after securing an MBA from Loyola University in Maryland back in the early 90s. She climbed the career ladder and an early-stage startup in the commercial construction technology industry to Director of Business Development and demonstrated success driving multimillion-dollar sales growth while providing award-winning sales leadership. After a personal challenge managing her home, Elizabeth decided to build the very solution she needed to save money, save time and reduce her stress. Now she is the Co-Founder of HomeZada, an online and mobile home management portal that helps homeowners manage their homes to save time and money and reduce stress. Specifically, HomeZada educates homeowners in the areas of home management, inventory, maintenance, remodeling projects, and finances. She recently won the 2019 Female Founders and FinTech Pitch Competition and appeared on the NASDAQ channel. What made you take the leap to start your own software company? Originally, I wasn't going to start a software company, because my husband had already started one and I worked for that company. Lo and behold, I ran into my own problems, as the bio indicated, I started running into problems at my home, and it was broken hot water heaters that broke earlier than they needed to only because I didn't understand that simply flushing them, which is basically how maintenance makes them operate properly. Not understanding how to manage all my maintenance, all these different areas, where was the money going in my house, I was really, really frustrated that I couldn't figure out all the little details of managing my home, and how to actually get this data to make it easier for me to manage my home. Then I started realizing if I'm having this experience is everyone else? And so I looked for 10 years for someone else to create a solution like HomeZada, and nobody did. We had sold our last company and my husband who I actually work with right now, said we've got another startup in us. Let's do it again, let's build the company that you want and the product that you want because we could help all these homeowners everywhere. At first, I thought it was crazy! But then I said, "No, you know what? I still have these problems, the solution to my problems are not solved, I need to solve them and they also need to help other people solve their problems as well," because if I'm going through this, other people must as well. Sure enough, we have customers all over the country, and in many countries outside the United States who experience the same things. They're running into problems managing all the details about their home in one place and this is what HomeZada allows them to do. What types of marketing are you doing to build your customer base? We target directly to the consumer so we target the homeowner. We use a lot of different marketing activities to reach them. The first set of activities that we target for our homeowner customers is a lot of digital marketing. We are a digital platform so making sure that we can give them access to our platform as easily. Anything that's social, pay per click, email marketing, and we also do a lot of other marketing as it relates to PR. PR is also a really good way for us to get our message out there because we do a lot of things because we are total home management in one system and not everybody needs complete home management all at once. They may need one portion of managing their home, for instance, I live maybe in Florida, meaning this homeowner, and it's getting ready to be hurricane season so I need to track a home inventory. So that's maybe where they start. Or maybe you're a first-time homeowner and what you need is to track your home maintenance, because you're not familiar with how to maintain your home. Or maybe like in the pandemic, everybody was doing projects and so how do I actually manage those projects as easily and efficiently as I...
Meet Paul Paul wears many hats, ghostwriting, agency founder, bestselling author, podcast host master networker, husband, father, older brother to younger men, amateur theologian, voice mimic, and recovering insurance salesman. As a first-generation Spanish-speaking immigrant to the US with African heritage and the Middle East come back experience, Pual's lived in five different countries, speaks two languages, and holds three passports. Paul does two things well, words and people. When he isn't writing content for clients, you're most likely to find him building relationships and creating opportunities for his network. Effective communication is something that you preach quite a bit. What role does effective communication play when it comes to growing your business? I've said for quite a while now, but one of the things that came to the forefront with me was that I make way more money with my ears than I do with my mouth. What I mean by that is that there's a tendency in everyday conversations when you're building relationships with people. To stay on the surface of things, to sort of being polite and chitchat and as I was learning the ropes of networking, it was fine. But eventually, I got to a point where it became very repetitive, and especially if you're in a medium to small size town where you know a lot of the people in any sort of business networking event, that's going to start to get stale. It did for me because I was passionate about it. I loved connecting with people, and I loved going to events and functions, and it was my primary method of generating business. But I couldn't keep talking like that and so I said, I've really got to get a lot more curious about people. For a long time, I couldn't think of what to say, and when somebody finally pointed it out to me, I suddenly realized, Oh, I'm being reminded of something I should already know, having studied communication in university, and having been exposed to newsrooms, and working in radio stations in Seattle. I should have known that the approach of the journalist or the curious TV interviewer, someone like Oprah Winfrey, for example. You just need to distill that down to an everyday conversational level, where you're asking people questions that quickly get beneath the surface, not in an inappropriate way, but in a way that sort of pulls out of them what they wouldn't regularly reveal. Not because they're ashamed, or extremely private, but simply because nobody thinks to ask them. I found that as soon as I started asking these kinds of questions that got below the surface, and then I started being a curious journalist and saying, "Well, tell me who, tell me what, where, when, why, how," all these open-ended sorts of things, people just will tell you all kinds of weird and wonderful things about themselves. Over time, as I built up this huge, giant mental Rolodex in the back of my head, I quickly discovered that whenever people told me what their problems were, or what their pain points were, I had right in the back of my head an instant list of people that I could connect them to who could help them. So I just became this hub, this sort of go-between, this broker almost, if you will, of one person to the next, solving problems and making myself valuable. What are the five tips for networking with your dream connections? This is one of my favorites. In my book, which by the way is going to be available to your audience for a free digital copy. I've realized after publishing that I have had these ordered incorrectly but they're all still the same. The first thing I tell people is you got to be an angler. So when a fly fisherman is trying to get a trout or a salmon to jump out of the water, he's going to cast that rod at an angle that mimics the flight patterns of a fly above the surface of the water. So the analogy that I take from that is that when you're in a networking function, you're gonna show up physically sort of the way everyone else...
Meet Shannon Shannon is the Executive Director of The Community, a nonprofit he founded while incarcerated to foster the successes, humanity, and agency of people with criminal records. He is also Co-Owner of Paradigm Shyft, a new Second Chance employment consulting agency that trains incarcerated people prior to release and helps employers benefit from this untapped pool both while incarcerated and post-release. Meet Adam Three days after turning 15 years old, Adam was involved in a gang-related homicide and received a life sentence. He would become the youngest inmate within the walls of Wisconsin's most violent adult prison. But over the following 23 years of incarceration, he would renounce his gang membership and work tirelessly to keep teenagers from joining gangs. Today, Adam is dedicated to providing those released with the resources needed to succeed and making our community a safer place. What exactly does Second Chance employment mean and why should people care about it? Shannon: So second chance employment basically just refers to helping people who have gone through the justice system get employed after that experience. So it can be anyone who was sentenced to probation, sentenced to some years in prison, or as in Adam's case life in prison. One statistic that, to me, is the only conversation that needs to really be had when it comes to, what do we do when it comes to people coming out of prison and people that have criminal records, is that 95% of people who go to prison, come back. So who do we want them to be when they return to our communities, because they're going to be coming, regardless of what a person thinks, or what anyone believes in terms of their political ideology, they're going to return. So we should at least have a process set up to incorporate the value they have as human beings and as employers and as citizens as much as possible. So second chance employment is all about how do we best do that? Adam: Just to expound a little bit on what Shannon said, If 95% of the people that are going to prison come home, we should care about it. Because eventually, at some point, 95% of the people that have been incarcerated might be your neighbor. So do we want that neighbor to be somebody who can contribute successfully to society or do we want that somebody to be someone that feels ostracized has to go back to what they used to do because nobody will hire them? A lot of people who have gotten out of prison have children, and in no way is it an excuse to commit crimes if you can't provide food for your family, but we have to look at it realistically and understand that okay, if John Doe has served his time or her time, and they want to contribute to society, but nobody will hire them, what are they going to do? Again, no justification, but we have to really start looking at things logically. What has been the experience of companies and people in general who have hired from the justice impacted community? Shannon: So one thing I want to point out with that is that term is really interesting because there's a lot of debate within the advocacy groups and justice reform groups and abolition groups and all the other terms that go around this kind of word and really just comes down to people that have gone through the carceral side of the system, you've got justice impacted, system impacted justice-involved, there's a number of terms. That's one thing, I would definitely want to encourage anyone who's looking at it to not get too scared by what terms do I use or what language is appropriate? I think people would generally be very open to somebody just asking, "How do I refer to this population?" The heart is usually the most important thing. So that's one thing I want to touch on is the language can sometimes be a barrier for people when it comes to getting involved in a lot of things and the way the world is operating now with a lot of areas opening up for groups that have traditionally been
Meet Lisa She is the President of Evolution Marketing, a Wisconsin-based women-owned certified B Corporation specializing in the area of global sustainability consulting and storytelling, environmentally responsible creative design, and ethical marketing. I keep hearing about the social side of sustainability, but I thought sustainability was only about recycling and addressing environmental issues. Can you define that for us? In all sincerity, the average American really believes that when you say sustainability, you're talking about the environmental side. True sustainability comes in a holistic manner and what that means we like to talk about it as like three legs of a stool. So those three legs of the stool are people which would be the social side. So that equates to corporate social responsibility. Planet would be the environmental stewardship side, which is the environmental side. Then profit or economic viability would be making sure that the business you're doing is making money while you're doing sustainability. So all three of those parts interconnected together are what true holistic sustainability is. So you can't really address an environmental issue without also addressing the people side, or the community side or the supply chain side. So everything is all connected together. Here's the definition that I really love because it puts it pretty clearly: Sustainability means ensuring prosperity and environmental protection without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. So really, at its heart, it's all about people. Why is it important for businesses to begin addressing and adopting sustainable business strategies and actions? It kind of goes back to what we were just talking about with COVID. The reality is, Americans today want business to solve social problems. 20 years ago, Americans expected government and or nonprofits to solve the world's problems or the social problems that we have in our communities. But after the last couple of years in this United States, there's a lot of data that talks about how consumer attitudes have changed, and specifically Americans attitudes have changed, saying that they really want business to be the one to solve social problems. If you look at what happened Last year, business was the one that really jumped up or stood up in many cases to address not all their worker issues, but address community sustainability. So I would say transparency is a big part of this. Customers, consumers, the public, want to know what a business is doing, and that's why I think sustainability strategies are really important right now because they help to tell the story of the actions that you're taking in your organization. If I want to get help to make sure my business was more sustainable, are there references available? Do you have resources for Wisconsin and even beyond? I am a walking resource for sustainability because I love sustainability and its parcel to what our business does! So if you're in the state of Wisconsin and your listener, we have a program, it's through the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council. It's called the Green Masters Program which was established in 2009. Evolution Marketing, actually, was one of the original 13 businesses to pilot the program. What it is, is it's an assessment and recognition program for Wisconsin businesses interested in improving and being recognized for their sustainability initiatives. So what it means is, if you've never done anything and sustainability, and you're kind of looking for the on-ramp on like, where do you begin to learn about sustainability and what you could do in your business, I would say, go check out https://www.wisconsinsustainability.com/ and then go to the Green Masters tab on the website and you can actually download the questions. So the program runs all year round. For new businesses is free to apply until October 31 2021 and if you're an existing business, who already...
Meet Duncan Duncan is the CEO of Littlefield, a company that owns companies such as the Littlefield Company, Paper Airplane Sidecar who are critical equity partner contributors to profit-focused companies. The engine of his company is the Littlefield Company, where they tell under-told stories by delivering scalable content for purpose-driven companies. Plus, he's on a mission to always be a part of the larger conversation and to support everyone to become obsessed with their own unique life. What is the importance of story when it comes to marketing for a business? It's one of the things that we recognized as we kind of dug deeper into what we really do well, is that side of the story. Every business owner started a company for a reason. They wanted to connect to an audience, they wanted to sell something, they wanted to be a part of the community, whatever it was. We really want to tell those under-told stories that people don't know about. You walk into a company, and you can put two things together to recognize what they do and why they do it, but there's always a deeper meaning. There's always that thing that can have somebody sparked on attention and build their trust to be a lifelong guest. So it's one of those things where we want to tell those under-told stories that make them stand out against the competition, but also at that point, earn a consumer’s trust. Once you earn that trust, you can have an ask which can be to buy or to donate or show up. That's really where we wanted to lean into is just focusing on the story and not have been so focused on budget or camera equipment, or anything else, it's just let's tell incredible stories, that have people walk through the door and saying, "How can I be a part of this, and how can I help you grow it?" That's where we're, we're so fortunate to be in with some incredible partners who, that's all we care about. It's just the story. How do you create team and collaboration within your core values? We focus on letting everyone have some confidence and not the ego. Very early on in the company, we recognize that every story we make, every video we create, every story we get to tell is not ours. So if you look at our portfolio from our website, we've only added roughly six company logos in just two videos in our company's history and all of those six videos are for us. Everything else, we don't put a logo on. We don't want to take the attention away from that partner story because we really believe that yes, like, are we the ones creating it and potentially molding the story? Yeah, but the reality is, it's not our story. So we really have this collective mission as a team to kind of check the ego at the door, and say, "We are really big believers in our core values," and those core values are, bring your best, be your DNA, be positive, and show up for each other. Those four things are not rooted in, I want to be the best person or the best director or the best cinematographer or get my credit here or here, it really goes, "Hey, how can I be a part of the bigger conversation, help a company tell their story to earn their trust and have a lifelong guest." We're collaborative, too, potentially to a fault at times, because it takes us a little longer to build the creative because we have so many internal meetings about it. It's we have so many internal meetings about conversations or companies that we're trying to build stories for or understand companies or brands to then at that point, it could slow us down, because there are so many times where you work with a single cinematographer videographer, and they're like, "Cool, give me 24 hours, and I can create a game plan, we can do this, this and this," because they don't need to talk with 15 people about it. That's where we really go is we want to make sure that we have all ideas on the table and we're really focused on that team effort and it's something that I'm very proud of, honestly. We want to have guys and gals
Meet Brad Brad has been supporting and improving the lives of those around him for over four decades. He has brought perspective and context into every role he has had. Having been in manufacturing for most of his adult career, he has forged relationships by learning what matters to the people. In doing so, Brad was able to master the art of change management. Working with family-owned blue-collar businesses as a customer and supplier, Brad understands both sides of the industry creating growth and wealth. In your line of work, you do a lot with regard to accountability and setting expectations. Can you speak to our listeners a little bit about why it's so important to have set expectations and accountability? It's important for multiple reasons. When you look at it from a business owner’s perspective, it's important to know what your team is going to accomplish, not so much the tasks that they need to do, but what are the results that you're looking for? And clearly communicating that expectation because as humans, we really don't want to disappoint people that are really not in most people's natures are disappointed or upset. So when we have clear expectations, we know what we're working towards on a regular basis. So we're clear on what we need to achieve, we know what others are expecting from us and it makes life just so much easier to know. If you knew what you were expecting for dinner every night, if it was planned out every night, for the rest of your life, that conversation that happens of what's for dinner and that whole big mess that happens in many, many households just don’t happen because you know you have a plan, you know what the expectations are. And it just makes life a little bit easier when you know what the expectations are. On the accountability side, it is important to allow us to know as employees and or as owners, what you're accountable to do, what that result really means. So if you're accountable to make sure that the driveway gets poured, and it's finished the customer satisfaction if you're a concrete guy, you now know what you're accountable for and what that responsibility looks like and you're given the authority along with that accountability to make sure that you can deliver those results. That's where a lot of disconnect ends up happening is we tend to give the accountability without necessarily the authority to make those decisions or use the resources appropriately to allow the result to happen. What is the turnaround when you see business owners start enacting expectations and accountability as far as the challenges that they're experiencing with their business? The first challenge is to get the owners to understand what the expectations are from a results perspective. Most are so task-focused, I want you to make 30 calls a day, I want you to see 10 customers, I want you to pick 15 lines of orders every hour. So we're so focused on the task that we lose focus on what the result is. That's where we start stemming the creativity problem to allow people to be creative solution problem solvers. So the first step is to get the owner to think about the results. Once they define the results and they get them documented and we get the position agreement and alignment and have the employee-employer conversation, there's this big weight lifted off of people's shoulders, because they now know what's expected. They come into work and they do that thing to focus on those results and the noise and the garbage that everybody goes and works on every day goes away. It doesn't actually go away, it just gets refocused into more positive energy because we're not focusing on the minutia, we're focusing on the bigger picture. Instead of the did you make the 25 phone calls? No, I made 15 phone calls, but I got $300,000 worth of proposals written with those 15 phone calls. So the number of phone calls didn't matter, the proposal writing was what mattered. There's this major challenge that's...
Meet Dave Having started his first business in fourth-grade programming bulletin board systems, working for Apple Computers as a college freshman, and then founding a computer networking services company employing college classmates while in college, Dave Stamm has been has always been passionate about implementing technology and serving people. Dave is currently the CEO of two technology companies, Stamm Technologies and Stamm Media, and a partner at No Small Magic. Can you just tell us a little bit about these three different companies that you have? So the first company that I started in college was Stamm Technologies and we provide outsourced IT services to small and medium-sized companies in Metro Milwaukee and Chicagoland areas. Then we later started Stamm Media as an offshoot. It was a client that we had been working with for years in the IT company and that is Stamm Media and we provide technology services and equipment, to large trade shows and corporate events throughout the country. So we rent audiovisual and IT equipment to mostly fortune 500 companies and then we provide the labor and services to set that stuff up at their various events. So that's the event company and then the third company, No Small Magic we started about five years ago and that is an interactive studio, providing primarily custom boutique software written for these corporate event clients that we've got throughout the country. During the pandemic, we wrote a virtual networking platform called Showboat, which has been our big focus over the last year. Can you tell us a little bit about your background as it relates to networking and technology? You bet. So both are passions for me. I started out, I was the geek in grade school before you know being a geek in programming was cool, right? This was in the 80s, I started out programming in grade school and was kind of self-taught, but was smart enough. My dad was a salesman, so I was smart enough to realize that at that time, again, being a geek wasn't cool so you had to kind of keep a lid on it. While it was fun to do, you also had to be social and network which is really kind of the function of early selling. So my first job was when I was 14, I started as a Subway sandwich artist at New Berlin subway and actually, it ended up being that the couple that owned that Subway owned another business, which was an audiovisual event company that served big companies nationwide. So I started working with them when I was young and they taught me the ropes and as I grew, having that networking background and being able to be connected to them and their network, and just working hard and networking with people from when I was young really paid off for me. It's one of the big reasons that we are where we are right now with the three companies. How is technology enabling networking today and what could be better? I think over the last year as the pandemic happened, we've all gravitated towards it. All the platforms existed prior to the pandemic, we had zoom, and we had teams, and sure they've added some features, but for the most part, those platforms existed prior to the pandemic. Now we're all using them in our daily lives, whether it's for work, and you're on multiple zoom meetings in a day, or it's kids doing virtual school, or get-togethers or virtual birthday parties, or what have you. We're all living in these new technologies and they're second nature and because of the event business we had, we serve a lot of clients nationwide, we were using these tools prior, but for the most part, we were only ever using audio. Everybody would get into a zoom meeting and shut off their video. Now what's been fun is just the way people are using it and it's the authenticity of being able to use these tools. If your kids are running past or your dogs or your cats are in the shot, nobody cares and everyone is authentic. They're themselves in doing whatever they need to do using these tools and so we...
Meet Tobin When experts are ready to create more conversations with perfect prospects, they call Tobin at bookofexperts.com. He's been called an introverted savant with a superpower for helping you find your tribe and sparking conversations out of thin air. This new book is called Experts Never Chase, because deep down we all know that chasing undermines the hard-won trust and authority of subject matter experts so he helps entrepreneurs find the easy path dialog that drives sales. Why did you write the book, Experts Never Chase? What's the big idea behind it? So our book just came out last month. We launched on May the fourth, and since we launched, we've had a successful Kickstarter, which was a unique experience to launch the book with that and I think we're on four or five bestseller lists now. So that's been a new experience for me, I've never done the book thing. My co-author on the book, Cat Stancik has published once before so she had a little bit more experience and it has been great getting some help from friends and experts in that space of what it looks like to launch and market your book. The funny thing is when we did the Kickstarter, we used the exact same process that is outlined in the book. So I think that that was a really fun way to validate that and show people what we're doing at the same time for why they might be interested in the book. The book is not for everyone, but it's really written for expert-based entrepreneurs, so coaches, consultants, people who talk about clients instead of customers, and particularly folks that are feeling like it's harder than it should be. Like, it's really hard to get that next couple of clients and if I had just a couple more clients coming into the mix, it would really change my business, my life, my work-life balance. So the book is how to make that happen without feeling like you have to chase those clients, those prospective clients around because when you do that, it really undoes a lot of the good work that we seek to make in the world. What do you think is the biggest challenge that you see in our online space of expert-based entrepreneurs and what would really help them out? The challenge that I'm seeing goes right back to what you described of this reaction of, "I get these messages, and I have no interest in them," so it's this challenge to scale. We've been sold a bill of goods of I'm going to create a business that's like an ATM, it's going to work while I sleep so everything I do in my business has to be built to scale, built to grow big. Relationships are a little bit different because the minute we start treating other individuals like a number on our spreadsheet. We've all done that funnel math where we try talking to 1,000 contacts where that ends in let's say three clients coming out at the bottom of that funnel. What we don't factor into that math is the 997 people at the start, who received that first message and said, "This is probably someone I'll never do business with," because of that first impression. So I think the challenge is how to change that and how to create relationships in a systematic, predictable and consistent way, but not scalable so that you lose that human-to-human connection. Business is done by one person doing business with another. There are other industries, where their consumers and customers and I came out of that world. That was my background, I had to reinvent myself four or five years ago. I was a build your list, push the send button. We sent two emails that produced a million and a half dollars in the nonprofit space. That was my world, like the one to many kinds of digital marketing. But I grew really frustrated because I saw that it wasn't working as consistently as it should because 2 out of 10 people were opening emails, and you'd work really hard to send better emails, and it might go up to 3 out of 10 people. So about four or five years ago went all-in on this one-to-one, talk to people the way I...
Meet Joel Joel is the proud author of Formans Financial Facts, a financial management blueprint. His mission is to educate people so that they can manage their personal finances with confidence for life. Over the past 30 years, Joel has worked in corporate America and a variety of financial roles. He started in traditional financial roles in the financial services and baking industries. About 16 years ago, he successfully moved into the consulting world. Why is it so important to have a personal budget? Well, a personal budget to me, is really the foundation for anyone's financial management and money management needs. By building a personal budget, you're going to understand where you're spending your money, what you're spending it on, and you're going to make sure that you're bringing home enough money on a monthly basis to not only cover those fixed and variable expenses but to also have money left over to what I like to call pay yourself for savings and investment opportunities. If you don't have a good handle on the budget, and what you have coming in versus coming out, it's going to be really difficult to do those other two. Why is it important to have a plan for saving money for the things you want and need? It's really quite simple. Unfortunately, we know money makes the world go round, we can't go in and purchase a new computer with a smile. So what one of the things that I teach in my blueprint is I break it down into percentages for you. 55% is generally for your core bills, your rent, your mortgage, car payments, any loans you have, etc. Then I have 21%, which is a little bit more flexible for wants and needs, for going out to dinner, for entertainment, going to the movies, once the pandemic is behind us. Then the most critical piece of that is the 24%, which is what I call the pay yourself first, which is you break that down to savings and investments. The savings part of that is let's say you want a new couch, or you're looking to get a new car and you want to have a down payment on it. By saving for that in advance and putting money aside, let's say you need a, you know, a $5,000 downpayment? Well, if you all of a sudden just have to come up with $5,000 from somewhere in your financial arsenal, and you didn't plan for it, it might be more difficult. But by putting this money aside incrementally, it makes the buying experience so much easier when you go to buy that car because that $5,000 while you'll feel it, it's less painful because you already have it and you can enjoy the rest of the buying experience. What are some of the key things to think about when you're setting these financial goals? There are a lot of different things that come into play. So I like to look at the whole picture. So you're going to be wanting to save up for things that you want, whether it's a down payment on a car, down payment on a house, you're also going to be thinking about retirement, and yes, no matter how young you are, and especially the younger, the better, because time is not always your friend in life. But when it comes to planning for retirement, time is absolutely your friend, the more time you have for that money to grow, the interest to compound, the market values of whatever you invested in to go up, you want to think about that. You also want to think about your children's future, even if you don't have any, and start planning with a 529 plan or something that will get ready that can be used for their future education. So the first thing you would do is make a laundry list of some of the things that I've mentioned, and maybe some other things that you want to do. Then the next thing is you sit down either with a financial adviser, or an accountant and lay out the things I want and the things that I need to save for my life and for my family. How do I get there? What's the plan? What are the steps? What are the vehicles that I'm going to go through, to channel the money to either save and or invest to
Meet Eric Eric is the co-founder of Blue C, a California-based brand strategy and creative marketing agency. Since 1998 Eric has been helping companies across both b2b and b2c segments. Eric is a second-generation marketer and actively supports clients’ growth dreams through the Blue C Brand PWR platform and the Six Systems To Success. On a personal basis, Eric spends 16 weekends a year in Baja California and is the co-founder of The California Love Job, which cares for frontline workers. How important is brand strategy for companies that want to grow? Well, what's interesting is that our company focuses first and foremost on brand strategy. The platform we have is called Brand Power and the very first step is always about brand strategy, brand messaging, clarity and positioning. It's interesting, because in the last 12 to 18 months, we have had so many more companies come to us and ask us to go through our Brand Power clarity process than ever before. A lot of people think that branding and marketing flow together, but they're almost like polar opposites, or maybe even like the Ying Yang, if you don't do one, you can't do the other. What happens is if you don't have complete clarity on your message, you're not going to be able to do your marketing well. So by going through our process, we're able to uncover everything, create absolute clarity, create massive success for both internal and external, as well as create the next step in our Brand Power process, which is called amplify. The system actually works really well as a roadmap and our first step is clarify, which is the brand strategy, amplify, which is the marketing strategy marketing plan, kind of our roadmap, and then infuse the creative campaign development. Then integrate is the digital marketing and sales strategies, and then engage is all the social media content and content marketing that flows in around the whole campaign. So to answer your question more precisely, how important is brand strategy, is brand strategy is a long game, but it's very, very, very important. You can't do one without the other. What is the difference between branding and marketing? I think the easiest way to explain branding is this is what people think about you after you leave your room. The marketing is how are we going to get that message out to the right people at the right place at the right time. So if you break it down really simple like that, that's the best way to think about it. The branding is always about the message. A lot of people are like, "Okay, well, we need our brand developed, let's do our logo," but no, it actually goes deeper into that. So when we go through our process, the brand clarity process, we really get down into the pillars, the tonality, the mission, the values, the words you say, the words you don't say, the visual direction, and keeping a very strong clarity in the message. So with that being said, the branding is that feeling, what they think about you, how everything is cohesive and everything works together, the marketing is how they're going to connect with you to get you to engage and be a fan of that brand. What's the difference between b2b marketing and b2c marketing? I think the easiest way to think about it, and I kind of want to take a step back before I go into that is a consumer will spend $100 on something, but a business will spend $1,000 on that same thing. The difference is that the consumer wants to know about the emotional connection of it, they want the emotional buy on it. So you're going to see a lot of marketing really targeted towards the emotional side, how you're going to feel, how you're going to be seen, how you're going to look, how this thing is going to change your life on it. Then on b2b, it's all rational and they're thinking what is it going to do for my company, is it going to save me time or make me more money. What's really interesting is that we have clients that have both b2b products, and the same
Meet Katie Katie is a writer specializing in customer case studies. She has written for technology and education companies and coaches of all types. In her free time, Katie enjoys baking, reading fantasy novels, and going on road trips with her husband. Katie lives in Wisconsin and thinks cheese should be in its own food group. Can you share with our listeners what a customer case study is? A customer case study is the success story of how a client or customer has gotten results through a product or service. So basically it takes your happy customer from how they found you, why they decided to work with you, through that experience of working with you, and down to the results that they got when they had finished working with you. What are some characteristics of an ideal customer to feature in a case study? So customers that make a great fit have likely told you that they are happy with the work that you both did together. They may have recommended you to others, which is great because a customer case study is kind of a recommendation, so to speak so if they've already been recommending you to other people, they'll be able to give more ideal quotes for the case study. Also, if your customer has told you about a result that was particularly impactful, that is also a great qualifier for a customer who might make a great case study, because having a great story and pairing that with enticing data, or even really great emotional benefit, is definitely a way to create a piece that shows your prospects and your leads what they will get if they work with you. So you have mentioned that there are four sections to a case study. What are examples of the questions that I could ask my customers to make sure that I have information in each of those four parts? So the first part is the introduction. You'll want to ask your customer if they are a business owner, where is their business located, what types of work do they do with their clients and customers, how long have they been in business, and then if they're a consumer, then you'll ask them things like, where do they live, how old they are if they're comfortable sharing that. Sometimes people's hobbies and interests can be good to know about just to make it a little more personable. So those are the basic introduction questions. Then we get into the challenge part and the challenge part talks about what challenges they were looking to solve. So I usually ask, what was the challenge you were looking to solve, why did you choose to have someone else help you solve your problem, how are you solving your problem before you found the product or service that ended up being the solution, and then we get into your business because we want to have a little information about you and your business and why they chose you. That can come from asking them, how did you learn about the solutions, why did you specifically choose to work with my company, if you're doing the interview yourself. Then, of course, the most impactful section is the results. So a few questions that I usually ask are, what are some qualitative results that you've experienced? So that gets really into those emotions, those feelings. What are some quantitative results that you've experienced as a result of the work? Which gets into the numbers? Then another question I love is, tell me about a time when the work we did made a real difference because that can open up a whole story of, "Oh, I was just spending all my time answering emails, but with the autoresponder that your company provides, I now have a ton of time to do the work that I love, and I'm really happy." So that question can be really open-ended and give the readers an idea of how the results can impact them on a day-to-day basis. Then I always ask, why would you recommend this business to others? That is a great question, because sometimes they'll even say, "Well, yeah it has, I have sent referrals, or I have recommended this business to other people...
Meet Melinda Melinda is a sales coach who specializes in helping female entrepreneurs sell to corporations. Not only does she coach how to sell, she still practices her own sales. Melinda works as a sales executive and holds an impressive track record of over $40 million. With 20 plus years of b2b sales experience, she is determined to help other women expand their impact by selling to big companies. She also leads a Facebook community of amazing women trailblazers called B2B Women Making Big Sales. How do small business owners sell to big clients? Yeah, I think this is usually the first question people have. When we are small entrepreneurs, and we look at other people going after or working with more established businesses and corporations, and a lot of times they look at fellow entrepreneurs that are able to have an impressive client list. A lot of people often ask me, how can I sell to corporations, and I personally think in today's world, the world has gone through so many changes and companies are actually becoming more flexible in terms of looking for consultants or companies or business owners to work with me. So I've worked with a lot of women that told me the same thing. Sometimes companies are looking for employees, but because of different reasons, they started looking for consultants to help them with different services or different solutions. But the first thing that when people are thinking about starting to go after corporations, the first thing they often have is that, "How do I get started? Is it even possible?" I like to say the first step when it comes to going after corporate clients is all about the target. If you want to stand out and compete with other people, especially more established competitors, the first thing you need to ask yourself is, can I be more specific or targeted in terms of my marketing? Can I find an industry that is highly specialized, and in terms of what I do, can I be considered as a specialist in terms of my service offering. Your positioning statements should be the first thing you stand out for because business prospects or business clients are super busy, they often do not have a lot of time to listen to a long speech or long elevator speech. So to have a very clear understanding of how you stand out how you can be a specialist should really be the first thing that you want to focus on. But if you are able to stand out within a very specialized industry or something you offer, I personally think that there is a great opportunity for you out there to go after corporate clients because you are going to tell them, "Hey, I'm going to stand out from my more established competitors because working with me, you get to have direct access to me, you are able to work with me rather than some other teams or other companies where they have a lot of turnovers." I think that for small entrepreneurs when it comes to going after corporate clients, our customer service and personalized approach is definitely a way to that will appeal to a lot of corporate clients. How do small business owners stand out when they're selling to these big clients? Yeah, definitely niching down. I often tell people that in terms of sales perspective, the first thing, industry can be a really great way for you to stand out from your competitors. It's one thing to say, "Hey, I'm a marketing consultant," or you can say, "I'm a marketing consultant that really specializes in sporting industries," and that instantly helps you stand out from your competitors. So to really find an industry that you're passionate about, and one thing you can look at is to look at your past experience. A lot of women when they start out probably already have years of experience, either in the corporate world or from their education, or where they're located. So you can also always look back to your professional experience, and try to ask yourself, in terms of experience I have, what industry can I specialize in, and that is a...
Meet Mike Mike graduated in 2015 from William Paterson University, where he studied New and Digital Marketing Methods. During his senior year, he accepted an internship at an advertising agency that specialized in marketing for manufacturing and logistics companies. This is where he developed his passion for manufacturing that ultimately led him to the New Jersey Manufacturing Extensions Program where he can actively make a difference and support the industry. Why are you advocating so vigorously for the manufacturing industry? It kind of goes off of the fact that it's been stigmatized. Manufacturing, when people think about it, they think the dark, dirty, dangerous facilities in the Henry Ford videos of the assembly line where right now it's so beyond that image, where it without talking about advocating for it, students, young adults won't know that the industry average salary in New Jersey is over $94,000 a year. That impact on the nation of high-paying jobs, the impact to the GDP of the nation itself is just too important to forget about or let dwindle. So those factors really are the sole reason why people need to speak up for manufacturing and get that underappreciated opportunity in the forefront, where there's so much opportunity, there's so much value for the workers, the communities, the states, the nation. Without advocating for it, it's just gonna get forgotten because when I was in school, I was told that all manufacturing went overseas. So I didn't look at the industry and I think that was a miss. But glad I made it to where I can actually talk about it and engage with students and engage with the local communities to make sure people know about the opportunities. How can manufacturers ensure the success of their business and the industry as a whole here in the US? It goes back to advocacy. Stay engaged with the local community, and really the local government, because, in New Jersey, the legislature thought that all manufacturing moved. They're lawyers, they're business people and professional services, they're not necessarily manufacturers, so they didn't know the industry existed, especially to the extent it does, where New Jersey has over 11,000 manufacturing and stem firms. So if manufacturers get engaged, speak up and come together at events, you have an opportunity to convince or at least showcase the value of the industry to let the local government know where they can create legislation and bills, and laws to support the industry. What you put in is what you get out of it. If you're looking internally, you can look forward and really take into consideration of continuous improvement mindset. That continuous improvement mindset could be that advocacy push, that engagement, always trying to improve how you engage with your local community or your production line. How can you advance yourself to really kind of drive your own business forward in a way? It's not all new tech, but there is a lot of new tech involved too so don't be turned away by buzzwords where the buzzwords are really, at least pieces of stuff you can implement today. Systems, automation processes, robotics that you can implement today. Lastly, never, never, ever be too busy to approve. That's my biggest thing. If you're too busy to improve, you're just going to keep on taking steps backward. It's not going to stay the same, you're not going to continue that growth. You're always going to have to improve and find that time to take those steps forward. Can the manufacturing industry benefit from Digital networking tools to help promote themselves in the industry? It doesn't necessarily have to be that much of a shift off of improving your business or improving your standing within the state in terms of an industry because digital tools are all a different way that you can kind of get the word out there and advocate for yourself, find and connect with thought leaders who might have some insight of how you can find continuous...
Meet Jeff Jeff is a life architect, owner of Creative Web Studios, and mentor to young entrepreneurs. Many people will tell you where to go, what to do and how to live, but there's a higher path and calling inside of you that only you can unearth. It's time to stop living by other people's scripts and expectations for your life and have your own awakening. So let's talk about your marketing agency. How did you get started? Sure. So I followed up a pretty typical entrepreneurial dream. If you're like me, you go to school, perhaps your parents tell you to go to college, or they want to push you to get some stable jobs somewhere. So I did all that I had a good run, I went to the University of North Florida, got my computer science degree, and quickly here in Jacksonville, Florida launched out into corporate working at a large municipality, so electric, water, wastewater, and there are about 2000 people there. I enjoyed it and had a pension plan to work there for 32 years get 80% of your salary for life. I rose to the top there in leadership and got an interim director position and I remember I had this epiphany one day I was in this old civil service looking wood panel building well maintained, but from like the 60s, and I just looked across the table and this awesome colleague, Richard was there. He was about seven years out from retirement, and he just made a marginal amount of money more than me. I was just like, dude, I gotta do this for like 25 more years, day after day, you know, do this 45-minute commute and I just realized it wasn't for me. So I had a computer science degree, I minored in graphic design so I had all this creativity. At that time, in 2005, websites were really starting to pop and they were kind of hard to build. So I started moonlighting on the side, and I hatched this little six-month plan in 2005 where I said I'll just give it a go for a year and if it works out great, and if it doesn't, I'll just hop back into corporate so boom, that independence, autonomy, that entrepreneurial dream, that's how I founded the agency back in 2005. How did you set it up so that the business is running without your day-to-day involvement? Yeah, so over time, and it's taken a while I just slowly fired myself from positions and for a few reasons. Some stuff I was never good at, I was pretty sloppy at the invoicing and collecting. Obviously, I ultimately did it, but you can really get that stuff on a machine and I'll have problems there. So that was an example of something as soon as I could get like the CPA help or like the accounts receivable help I did, but then other things just logically made sense. So I was going out on my own, and I sold five websites, and say, a site at the time took me 40 hours to code. Well, that's 200 hours just for the coding part of the site. So at that point, I really couldn't go in on any more business so I just saw certain stuff I had mastered and I was good at, it was time for someone else to do it. So slowly but surely I started to outsource stuff. Coding is pretty technical so you can outsource it and not have to worry about the language barrier. Then finally, I got to the point today where I love selling but different people do an amazing job at it so when leads come in, they do it. So I just slowly fired myself and changed my position and got to go into more of a leadership role, like giving back and helping others and doing some mentoring. So that's been the progression, fire yourself from things that you've mastered, like give someone else the opportunity and things that you're never good at, get those off your plate as soon as possible. What are the biggest marketing mistakes that you see small businesses making? What I find is business owners don't take into account everything that goes into their online presence. So a lot of times we might focus on redesigning the site, or we might be like, I want to show up for spine pain relief doctor so we'll launch a Google...
Meet Gail Gail has a Degree in Journalism and Masters in curiosity! She guides clients to success with a marketing strategy centered around telling stories and making the right connections. How? Sign up, suit up, show up. Her resume includes media fundraising, advertising, PR, and owning a b&b. Gail now is a powerhouse connector, strategic brand consultant, and keynote speaker with a focus on manufacturing. She is a Twitter evangelist, a passionate networker, and an avid storyteller. As I stated in the bio, but you're calling yourself a chief curiosity officer. Why is curiosity so important to you in the new virtual manufacturing marketing world? Well, with curiosity, I encourage people to use it. First of all, I use it because that's how I really did the pivot into learning more about this world because I was a journalist, which I covered a lot of different topics. But manufacturing, I did not know much about that, and certainly, I've been doing work in mold-making, which is a very niche world and I use curiosity for me to learn. But then when I'm teaching now and working with clients in that world, I'm encouraging them to be curious about marketing, curious about outreach, curious about how can they make a change from the traditional trade shows. Especially since the pandemic, things have changed, and it's a disruption, not an interruption. So we're not going to go back to the way it was, it forever changed how we're going to be doing things and even if we go back to live, there's still going to be a digital component. So curiosity is like a muscle, if you're not using it, it just won't grow and curiosity is about growing, learning, and exploring the virtual world that for some people may seem overwhelming to them and may even seem a bit scary. So that's why I say number one if you're curious, you can learn so many new things, and become more adept at how to use all these virtual technologies. Can you share some tips to help salespeople that are in the manufacturing industry that are trying to get away from the trade shows to best understand selling in the digital marketing world? It is about asking those questions and first doing your research. So I always say before you try to sell to anyone, first learn about who your clients are and what they're looking for. What's happening is those same clients are doing that with you. They're doing research about your company, they're looking at your social media, they're looking at websites, they want to know who you are before they're even gonna think about buying from you. So you need as a salesperson to do the same thing. Dig in, find out who they are as much as possible. There's a lot of information you can find online about someone and some people and I've had some salespeople kind of feel uncomfortable with that they feel like "Well, I'm nosing around." I said, "In this world, if someone posts something publicly, they post it on a social media platform, it is done because they want to share something." So that's one tip is to do your research. The other thing is instead of selling, be generous with your information, share your knowledge, try to be a guide to who you're trying to sell to. So if you're in an engineering role, as a salesperson, you want to share all the intricacies of what goes into everything. Give me some insights, and I mean, give me meaning the person looking at your profile. One of the big stop gaps for a lot of the people in sales that I'm finding manufacturing is they go, "They're gonna know this," or, "If I explain this, most people already know this, I don't want them to think that I don't know it." So I said, "You'd be surprised at what people may want to learn about, and the people that may be doing the research aren't always the people that know about how that tool works, or what machine is on that tool. So be that guide, share information, and also share a bit of information about yourself. So if you have an interest...
Meet Geoffrey He is the founder of Voice Express Corporation, with multiple patents covering the personalization of voice-enabled print media, and VOT (the voice of things), Stern has been at the forefront of using voice to drive commerce and customer engagement. Stern's products have been used in over 60 million Build-a-Bears in sentiment expression, photo imaging, direct mail, packaging, and point of sale signage to name a few. Does every product, service, and brand need a voice, and how do you discover that voice? I think when we're in school, we're always asked to find our own voice, whether we're writing or whether we're an artist. Think of a child where the first thing that they do, the first interaction that they have is to hear their loved one mother's or father's voice and to start to gurgle and interact with the world through voice. So voice is very primal and it's also a primal trigger. There were some brands that really kind of feature themselves and define themselves through audio. There were others, especially business to business type brands that might not realize that they have a voice too and they have a voice in the larger sense of the world in the sense that whether you sell a spring or a widget or personal care products when the customer uses it, your brand should be delivering a message that is more than just the physical product or service. So our company, as you said, is involved with linking products that can speak, can engage, can interact with the consumer. But I would suggest that anyone listening who is involved with any sort of branding, whether it be a product, a service, or just their own personal capital, needs to have a voice and needs to explore ways to engage with that voice and to flesh out all of the different personalities, characteristics, and aspects of that voice. How does a brand innovate and keep fresh? It's part of the sense of a voice and there is kind of a new tagline out there. It's called conversational commerce and it doesn't necessarily relate to products like mine that literally talk. But ultimately, whenever you have a customer who's interacting with a product, there's a conversation, and it's a two-way conversation. So brands that are growing, are constantly listening to their customers and hoping that their customers are also listening to them. One of the things that we did during the past year and so many brands have pivoted is we started offering our products on Amazon. We did it for the obvious reasons of having another channel of revenue, but more to the point because we are a technology enabler and many times stand quietly, silently behind the brand, when you offer something direct to consumer through Amazon so that we don't have to get involved with customer service, shipping, and delivery, it enables us to everyday look at the comments and look at the way that our customers are using our products. Frankly, most of our best ideas literally come from our customers. So I think the secret to growth is really listening to the users of your products, watching how they engage with your products or services and that's the best source of innovation. What is the future of voice and what do you see happening with the voice of things? Well, I think the biggest misconception about voice in terms of the recent introduction of smart speakers like Alexa or Google Home, or even Siri is that these are voice assistants, they're smart, they're artificial intelligence-driven. It's all true, but at a much lower level their interfaces are more in line with a mouse or a touchscreen, they're simply a way of interacting with other devices that maybe don't need touch and maybe have a higher level of privacy because every voice has its own coding. But I think that a voice, on the one hand, has to be put up on a pedestal in terms of, "Wow, this is amazing what you can do with it!" But on the other hand, it has to be integrated into all of the simple,...
Meet Valerie After almost 30 years with Monofrax, Valerie has progressed from Clerk to Marketing Manager. She's just beginning to network and has found that the last year of virtual networking meetings and webinars was the perfect place to start. Just don't ask her to attend a speed networking event! I'm curious why you're not interested in speed networking, is there any reason why? Speed networking is sort of my worst nightmare. I mean, frankly, it's the business version of speed dating, and I'm just like, "Oh, this is so bad," and especially for someone who's an introvert that likes to have a few moments to think before they answer on anything, the pressure is a little too much. I totally understand. So tell me a bit about Monofrax and what you guys do. The short boring answer is that we are a manufacturer of fused cast refractories. The more interesting answer is that we are a foundry that does not pour steel, we pour artificial stone. What exactly is artificial stone? Well, first of all, we're at twice the temperature of lava, which I think is really cool and we're pouring blocks that are to be used for the linings of glass furnaces and metal furnaces. So who's your buyer that's buying from you? Predominantly our customers are the glass industry and light steel or light metal. We've also been used for nuclear vitrification and we have a global presence and we have been selling worldwide for the last 30 years. What's it like coming into a marketing role without any experience in that space? It was a little frightening because I have no background and no experience. But on the other hand, I consider it a huge advantage because if I'd taken marketing 30 years ago in college, things have changed so much since then that I'm looking at it with fresh eyes. Nothing is out of the question and I'm just willing to throw myself into it completely. What was your biggest challenge that you faced moving into this role? The biggest challenge has been the organization, marketing, strategy, and plans. All of those things that I probably would have learned if I'd studied in college. The rest of it would be the writing for social media, and articles for industry magazines, those things came a lot easier. Can you share with our listeners one of your favorite networking experiences that you’ve had? My favorite probably is when this all started and I can either blame or credit Kurt Anderson, for all of this who I know he's been a guest on your podcast. I attended a Manufacturing Marketing World Conference back in 2019, sat in the center of the room and this gentleman comes and sits next to me and starts a conversation. He's as energetic as always, he's the biggest cheerleader for manufacturing and that's where it all started. I started talking to him and then when he started his manufacturing Ecommerce Success Series, I started attending that and I started networking with the people that were also in that attending and it sort of just started rolling from there. As you continue to connect and meet with new people, how do you best nurture these relationships that you're creating? I'm probably not really good at the nurturing part, I'm better at the connecting part because I go to a webinar, if it's one that's weekly or bi-weekly and I consistently go I get to the point where I recognize the other people in the room. Then it's much easier to go down the chat list or look at the people in the gallery and go, "Oh, okay, I need to connect with this person, and then I can write them a quick message on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I see you're attending the same webinar." So I already have my script prepared, because we're doing something together at the same time, we have the same interest and it just makes it a whole lot easier to do that. What advice would you offer that business professional who's really looking to grow their network?...
Meet Andy Andy was a business executive who learned to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing, highly uncertain environment. Now, he's a leadership coach and career strategist who helps individuals who want to go from just getting by, to having insanely awesome careers. Andy is a Certified Professional Coach, has an MBA in management, is certified as an expert in Lead Management Systems, and is a Board Certified Healthcare Administrator. I'm curious to learn about what led you to change careers and become a leadership coach, could you tell us a bit about that process? Wow, that's a great question. Not to be boastful, but I had a pretty successful career. As you mentioned in the intro, my career was in healthcare administration and so I had a really good career, I had some great mentors and I worked for some great organizations. But I got to a point in my career, kind of a crossroads, where I thought that I've got the second half of my career to look forward to, and how do I really want to spend that? What I really enjoyed most about my career, up to that point was helping develop others in seeing future leaders grow and develop and advance their careers. I was involved in a lot of extracurricular professional organizations and such, where I found myself speaking to large audiences about career advancement, working with individuals, one on one mentoring individuals. So when I got to that crossroads, in my career, I made the decision that what I enjoy most about leadership is helping others develop as leaders. I found this thing called coaching, that, quite frankly, I didn't know much about myself. It's just one of those things that just really spoke to me and really hit on a lot of my personal values and passions. Over the last few years, I took the time to deliberately make that transition and become certified and I'm enjoying the heck out of working with folks as they want to advance their careers and have those insanely awesome careers. It sounds like more and more people are finding coaching as a pathway to their career advancement, why do you think that is? We can't ignore what happened over the last year, but up into and through and even now, to this point, the corporate environment, the business world itself has just become so competitive and so fast-paced and constantly evolving. New changes are happening every day, especially with innovation and, and the digital era that we're in. It's hard for a leader to keep up with everything so you have a lot of working professionals, you have dual-income families where the husband and the wife, or the spouses are both working and raising families. So there's just a lot on people's plates these days. I think individuals are looking for ways to continue to have that competitive advantage in the workplace, and continue to advance their careers. For so long coaching has been this wizard behind the curtain kind of thing, if you will, where folks have heard of it, but don't really know much about it, and haven't looked into it all that much and one of the things that have really helped coaching kind of launch more into the mainstream and be more evident, is the digitization of it. So many organizations are going to online virtual platforms, much like we're doing here with the podcast, where you can work with a coach from your home, the coach can be anywhere in the world. So it's a great opportunity to work with somebody to put together your plan of action. The biggest thing about a coach is that a coach is not an advisor, they're not a counselor, they're not a mentor, they don't have all the answers for you, a coach really believes that you have all the answers you need and that you know your path forward, you have the skills that will make you successful. So a coach kind of helps draw that out and package that up in such a way that you have the vision and the pathway forward, to help with your success. Individuals are looking for things like work-life
Meet John John brings his experience of lead generation, marketing automation, and social media marketing to up Optessa. started out his career with New York, Community Bancorp as a marketing assistant and later worked for iCIMS and Hermetic Solutions Group and Versatile Roles, driving new business and elevating the brand within their respective industries. John holds a bachelor's degree in business administration with a concentration in marketing and advertising from Seton Hall University. How do you determine the channels where you have a presence online? So I always start with doing research. I think that there are no shortage of platforms that are available to anyone these days, and there seems to be a new one every week or new features so I think it all starts with doing your research. The other piece that a lot of people forget is that you don't have to be on every single one of them. I don't think anyone really has the time to do this effectively so you have to stick to the channels where you feel you can provide the most value, jump on, and start engaging. For myself, I spend the bulk of my time on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook because that's where most of my customers are, my communities are, individuals within the industries I serve are providing value, or have a robust presence if you will. Once you've actually joined those channels and selected them, you have to start building credibility, you have to start engaging, you have to start providing value and that's another piece where when you're online, it can't always be a sales pitch. I say that a lot in the chats and in the communities I'm a part of. I tend to provide thought leadership pieces, blog posts, reports that I come by that are relevant for my industry, and I have individual look to me and my company to kind of be that soundboard of what's happening or what's trending. Then I let pieces like my website or my social profile do the selling for me, and I make sure that where I drive them gives the opportunity to engage with me, get in contact with me or members of my team so I'm less spending less time selling. So I think once you're on those channels, you have to find your way of providing value without being too salesy. So get your research, don't join every channel, you will not have enough time to have a presence on each of the channels effectively and once you're there, spend a lot of time on they're building credibility, provide value, and don't sell people every minute you're on there. Have a nice balance between the value provide and what you're selling, as well. Why are online communities vital to the success of a business today? Communities were what I really started doing back when I was with Hermetic Solutions Group and it was one of those things again, going back to I just said like, I was just doing my research. I had to understand where my buyers were, where my audiences were, and where I can provide the most value and ultimately return to my business. So I started building communities online, and it started with just getting that profile. So when you're looking at Twitter or LinkedIn, specifically, you have the ability to create a profile, add images, add a bio, put links, and start engaging and having people go to these profiles as an extension of your website. So I was building those communities online and then I was struggling with what next? Now what? I'm on there now, how do people find me? I really gravitated towards the online communities and what people were saying about certain topics, topics using different industry hashtags, Twitter chats had been huge, events have been tremendous and always follow the event hashtag. I tended to shy away from what's trending topics, because to me, sometimes it feels like the brand, or the company or the person is trying to stretch their purpose or their tie back to the trending topics so I kind of stay away from those. But going back to online communities, they're
Meet Andrew Andrew is the founder of Fangled Group, a strategy-first multilingual Global Marketing and Sales Consultant, and has successfully driven business growth in more than 120 countries, driving revenue in the 10s of billions of dollars. He's also the host of the Fangled Cast podcast where incredible guests take deep dives into relevant topics for the business world. Let's talk a little bit about brand. What do you mean by converting every touch into ferocious advocates for your brand? Well, one of the things that gets missed is that in the business world, everybody talks about this idea of the mission statement, we talk about your brand story. A mission statement is that thing that goes up on the wall that people talk about to sort of prime themselves before a planning meeting, whereas a mission statement is really who your company is and the brand is what are they saying about you when you're not there? So when we talk about converting every touch, most companies talk about converting customers into brand advocates and I think it falls short. So when you think about the number of people who don't do business with you but love your company. I mean, if you go to like a luxury brand, how many people out there love Ferrari but could never own one? So what we talk about every touch is every person who comes in contact with your employees, your company, your products, your services, leaves going, "I wish that I could do business with them, and not only that, I love what they do so much that I'm going to tell people about it." That's what we mean by every touch becoming ferocious advocates. Another area that you really focus on is, as opposed to competitors, you talk about alternatives. What exactly is the difference? It's a fun one to get into because sometimes people say, "You're just splitting pairs," but I'm not. So imagine that you're a manufacturer of construction nails and you get asked who are your competitors and your answer would be all of these other guys that also make construction nails. We say, well, a construction nail is a solution to bonding two things together. So your competitors are nails, yes, but the alternative solutions could be screws, it could be adhesive, it could be tape, it could be making products that snap together, it could be twine. All of those are alternative solutions to the problem that the person who's buying a nail would see. So when we do a, quote, competitive landscape, it's not just other people who make what you make, it's other people who make solutions to the problem that your product could solve. How can people turn boring video meetings, which we are all having today into memorable events? When you look at the typical zoom meeting, it's a bunch of heads in a box and occasionally people will do some sort of weird background, they don't have their lighting right, you're looking up their nose, they don't have the camera angle. So phase one of being better in terms of video in terms of meetings and things like that, is getting all of that correct. But then there's the next level, there's how do you, for example, share your screen in a way that you're really giving the person the impression that you're in the room. We use open-source software that we teach people how to use, that literally creates a TV studio on your computer, that shows up in your zoom meeting and your blue jeans, with your Teams meetings, so that you can truly control the environment, you can shrink yourself down, put your PowerPoint up, and grow back up if somebody asked questions, you can re-engage and all that type of stuff. The same tech works if you're making videos. So when people get to see you almost as a performer, the same way they would if you were in the boardroom with a PowerPoint or a video up on the screen, you can recreate that. But it came out of somebody asking the question, "How the heck can I be in the room, but I can't be in the room?" We've looked at
Meet Danielle Danielle is the leading authority on the science behind caffeine and energy drinks, the best-selling author of How To Get Shit Done When You Feel Like Shit, the host of the Caffeine at Midnight podcast. As the founder of GEG Research and Consulting, she helps people who work long hours and use caffeine to get through the day. Green Eyed Guide (GEG) has helped workers, nurses, college students and small business owners beat burnout with caffeine science. So you say you help people beat burnout with caffeine science. What does that mean? Essentially, caffeine is the number one coping mechanism when it comes to stress or sleep deprivation. During the last survey that Forbes did, which was before Coronavirus, 67% of employed Americans said they struggled with burnout in the workplace. I imagine that it's more than 67% since Coronavirus, but that's the best number that we have. So essentially what this means is that people are using caffeine throughout the day to help them juggle all their roles and responsibility and there are certain situations where caffeine can actually backfire, it can actually make your mood worse and your anxiety worse and your sleep deprivation even worse. So what I do in my workshops is I go through my system called the five levels of fatigue. I teach people how to identify every level of fatigue and then we talk about the ways that you can beat or manage that particular level of fatigue with and without caffeine. Ultimately, what it's doing is it's teaching people how to drink caffeine strategically so that you get the benefits of caffeine like improved focus and improved mood, but you also know when not to have caffeine and that way you're not compounding that anxiety and that burnout that you have because you have that caffeine strategy. So it's a comprehensive plan that addresses the caffeine as well as you know, your physical and your mental health. What's your favorite caffeine-related tip to share with the coffee drinkers listening right now? Well, I am a huge dog lover and so I have something called the barks doggy law, which is really a law about moderation. Essentially, what happens in this barks doggy law is that if you're bored, or you're tired, one cute little doggie can come along and then your mood goes up a little bit. Then maybe another dog comes, another dog comes, another dog comes and then you're surrounded by like, 50 yapping dogs, and it's no longer cute, it's no longer improving your mood, and it's actually making your mood worse and is actually making it hard to focus. That's because performance improves to a point with increasing stimulation, and then you become overstimulated and your performance decreases. That's what happens when you have too much caffeine. So there's a sweet spot in this Barks doggy law and essentially, it is finding your sweet spot where your stimulation is just enough to improve your performance, but not enough so that you're overstimulated and it pushes you over the cliff. This is my favorite tip to give caffeine drinkers because the amount of caffeine that you might need to get you to that sweet spot might vary day to day based on what other stimulation you have in your environment. If it's a relatively low-key day, maybe one cup of coffee will do. But when shit hits the fan, you might need more caffeine, but you also need to make sure you don't fall off that cliff where it makes you even more frazzled. So that's my favorite tip, find your caffeine sweet spot by nursing your caffeine and being extra aware of how stimulated you feel. How do you connect with your ideal clients? It really does require me to be a chameleon, because it depends on who I'm talking to. I've learned this the hard way, if I'm talking to someone like an HR rep, they might not care so much about my background in biochemistry and food science, or how many years I spent studying caffeine. They want to know how they can keep their
Meet Ted Ted is a Safety Operations Executive from Appleton, Wisconsin with a passion for people development. He has been in the construction industry for 20 years and has built multiple high-performance teams. Ted has a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and has been a CHST Board Certified safety professional since 2008. Ted was on the National Safety Council committee and Mobile Crane Safety and the past President of Fox Valley Safety Council and Wisconsin Tripartite Safety. He has been published in multiple research studies with CII Research Team 284 and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks on leading indicators. Ted adds value and mitigates risk to organizations by monitoring, mentoring, and developing high-performing teams through active leadership and innovative learning. How long have you been in the safety world? Well, I've been in health and safety for approximately 25 years. The majority of it's been in construction and as I've gone through the years, I kind of started out in the field, as that person learning about construction, because I really didn't know, I learned a lot of interesting stories, I should say while working with a lot of great construction people that kind of mentored me in health and safety. As I went through my career, I was fortunate enough to be able to go through and become a safety director and watch out for companies on the worker comp, make sure the training is done. So a lot of that type of stuff that I've done for the last 25 years, and I just am very passionate about keeping people safe and keeping families together. How did you get into safety? Well, I graduated from Oshkosh, as you were saying in the introduction, and I wanted to be a law enforcement officer. So I became a police officer and wanted to be the Barney Fife of the area if you will and it just wasn't the right fit for me. As I got out of law enforcement, I got a job as a safety consultant for a local safety company here in Appleton and I was learning all these different regulations, and I kind of found myself enjoying them, and being able to go into some of these companies and help them along the way. So just understanding safety and behaviors, how to work with people, but also I really enjoyed learning the business side of safety, which is also very crucial within organizations. So I think it was kind of a unique story, I started off in college on one path and didn't like that and found health and safety. When did you decide to start Total Health and Safety then or why did you decide to start? One of the reasons why I wanted to start Total Health and Safety was because I believe that there's a lot of companies out there right now, small to medium size, either manufacturing or construction companies that really don't necessarily have a safety person that they can rely on. A lot of times its human resources or somebody else that's filling in a little bit, but their main role is something else and I believe that we could come in at low overhead and be able to help companies grow their organization, and really get that return on the dollar for the services that were performed by keeping their worker comp down and more importantly, keeping their families together, and their employees happy at work. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking stories that you have? Well, it's kind of funny, I think the one that I just had today was a good example. I met with a person several months ago, on a different networking thing and we were just chatting and we got to know each other a little bit more and more and I found out that his brother actually owns a construction company. Through all that, his brother came in here and I just got done talking to him for an hour or so about safety. So you just never know where any of those networking conversations are there. They are so important to a small company like ours to be...
Meet Sam Sam has been an ERP thought leader in the digital transformation space for nearly two decades with a primary focus on financial systems and ERP. He has been part of large transformation initiatives for Fortune 500 corporations but now spends time consulting with SMEs as a principal consultant at ElevatIQ. Sam regularly speaks at industry conferences and contributes his experiences through many popular blogs and publications. He also hosts a podcast called WBSRocks. Why are manufacturers not exploring these marketing opportunities right now? When we look at the manufacturing landscape, especially if we talk about the SMB manufacturers, their business model, traditionally, if we look at the manufacturing supply chain, we had the manufacturer, we had the distributor, and we had the retailers. So just going back 20 or 30 years, manufacturers never had to worry about building their brand, because they had distributors who could actually sell for them. But now things are changing in the world, right? The skillset that they needed to develop, to be able to market, to be able to educate their distributors, they never had that. They were selling through distributors, they always had sort of the sales mindset, they had salespeople who were really good at talking about their products, but they never had to worry about marketing and that is the primary barrier, in my opinion, for manufacturers in understanding why they should worry about the marketing aspect and why they should pay attention to marketing to be able to create the opportunities they already have. With that being one of the key barriers, what do you anticipate how this next phase of growth can happen and what can these SMB manufacturers do to get to the next stage? I don't know whether you want to call this as next phase of growth, or the next phase of disruption. So there are some disruptions happening in the startup space, right. We have a lot of startups that are really good at marketing because they were never good at let's say the traditional manufacturing just because they had to compete with some of these established channels and their relationships. They had to figure out how to do the marketing because otherwise, they cannot compete with the traditional manufacturers. So disruption is happening in the startup space. Now, their products are going to be slightly more superior and the reason for that is because they are better at manufacturing as well. Just because they are utilizing the newer technologies, they are slightly more innovative. Looking at the traditional manufacture, they are going to face tremendous competition from these startups just because their products are going to be easier. They are going to build let's say the b2c channels which are going to be direct to consumers as opposed to going through the distribution channel. So manufacturers are going to face tons and tons of competition from these startups, plus, the lines are really blurring between your distribution and manufacturers just because some of the manufacturers are directly marketing to the consumers and the distributors, what they are trying to do is they are trying to develop their own in house capabilities to be able to develop these products. Now, they have competition from their own distributors, who were supposed to be their sales and marketing channel. So it's going to be a very interesting play overall and I think manufacturers need to think a lot more about what they can do to make sure their market share is protected. How do you see the buyers and the decision-makers play into this? Well, let's look at the buyer types depending upon the kind of products. If we are talking about some of the spaces such as food and beverage manufacturing, in that case, the buyers are going to be slightly smaller overall, in terms of their buying power because of the way they buy their product, and the dollar amount that they spend on a specific
Meet Matan Matan is the founder of Fit Hit, an Inc. 5000 fastest growing company in the US. As a former special-ops Krav Maga Warfare Officer, and after training 1000s of special ops pro athletes World Champs and regular folks, Matan recognized that empowerment to training is key to success, not just in violent situations, but in general. Fit Hit helps people tap into their potential, develop a healthy lifestyle, increase mental fortitude, and learn how to handle themselves. What would you say to entrepreneurs who simply can't find the time to invest in their own well-being? That's a great question. A lot of my students are entrepreneurs and high-level managers, creators, people that rely on their creativity to succeed. So we actually have a little in-house joke that we say and it's called more abs, more money! We're basically connecting your personal well-being and fitness level, to your levels of income and how much money you make. Now, most people can't see the direct line between the two. But I can tell you, there have been several researchers on the subject that have looked at over 1500 CEOs, and what they found was that CEOs that take the time to train, hold themselves up to higher standards when it comes to their nutrition level and their well being overall tend to have more successful companies, better returns to their investments, and more profit. It's not that hard to figure out why right? It's because really, how you do anything is how you do everything. So when you start putting your own well-being as not as important as something else, you don't actually show up in their business as the best version of yourself. If you're an entrepreneur, your capacity to create is what's gonna make or break you, how much drive do you have? Do you think that you'll be able to do more when your health is on point when you have energy that lasts through the entire day, and you're not bogged down by 6 pm or 7 pm, when you just bounce out of bed right in the morning, right? Because your body can carry you like that and you're gonna spending the first 30-45 minutes doing morning scrolling in your bed because you don't have the energy to get up. So what we tell entrepreneurs is that if they're not putting their own physical well-being first, their business is taking the hit, not just their own physic. I recommend to a lot of entrepreneurs to do it that once you get into the process of actually taking care of your body and being aware of what your fat percentage is and so on, I've actually mapped out my fat percentage put it in a graph over time because I keep track of it and my bank account, and what I've noticed is that the two moves kind of like in the same pattern. When I'm at my fittest, my company does really well and if I let go, I can see the changes in the company. If I can show for myself, that means that I can also show up for my business and for my employees. But if I don't even show up for myself, are you really giving the people who depend on you, your team, your staff, the best version of you, or a run-down version of you? What can entrepreneurs do to beat the stress eating and some of these other bad habits that we've all picked up over the last year? I can tell you that one of the reasons that so many have gained weight during COVID, and I'm looking at entrepreneurs, specifically, is that we are a breed that is driven by control. We have our own business because for better or worse, we like to control the outcome of things. Some are more successful than others, but even when you talk to people that are not that successful in business, and they're business owners, they'll tell you, I'd rather be here than get a job, right? They like the ability to control their successes and even if they fail, it’s still something that keeps them motivated keeps them going and they're very much connected to it. Then COVID happens and what happened when COVID happened is we lost a significant amount of...
Meet LeTeisha LeTeisha was born in Richmond, Virginia, she graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in 1994. She is a serial entrepreneur and has been self-employed for over 17 years. LeTeisha uses her life experiences to motivate and to find ways to help others. She's the Founder and CEO of A Better Day Than Yesterday Initiative Program, where they help families rebuild their relationships during and after incarceration, divorce, and deployment. She specializes in re-entry and family reunification. How did you get started in the work that you do? I was invited to a five-day event to speak on a panel for entrepreneurs about entrepreneurship and it was a Father's Day event. On that panel, it was me, other invites, government agencies, and returning citizens. So the guy asked me, "How do you rebuild a relationship with someone that's been incarcerated?" When he asked me that, it took everything out of me. On that ride home, God said, that's your purpose because two weeks prior to that I asked him, "What is my purpose? What am I here?" I know I'm here to be an entrepreneur, I know I'm here to help people, but I'm not being fulfilled, I'm not feeling successful in any of it. After that event, he let me know that was it because my dad and I weren’t talking at the time and he had been home at that point for 16 years. We had a terrible disconnect when he came home, trying to rebuild our relationship. So that's how I got started and I've been affected by incarceration since I was five years old so it actually started way before I realized I was here for this purpose. What keeps you motivated to keep doing what you're doing? I know there's a need for it and I'm surrounded by it. My son just came home which made it more personal other than my father, my brother, my aunt, my uncle, and my mother. So my son came on July 13, 2020, last year during a pandemic, and he was incarcerated for 18 months. Just being around the kids that are in our programs, and how they talk about their relationship with their father or their mother who are incarcerated, it touches your heart. So, you know you have work to do, and you just have to keep doing it so I just feel that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Do you work with the families that are anticipating the re-entry on how to best prepare, or what does that relationship look like? So the idea of it is to get with the family before the person is actually going to be serving the time so that we can navigate the family through the system throughout their journey. Before the pandemic we were going into the institutions, bringing awareness to the unintentional victim, and the father wound. So now during the pandemic and we're reconstructing our program, we're waiting right now on IRB approval for a study to do on six families to help them navigate after incarceration, how to start rebuilding that relationship and that's the 12-week program. During that pro 12 week program, they were there in life skill every week. Every Monday they will do a debriefing with a social worker and an intern, and then every four weeks, they will do a family engagement activity. Then on the 12th week, they will do a weekend retreat from Friday to that Sunday. So right now, this is the first time we're ever doing the family as a whole because before we were doing it as pieces, like we were talking to the parent and do something with the parent, but it would not be their child that's in the program. So now we're doing it while we're selecting the whole family that was affected to participate in this 12-week program. How many years has it been since you started this work, and does your program serve across the US, or mainly locally? This is the fourth year now. You have to find your niche, but when it all boils down to I never strayed away from the point of the family. The only thing that we added on that just became part of our initiative is called...
Meet David David launched his first web business in the year 2000 and his first podcast in 2006. Since then, he's worked on the agency side as a Head of SEO, in-house as Head of Digital Marketing, and for a trading company as a Digital Marketing Course Producer. He's built his own podcast, Digital Marketing Radio up to 20,000 downloads a month, and in 2019 he founded his own podcast production agency for b2b brands called Casting Cred. You can find David over at castingcred.com! So you were way ahead of the whole podcasting trend, weren't you? I was! It was only a bit of fun for me back then around 2006 or so. I published a few shows then and got quite a few listeners and didn't really think too much of it. I just thought of it as a bit of fun rather than actually a serious marketing channel, which I probably should have done. What mistakes do you see big brands making with their podcasts in 2021? Oh, there are a lot of big mistakes. There's just horrific quality that you actually hear. There's just not a lot of thought that goes into podcasts by many b2b brands. I compare it back to how brands used to actually think of their websites back in about 2004, 2005, 2006 because back then, brands used to get the intern or a junior person within the business to design the website for their brand and this is a multi-million dollar brand you're talking about here. They just didn't appreciate that digital presence can actually relate to how your brand is perceived in its entirety and actually switch people off from using that brand. So as I said, back then, about 15 years ago or so, brands used to get these lowly paid people to design their websites for them and think nothing for it and the senior people didn't even look at the websites. Exactly the same thing is happening with podcasts nowadays, in 2021. Even in the upcoming years, what brands are doing is they're getting these people who are interested in podcasts, junior in the business, but probably don't know that much about producing professional quality audio, probably don't know that much about brand identity, what needs to be said, what doesn't need to be said to produce the shows in their behalf and they're producing amateurish sounding shows. These reflect how their audience perceived these brands and it's just not a good idea. What are some of the equipment that you recommend for podcasting? Sure, and for many big brands out there this probably the biggest mistake, to begin with, is that they just go with the microphone that they've already got kicking around the office or in someone's home. In general, if a business does webinars, then they've got a big condenser microphone sitting in front of them in the middle of a boardroom table and a condenser microphone is good in that it picks up the full frequency of a human voice. However, it also picks up everything else that's going on around the room. It picks up the air conditioner unit, it picks up a computer fan noise, it picks up someone shutting the door two rooms away from where you are it's not an ideal microphone to use for a podcast. Condenser microphones are wonderful if you're in a professional studio environment if you really have a decent soundproof room that you're operating in. Otherwise, I highly recommend the use of a dynamic microphone. So a dynamic microphone is less sensitive and it means that it needs to be closer to your mouth, it needs to be roughly three or four inches away from your mouth and 45 degrees away from your mouth so you're speaking over it just to get the best quality from that microphone. But if you do that is not gonna pick up all the rest of the noise from around the room. So then the question after that becomes, okay, what type of dynamic microphone that you use? There are very few dynamic microphones available that have both what's called an XLR and a USB out. So if you are looking for your dynamic microphone to easily connect to your...
Meet Gina Gina is a leader in the women in sales movement. Gina's career in sales started very early in life when she would pitch your parents on important issues like her version of how grandma's vase ended up on the floor in a million pieces! She would routinely beat out her competition (aka her six siblings) for best storytelling in a dramatic role. Throughout her 20 plus years in sales and marketing in the US, Europe, and emerging economies, Gina has continued to employ those same storytelling skills in selling and other persuasive arguments. So talking about women in general, what are some of the things that you think are holding back women from getting into leadership positions? Well, it's not for lack of trying and it's not even for lack of perceived opportunities on the part of the companies. Many well-meaning corporations want to bring women up through leadership, and really give them opportunities. What they are kind of unaware of is that they're still environmental issues and cultural issues within companies that don't promote the same kind of allegiance to opportunities. For instance, there's like this disconnect, companies will tell me that they want to elevate women into leadership, but the women just don't speak up in meetings, they don't share their ideas. So it's hard to get sponsorship opportunities for them to give them big promotions and things. Whereas the women will tell you that they don't feel heard or seen, or they try to speak up in meetings, and they try to share their ideas and they get blank stares and then Bob will say the same thing five minutes ago and they're like, "Oh, yeah, way to go, Bob!" My apologies to all Bob's listening, that's just the name I use. It's just these kinds of underlying cultural anomalies that happen, and they keep women from actually feeling like they are heard and seen. It's really a problem because it stops them from asking for what they want, asking for the positions they want, or letting their employers know that they want those positions. Whereas a guy will say, "I am going after that VP role," and he will make it known to everybody that he wants it. So that's where the disconnect is. Companies feel like they're giving opportunities to women, and they're not taking them, but women don't feel the same way. They don't feel that they are given the same visibility and the same opportunities to share ideas and that's really holding women back. Let's talk about actions that can be taken to help women in the workplace. How can women help themselves achieve their career goals? Well, there's a lot of things and this is where it sounds easy, right? So if you're not getting hurt in meetings, just speak up more? Well, if you don't perceive that there is support for your ideas, or if you have tried to speak up in meetings, and you're shut down or ignored, or dismissed almost which I have heard from many women, then it's harder to go ahead and just speak up. So that's where mentors, coaches, sponsors come in and we can talk a little bit about the difference between mentors and sponsors. But where these things come in, because once you get someone who you can be as your sounding board, and you can talk through how you can handle this. Also, women can help women. If you see something happening in a meeting, if you see that Bob said something that Mary just said a few minutes ago, and Bob's getting the attaboys say, "Wow, Bob, that was great and you know? Mary was just talking about that five minutes ago." Have your sisters back! Do these things that really can help both you and her get heard better because it puts people on call that you were aware of what just happened, and you're not going to just sit there. So that takes getting used to, it takes practice. It's not something that comes all the time. But I would say one of the biggest ways that women can help themselves is to get a mentor and be honest about what it is you want to achieve, what...
Meet Elin Ellen is The Founder and President of White Knight Productions and is the Founder of The Boardroom, an online community for entrepreneurs to connect network, and grow their businesses. Her first book Ready, Set, Grit, Three Steps To Success In Life, Business, and The Pursuit of Happiness comes out this spring. Why don't you tell me a little bit about how White Knight Productions has adapted to work with clients nationwide? So when we started, we are a 12-year-old company, we've been around for a while. We make videos and animations and help people with marketing. That's not the only thing we do, but we do a lot of marketing work. The vast majority of what we do is visual. When we started the company 12 years ago, we were focusing on local clients, regional clients, the whole traditional way of doing video production. Over the years, that has really changed dramatically, where now we do work with clients all over the country. I as the principal in the agency, I've worked very hard to foster relationships with videographers around the country, and relationships with our clients throughout the country, and have found a kind of innovative ways to service them without necessarily being there on site. Sometimes especially pre COVID we would fly out and attend a shoot, or other meetings in different locations. But these days, we do so much via remote video capture. We do so many meetings via zoom and that but it's interesting how we've really been able to expand our reach. First by changing our mindset and then by looking for solutions to manifest what we were looking to make happen. Let's talk about some misconceptions that people have when working with a video production company. Well, a lot of people think it's got to be super expensive when they hire a video company. I feel like a lot of people feel concerned that their brand won't be well reflected, or that they're going to be giving up control over the messaging or the project. Also just that it's inconvenient and a little bit scary. But you put a camera in front of people, many people who just aren't used to it and it's super intimidating, and you throw up some lights and add a few people in the mix and it can be very scary to step up there and be in the spotlight. It can be scary even if you're used to speaking, even people that are used to public speaking, or we've had experiences with CEOs of large medical groups, for example, that have been super intimidated by the camera. So one of the things that we do as a video company, is we work very hard to make sure everybody's comfortable, and kind of forgets that the cameras there. Eventually, it takes a little work and a little soothing sometimes. But it's always our goal to make people enjoy the experience and also to realize that there are different ways to work with a video team. Sometimes traditional video can be pricey because there's a lot that goes into it. People forget all the planning that goes into it, all the scripting, and all that stuff. But for us, I can't speak for every video company, but I'm sure this is the same for others as well. We always try to work with our clients to make the whole process very collaborative, and also to find solutions that work within their budget, and that help them reach their goals. So you're extremely driven in supporting other entrepreneurs and building community, why is that and what is your vision, ultimately? That's a huge part of what I'm so passionate about. Me as a small business owner, I know firsthand how challenging it can be and how lonely it can be sometimes, especially when you're going through something challenging. In my company, 2015 was a really tough year for us, and as I said, we've been around for 12 years. We grew very quickly the first few years and 2015 was our come to Jesus moment. It was really hard and at that time I didn't really have the right people who I could talk to. I was a member of networking...
Meet Curt Kurt Anderson founded an e-commerce company in 1995 that was ranked three times on the Internet Retailer Magazine's Top 1000 E-Commerce Companies. Since selling that company, Kurt has served as an e-commerce consultant serving manufacturers. He is the author of Stop Being The Best Kept Secret, and founder of b2btail.com an e-commerce resource guide for manufacturers. How does a custom manufacturer enter the e-commerce market? Certainly, as we all know, in this world that we're living in today, everything has drastically changed. So a little different dynamic, prior to 2020 and now there's a tremendous sense of urgency. So with e-commerce, as I'm looking out my window, the UPS man just left and dropped off an Amazon package. So Amazon most manufacturers, especially that custom side where they don't have a proprietary product or a finished good, you're like, "Well, hey, I'm left out of that e-commerce party." Original equipment manufacturers that had those finished goods are an easier slide-in for them and it's much more challenging for the custom manufacturer. So the custom manufacturer, they bend metal, they cut steel, fabricate something, injection, mold, printed circuit boards, you know, they're always making something for somebody else. So the preach that I have is how do you scale your proprietary process? Because what these custom manufacturers have over the years, they've perfected a proprietary process, and it's just trying to walk them through the steps of how do we convert that proprietary process into a proprietary good? How would you answer that question? A big thing with e-commerce, and again, if you look at your company, your website like you guys do an amazing job helping your clients with pay per click, SEO, trying to be found, trying to help them stop being the best-kept secret, right? And you're an expert at that lead generation so I think one myth to dispel is so many of those custom manufacturers that well e-commerce is Amazon at my door. No, it's actually Lori coming in and her team and helping you with that lead gen and driving that traffic to their website. Now if they're going after again, I'd been metal I cut steel. You know this, you know, you're a keyword expert. If you go really broad, man, you're still gonna be the best-kept secret. It's so hard to be found for CNC machining, or fabricating metal but if you do CNC machining for turbine engines because I'm in the northwest and I'm in the supply chain of aerospace or I bend metal for tractors and I'm trying to find and target Caterpillar or something. So I think like going after those long-tail keywords and for you and I speak in the SEO language, we're trying to help them with that keyword strategy by going deep in what you and I call those longtail keywords. That longtail keyword is the opportunity for the e-commerce opportunity. So it's actually it's that 80-20 rule where they're like, "Hey, tell me about your business," And we're like, "We crank out these little trinkets and our 80-20 rule, 80% comes from the 20%." Where is that 20% and can we start creating an e-commerce opportunity? Could we put those products actually, on your website? Could we take those products and put them on an online marketplace? That's kind of the process of getting into that e-commerce opportunity here. So you've mentioned Amazon and a couple of other marketplaces. Do you recommend that manufacturers use those? I'm super bullish on the online marketplaces for manufacturers and again, from the OEM side, that original equipment manufacturer, absolutely. So you've got Digi key, which if you're in the electrical field in any capacity, they have a great marketplace. We've talked about Zorro, you have like McMaster car. And then of course the big granddaddy of them all Amazon. Here's a scary thing, so we do a lot of webinars with the manufacturing extension partnerships, if you're familiar with those, the MEP, so they're
Meet Elisa: Elisa has been practicing law for over 20 years specializing in business and corporate law. Elisa helps you with all aspects of your business from forming an entity, starting a business, buying or selling a business, drafting, reviewing, and negotiating all types of contracts. Are you starting a new franchise or buying or selling a franchise? Definitely connect with Elisa. Assisting with real estate transactions involving leasing, buying, and selling, she's got you covered. When is it important to find an attorney when starting or buying a business? I think as soon as you know that you want to start, you just want to form your entity or you're looking to buy a business or start a business. There's a lot of steps, there's a lot of information on the internet, and it's all valuable. But you really need to hook up with someone who can make sure that you're protected in terms of making sure that your structure is right, that you filed all the correct forms, that you have everything you need so that you're not scrambling at a later date for documents or for what you need. So the sooner the better is always what I tell people. What do you say to people that just say they're going to Google for the templates for these contracts? It's a great resource, but there are two drawbacks. The biggest one came up for people during PPP, I had a lot of lenders calling me because they had people that started their own business, and they went ahead and filed their articles online. They might have gotten the EIM because they had an accountant or CPA, but they didn't have their operating agreement or their shareholders agreement and you needed that to get some of the PPP money. So I drafted a lot of those for people, a lot of times people follow the instructions, but they don't think it's necessary, or they'll use a template for an operating agreement or a contract and it doesn't always fit their situation. The biggest issue comes up when people are doing a lot of research and they're cutting and pasting from different sources. Then you have a contract that at the end of the day conflicts within itself. That does not help anyone if an issue arises between partners, members, or if you're sued. So Google is a great resource, but you've got to know where you're inserting it, how it's used, and how it relates to other provisions within a contract. Do you recommend getting an attorney up front and not just when you're actually ready to sign a contract? There's a lot of different aspects to it when you're looking to buy. First of all, there's a lot of people you need that are involved, that need to look at things. So when people come to me, one of the greatest benefits with my network in the last few years it's the best of the best that I get to work with. So if you come to me at the beginning, when you're starting to look, we can get you with the right lender, we can get you with a CPA, there are other people to look at the documents. So when you take us first, we might do a letter of intent, we might do an asset purchase agreement or stock purchase agreement, but you want to make sure that everything's in there, so that you can do your due diligence, and that we're bringing other people on. CPAs are great at looking at the financials. So the sooner you bring an attorney on or someone in your network on like a CPA, that will hook you up with the other people like the insurance people, the lenders, the better because you can waste a lot of time and money, a lot of time too just trying to see where you're at. Whereas once you get the attorney or you get somebody that's going to work with you, you're able to move forward on it and see whether or not it's actually a viable purchase for you. Word on the street is you're literally available 24 seven, why are you so accessible? I am. With what I do, no one's going to die, and no one's going to jail. Now my firm partner does criminal so yes,...
Meet Suzanne Suzanne notices a variety of creative ways people are branding themselves, both consciously and unconsciously, but is a successful business brand that results from powerful marketing. When the hype subsides, what keeps a good brand going strong? What is the real secret to consistent brand growth and advocacy? With over two and a half decades of strategic communication, employee brand engagement, and internal brand development, Suzanne's inside-out brand-building strategy creates the clarity and actions necessary for her clients to drive consistency, distinction, and advocacy long term. In your terms, what is your definition of a personal brand? So a personal brand is really just a perception. It lives in the minds of the owner and eventually to its market. So it lives in my mind and your mind and all of our audience's minds. It's based on experience, and emotion and then the products and services of that experience. So it's really all about perception and when people realize that in the first seven seconds of contact with somebody else, others are forming 11 impressions of you through their sensory perceptions. So what do you want those perceptions to be? Could you tell us more about the 11 impressions that you’re speaking about? We're all human beings. So our ability to perceive and begin to judge and perceive things based on our own filters kicks in gear the moment we meet people. Social Capital is all about networking so we can dig into what that means when you're out there networking. That's really powerful to know and to get super clear on your personal brand value position in what you want others to begin perceiving from you right off the bat. Let's talk a little bit about the difference between marketing and branding. Can you bring some clarity to that? This is my favorite topic because this is why I'm in business. When I do a lot of my workshops and pieces of training, that this is the big "Aha" moment. One of my pet peeves as a brand expert is knowing that oftentimes marketing and branding are used in the same sentence for the same reasons and depicting the same meaning. If I could just explain that you market a brand. So marketing is this verb, it's this thing, you go out and you disseminate and communicate information or the message of the brand. If you haven't yet fully defined the brand, and you're out there spending, money marketing, what are you actually marketing? So the brand is actually that perception. Have I stopped and defined those pieces and parts that helped create the value position perception that I want others to have of what it is that I do and who I am? So the effort for branding is really about the effort in assigning meaning. Assigning meaning to what that brand stands for and that's what the book is all about. That's what my whole last, basically 30 years, of being in this industry has been to help the client identify, define, and then align themselves into that value position so that they can become what they want to be known for. Alignment is a big piece and that's about the experience, the delivery, the follow-through, the vernacular you use, your messaging. All of that is walking the talk basically. How do you brand multiple sub-brand companies under a bigger corporate brand? That's a great question and I've had the opportunity to do that several times. It seems really complicated, but when you understand that there's this mothership brand that should espouse a set of core values that all the other sub-brands should operate under. So it's this section of the brand DNA process where we uncover those core values. That set of core values should be fluid and infused throughout all of the other brands to be a part of that mothership. But the caveat here is each of those sub-brands can then have values or have a set of personality attributes, a collective set of personality attributes. So that means that you may have a...
Meet William William has over 10 years of consulting, coaching, sales, leadership, and workforce development experience. His calling is to help individuals and businesses awaken their hidden potential by educating them on the mental success principles that have been articulated by all major cultures over the past 5000 years. He has infused these universal truths into his educational materials and personal philosophy because we must learn from our history. How do you define success? My definition of success is becoming the best version of yourself. For me, I believe that in life, we don't have problems or challenges, we have opportunities, and being successful is simply meeting every single challenge and making it an opportunity to learn and to grow. As opposed to seeing it as an impediment or barrier, seeing it as an opportunity to catapult us or to be a leg up, to go to the next level in our lives and whatever endeavor that we're going after. So success is deeply personal and it can only be defined by self, but a small still voice will always lead you on the road to success. How does mindset impact our ability to network effectively? Yes, so I think when it comes to mindset, and networking, one thing that I've heard so much because I was in workforce development for about three years before my most recent role. The biggest challenge that I saw with our interns in this workforce development firm that I also faced early in my career was the fear of saying something wrong, the fear of not being good enough. I think when it comes to the mindset component of this networking game, it's really about making sure that before you walk through the door, or turn on the zoom chat, that you have it within your mind that you are good enough to do anything and any question that you're going to be asked, you can be able to answer it articulately. A lot of times when you're meeting someone, you have to ask and answer questions. So asking questions isn't necessarily that hard, but answering them if you get nervous, and your mind shuts down can be tough. So overall, what that boils down to is having an unshakable belief in yourself. Do you believe that you are worthy of the best because life has to offer? And if so, when you go into a networking event, you bring that confidence in with you, and you have the ability and the courage to simply let it flow. Let that confidence, let that knowledge, let that wisdom flow, let the personality flow. The biggest thing that we tend to do in our personal lives, networking or otherwise, is that we tend to stop the flow of our own what I like to call divine intelligence which is the ability to create something from nothing, the ability to have answers when you didn't even understand what the question was. There's something deeper within us that allows us to be to tap into that. We have to trust ourselves to access it. We're putting our foot on the holes of the Divine or the energetic flow in our lives when we operate in fear and doubt. Why do we operate in fear and doubt? Why is that our natural behavior? So I think overall, this may be a very esoteric answer. But I think when it comes to fear and doubt, I think it's been embedded into our culture worldwide, for hundreds, if not thousands of years. If you look back in history, there was always to whatever degree some kind of mythology or religion or whatever else around, something that is fear-based, an entity or energy that will affect you and hurt you and cause you to do things that you don't want to do. What I would say is what I've learned, as I've gotten deeper in my spiritual and faith journey, is that I realize that the only enemy we have is the inner meat. So take the word, enemy, and the "e-n-e" and enemy just replace it with inner, "i-n-n-e-r". The inner me, the unresolved issues, doubts, and feelings of unworthiness and unforgiveness within ourselves cause all the problems in our lives. It's not...
Meet Jamila Jamila is a personal branding strategist and coach from Trinidad and Tobago. She works with entrepreneurs who want to market their businesses by leading from the front with thought leadership and personal branding. She focuses on helping people create strong personal brands by improving three big C's. They are shifting mindsets and creating a strategy so they can be more confident about their next move. I'm curious about your three big C's, can you talk about that a bit? So my three big C's in terms of personal branding. It's confidence, content, and communication. The reason I narrowed down to these three C's is that personal branding, first of all, is so broad. I find it important to focus on these three areas because the people I work with tend to lack these three things the most. So the first thing is people feeling more confident to declare themselves as the expert that they are. So they may be doing their thing, they may have been serving their clients or selling or whatever the case may be. But now they've gone to a space where they have to be a lot more open and out there with that message. So it's helping them do the things prepare themselves in such a way so that they can actually be more confident about stepping out into the market and owning their position. The second thing is having people being smarter with content, and leveraging the things that they would have learned already foresee, which would include more strategic thoughts and direction, etc. to inform the content that they're putting out there so that they can use it to position themselves as the expert, like the goto person in the industry. The third is helping people become better communicators. So if you don't understand things like inbox etiquette, you know, how do you actually engage people with direct messaging in a way that is not creepy or gross? How to look for potential partners because of course, with personal branding, a huge part of that is networking and expanding your work or your quote-unquote Rolodex. But expanding that as much as possible, not just with people who you can sell to, but people with who you can partner with. So I help people and I also help them leverage media to be able to get themselves onto shows like this. So podcasts and web shows on any other form of media. The main thing is to be able to increase their credibility and put them in a position to be seen as the go-to person in their field so they can own a space and own that position in the market. Do you think branding is more valuable now than it was 20 years ago before social media? Yes, I think it is more valuable. I think it's just as valuable as it used to be, but I just think that more people are catching on though I do recognize that. Technology has in a sense flattened the media landscape. So before where there were like a lot of gatekeepers to be the ones to decide who would get on TV, who would get coverage in a newspaper or in a magazine or get on a radio show. Now we don't have to rely on media anymore to give us a chance we can't actually create our own space. So it has now become more imperative for individuals or people or companies to know who they are and how they stand out in the market. It's no longer enough to rely on just word of mouth because you're dealing with so many amazing people who are now coming out onto the market and stepping into this space. Even if you are great where you are, being where you are only is not enough. So recognizing the need for branding and personal branding has become supercritical in our very flattened media landscape. What type of person is typically more successful at using personal branding as a marketing strategy for their business? So the type of person who is committed to the cause, the type of person who is ready to step off into the audience and understand the power of influence, so they believe, and they understand the power of already engaging people...
Meet Harry He is the founder of The Reshoring Initiative after being president of GF Machining Solutions for 22 years. Awards include Industry Week's Manufacturing Hall of Fame, he's participated actively in President Obama's January 11, 2012, Insourcing Forum, member of the Department of Commerce Investment Advisory Council. He's frequently been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, New York Times, New Yorker, and USA Today and seen on Fox Business Market Watch and other programs. Harry has a BS and MS in Engineering from MIT and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Harry, welcome to the show. Can you share a little bit about what the mission of The Reshoring Initiative is? So we're a nonprofit and our mission is to bring 5 million manufacturing jobs to the US from offshore by a combination of reshoring by US companies, and FDI, foreign direct investment by foreign companies. We picked 5 million because that's the amount it would take to balance the trade deficit, the goods trade deficit so that then our imports and exports would be about equal so to our mission is to increase our manufacturing by about 40%. So to recover what we've lost from the increasing trade deficit over the last 40 years. Has the current state with the pandemic been a positive or negative impact on your mission? For our work, our revenue has quadrupled, because companies now realize that it's too dangerous, too risky to be so dependent on offshore, especially China. What we do is show them that they can make products here in many cases and be at least equally profitable. So so we overcome that. "Well, I'd love to make it here, but I can't afford to", we overcome that issue. So I want to talk a little bit about this trade deficit. Why does the US have a trade deficit problem? Your trade balance is the difference between your exports and your imports. So we import $800 billion a year more than we export and that's because our costs, our prices are too high here. We have a method to compare pricing in the US and other countries and our price leaving the factory is about 20% higher than Europe, and about 40% higher than China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and consumer wants to buy something inexpensively, the company goes work and get at least expensively and as a result, we have a trade deficit. In classical economics, that should go away quickly because the currency should adjust. If you have a big trade deficit, your currency should go down in value versus other currencies and that would make you more competitive or competitive once again, and the trade deficit would go away. But the US is the reserve currency, and having the banks and institutions where foreigners want to store their money for safety, all those trillions of dollars flowing in forces the dollar up instead of having the goods trade deficit adjust. So one of the things we recommend is to have the US Government Act reduce the value of the dollar by 20, or 30% so that our companies would once again be competitive. How can our listeners help you achieve these goals here? If they work for a manufacturing company of any kind, or distributor of goods, or retailer, they could suggest to the company producing or sourcing more in the country. Our tools are helpful, for that we have the TCL estimator that helps the company do the math correctly on the costs associated with importing or exporting, and therefore that would be helpful for their companies also useful for selling. So for the small company to convince this customer to buy from them instead of importing, for example. But also, as consumers, when they're out looking to buy something, they should at least look a little bit, spend a little time looking for the Made in USA product. One of the things I wrote recently is, a lot of people are out buying things just because it's fun to buy things. If you're buying something, not because you need it, but just for the pleasure of buying...
Meet Mike Growing tired of the corporate grind, Mike and his co-founder Kevin started their digital marketing agency, Prime Digital. Four and a half years later, Prime Digital helps small businesses all over the US and Canada attract more customers through search engine optimization, and web design, among other things. Going into 2021 they focused on making business owners aware of ADA compliance and how it can protect their business and help them save money. What is website accessibility and ADA compliance? So website accessibility has to do with making your website accessible to everybody, whether they have some form of disability or not, whether they're blind, colorblind, some kind of motor impairment. ADA compliance is basically making sure that your website complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act. If somebody's using a screen reader, or if they need to adjust the size of the font on your website, or change the color contrast, whatever makes it easier for them to read it and navigate it, and clearly understand the information on your website, is really what it comes down to. That's what we're trying to spread awareness on nowadays, I would say around 20% of America has some form of disability like that. So we don't want to exclude a fifth of the country from the internet and websites and access to everyday needs, everybody uses the internet. So we want to make sure that it's accessible to everyone. Why is ADA compliance beneficial to the small business owner? So it's beneficial to them because if you decide to take some actions in making your website's ADA compliant, the government will give you half of what you spend up to $10,250 back in the form of a tax credit at the end of the year. You do have to be eligible for it so as a small business, you can qualify in one of two ways. You can either have less than 30 full-time employees or be doing under a million dollars a year in annual revenue. If you meet either one of those and if you spend five grand, eight grand, whatever it is, you'll receive half of that spend back in tax credit and you can get that every year that you're eligible for it. What can business owners do to be compliant? So I would reach out to a web design agency that can support this, make sure that they understand some of the laws, there's a lot of resources out there. You can use accessibility.com as a good one to catch up and learn a little bit more about what it entails and that's really the first place to start. I've seen a number of widgets and plugins, to support some of that. Is that what you recommend or is it more of a custom-coded experience to be accessible? Yeah, so there are a lot of those out there. Unfortunately, there really aren't any shortcuts to compliance. There's a lot of big companies, you'd be surprised that might throw in a plugin, or use one of these overlay tools, but it's not enough to get you in 100% compliance. There are going to be things that people could still poke at and find that might be an issue. There are some evaluation tools that we use to uncover some of those areas of opportunity to clean up the website a little bit. We want to avoid plugins and things like that. It's building a website, it might be a little bit of code, but for the most part, it's just a regular web builder that we can use and making sure that we're following the checklist and making sure that everything that you want on your website is going to be compliant. Can you share with our listeners one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? So I belong to a CrossFit gym which is a little bit different than Planet Fitness, or like LA Fitness or something like that, where you go to the gym and you don't talk to anybody, you just kind of workout in. CrossFit is a little bit more personable and I've been going to that same gym for probably seven to eight years now with the same people and working out...
Meet Mike Mike is the CEO of People Building Incorporated and the powerhouse behind the What Are You Made of Movement. He is a performance coach, author, dynamic public speaker, visionary, and thought leader. He has been featured by Yahoo Finance as one of the top business leaders to follow in 2020 and is on a mission to build people. He is driven to inspire others and he measures his success on how he is able to help others achieve greatness. C-Roc had a fire lit in him at an early age, that fire has ignited him with a fierce desire to compel people to see the greatness inside themselves using past life events to fuel their fire. I'm really curious about everything that you've got around this, what are you made of movement, so let me just ask you, what are you made of? People ask me that all the time so I'm gonna do my best with this. I'm made of rocket fuel. I'm a go, go, go kind of guy, I have a saying, thrust is a must, go forward fast. So that also leads me into times where I need to focus on taking a step back and breathing sometimes so I just recently got into meditation. But the reason I made a rocket fuel is that I came up with this concept. I'll tell you a quick story, coming from a broken home and not remembering my parents together, I went through a lot of conflict as a child with this. For three years I lived with my dad and during that period of time, my dad got remarried, and anytime you have Child Support, custody battle things, Stepparents involved, other agendas, you know, there's conflict. As a kid, you're the main link between your parents, for them to even have to talk anymore, and sometimes that can carry a heavy burden. During that time I went through a lot of mental abuse, psychological abuse, threats, and things that no kid should ever deal with. I'm not telling you this to feel sorry for me to play victim, I just want to share with you where this rocket fuel law came from. But when I'd had enough at one point, when I turned about 10, and a half or 11 years old, and I was coming home from my mom's house one weekend, and I said, "I'm not feeling right," and she goes, "What's the matter? You seem anxious." We were going over these hills on these really hilly roads in southeastern Pennsylvania and I was afraid to tell her actually. When you go through abuse, it's a tough situation to come out about it, because you're afraid of what may happen, what might happen, or if anybody's gonna believe you. So I ended up telling her and she said, "That's not normal, Mikey, you don't need to go through that, that's not something you should be dealing with." She ended up filing court papers, she told me at that time that you need to stick to your guns if I do this because she didn't want to go through all that and have me change my mind. But she also told me that in life, you need to stick to your guns when you believe in something because if you don't, then what's going to happen is people will try to change your mind or beliefs based on their own agenda or to justify their position in life. So it was a lesson I carry to this day about sticking to my guns and being stubborn. So when my dad finally got the court papers served to him I was coming home from school one day and it's a day that I dreaded waited for a long time didn't know when it was coming. My dad, who was my hero had a masonry business, big forearms, rough hands. I always looked up to him for how hard of a worker he was, he always carried $100 bills in his pocket with a rubber band around it and I thought that was the coolest thing because he used to flash it and show us what we got with money. It wasn't about greed or anything, it was just cool, you know. So when I confirmed he asked me if I really wanted to move back with my mom, and I remember her telling me to stick to my guns. He said, your mom doesn't have it that well, like, why would you want to go there? They don't have any money, you have everything you need here, and that
Meet Susan Susan lives life out loud, loves deeply, and celebrates when others shine bright. She's the president and CEO of Huntsboro Hemp Company, a rapidly growing CBD company dedicated to producing high-quality products to help improve the well-being of customers globally. Susan is a trusted entrepreneur and sought-after speaker whose mission is to educate people about the hemp plant and the benefits of quality CBD. She and her husband live on the family farm in North Carolina. Why did you decide to start a CBD company? My son-in-law was in college at North Carolina State University and he came home and he was so excited about what he was learning about industrial hemp and about CBD. He told my husband who has farmed his whole life, "Jimmy, you've got to start growing industrial hemp," and he looked at me and I've been in the health and wellness industry for about 16 years. He's like, "Susan, we need a CBD company," and I told him, I said, "You know what, Garrett, I think CBD is snake oil," even though I've been in the health and wellness field for about 16 years, and teach people about eating a plant-based diet and to let your food be your medicine. I could not understand or did not understand how CBD did all the things that people claimed CBD would do. My husband was like, "We've tried different crops, and we're just gonna stick with what we know, and not add him into the growing rotation." But what both my husband and I did was starting studying CBD. I found doctors that were using it in their practices with patients. I found him meetings to attend and CBD expos. My husband was also researching and studying about growing of the plant. But what I learned was that CBD is the real deal and that we all have an endocannabinoid system and when you understand how the endocannabinoid system works with the other systems in the body, and how CBD works in the body, you start to realize that it will do many, many things in the body. One thing I'd like to say off the bat is I am not a doctor, and I'm not a pharmacist, but I understand how it does work. CBD will cure nothing and that is something I love to make sure people understand is that CBD will cure nothing. But what it can do is reduce the inflammation in your body and when the inflammation is reduced, then the symptoms that are associated with many diseases are alleviated or reduced, therefore causing you to feel better. What is important to know prior to actually purchasing any CBD products? When you go into the marketplace, it is so easy to get overwhelmed because there are a plethora of CBD products. So the important thing to know when you are out in the marketplace, is you want to know where the CBD was grown. Therefore, you want to make sure it was grown in the United States with a licensed grower. That's very easy to find out either by asking the person selling it or looking at the box. You also want to look for a certificate of analysis. What that is, is that is third-party testing that is done on all CBD products or should be done on all CBD products. Now, it's a little bit harder sometimes to find that. Sometimes you have to ask if the person selling it has the certificate of analysis to show you, or sometimes you have to go to the company's website and look and put in your batch number and find this certificate of analysis. One thing that we are doing at Huntsboro Hemp right now is we are transitioning to putting a QR code on our labels. Therefore you just take the picture, scan the QR code, and that'll take you directly to the certificate of analysis for that product in that match. Then the other thing that I think people really need to understand is the three different types of products out there. If you're someone that is working in a job where you are randomly tested, you need to know if your CBD product has any THC in it. If you're taking a full spectrum product, that is a product that could have up to the legal limit, .3% THC in
Meet Shabnam: Shabnam, the author of My Persian Paradox was born and raised in Tehran until 2004. Shabnam teaches memoir writing workshops and has been performing lectures to colleges and universities about her book and the concept of sharing stories. She actively practices a variety of storytelling workshops to help people develop deeper empathy towards each other. She is currently working on our second memoir. Her motto is, "Let's share our stories and create more empathy." What experiences have you gained by sharing your story with others? I couldn't believe it. It started even before I started writing my memoir and it actually encouraged me to write my memoir and I was kind of in a midlife crisis. Then I was just talking to my friends at work, especially because we spend a lot of time at work. So I have a lot of American friends who were born here, around me, and we just talked and, chit chatted and every time I shared one story from my past, I felt better. Then they got to know me better. I got to the point that this past is really bitter, but when I shared it with someone else, in a form of his story, it makes me feel better. Unsurprisingly, it makes the audience feel like oh my god, I have a very similar experience. And who would think a girl in Iran is all grown up in the Midwest in America? We shared experiences, so we just shared stories and that led me to feel like you know what, I want to write this book. Because I wasn't a writer, I started learning to write, and then I started looking for communities of writers. I published a book and then I read the book for the people. I started having a community of people who shared very similar experiences. It's just growing in so many different ways and it changed my life. How did writing your memoir help you look at your life story differently? It was just amazing and it still is surprising me. In general, based on what I've learned about writing stories, and storytelling, now, to put it in perspective, I just see that when you look at your story, it could be your life story like mine. It's kind of like if we want to put it in a formula, let's say, like the simplest one, the three-story act. We want to see what the setup was, what the confrontations or stakes were, and then what was the resolution. Looking at it from a 50,000 point view, it's like I see the cause and effect, and then I don't see myself as a victim anymore because I can see that I tried, and I was impacted by the social norms and social limitation, cultural limitations. I can see how I was impacted by other people and how I impacted other people. So it just gave me a sense of belonging, and that I'm not a victim. Those bitter experiences actually made me into a more resilient person. I couldn't see it before, I was just whining and I was just feeling really down. But when I wrote this story, I saw it differently. I saw the value that those stakes and confrontations that I had brought to my life. How can storytelling make a difference and bring deeper social connections in everyday life? It was kind of like an exploration because when you open up, you feel like you're not scared anymore. I understand that this could be talking about the dirty laundry, you're not supposed to air them, right? For many people, it's taboo, and I totally understand it. But still, we each have a lot of stories and when we authentically share our stories, from that value standpoint, there was something there. Can you share with our listeners one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? It all revolves around writing for me because it changed my life. I attended some classes and it was good. It was a good beginning to networking. But I remember that after two years, I felt like I am just so lonely, I just need to join a community, I just need to find the community. As a new writer, I attended a couple of writing clubs and then one of them clicked.
Meet Meghan: Meghan is a native of Danvers, Massachusetts who has achieved sustained success at all levels of her hockey career in international and collegiate play. Meghan graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she majored in biology and was a member of the women's hockey team where she won three national championships. She went on to be an Olympic and professional athlete after he college. With Team USA she went three Olympic medals, including the first Olympic gold in 20 years where she led the US Olympic hockey team as Captain. As a member of the US Women's National Hockey Team since 2007, Meghan won seven IIHF Women's World Championships. A major topic in today's world is diversity and inclusion, can you tell our listeners how you decided to take a leader leadership role in this space? For me, I think about a lot of different factors in my life, and kind of in the world, in general, that led me towards making this part of my everyday. In general, all of us right now are eager to be a part of a world or a company or an organization that is more diverse and more inclusive and to do that we need to seek systemic change. That's a change in behavior, culture, attitudes and we all know that there's a lot of challenges that lie within seeing those changes. For me, my passion and commitment towards all of this started back in 2017, when I was able, alongside my teammates to lead a successful strike by our national team against USA hockey, which is our national governing body of hockey at the time, for gender-equitable treatment for women in the sport of hockey, and in our program. That was a long battle, we learned a lot, we discussed changes privately with USA hockey behind the scenes that we wanted to see and to make in our program and we weren't able to make any progress with them so we came up with a very public boycott. It's quite a long story, but we were able to make some truly systemic change in our program and while we're still working on those changes every single day, it amplified the movement and all of that in my mind and my teammates’ mine. So from then, I committed to helping diversify hockey in general, whether that's for opening it up to more women or more members of the BIPOC community or LGBTQ plus community, that's very important to me. But also, seeking out other opportunities to help underrepresented groups in all aspects of life and to truly make a more diverse and inclusive world that all of us are eager to be a part of. As a board member for USA hockey, what is it that you hope to achieve? Going off of the question that we just discussed, one of the biggest things that I want to achieve that I'm, I'm working towards every day and in a few different capacities, whether that's in my board seat, or the different subcommittees and sections I sit on at USA hockey, or being a part of the NHL player inclusion committee, where we're working to diversify elite hockey, or being a board member with the Women's Sports Foundation as well. All of those kind of have a similar goal, in my mind, and the first is just to diversify hockey. As I alluded to in the answer to my first question, when we think about hockey, traditionally, I hate to say it, but you think about hockey traditionally, and underrepresented groups are anyone that is not white, straight, men. That is sadly what people associate with hockey. So in a lot of those positions that I'm in, what I want to do is make sure that underrepresented groups are welcomed, and are introduced to the sport of hockey. Hockey changed my life in so many ways, I was the only girl growing up when I was playing and but, I didn't let that stop me. I had really supportive parents, I had supportive coaches and teams, and I was given an earned opportunities. But there's a lot of people that don't feel welcome in hockey or don't feel that it's a sport for them. Because I love it so much, because it changed my life in a million ways,
Meet Glenn Glen Allen is the go-to CMO of digital course launches. As a multi-instrumental musician turned marketing consultant, he helps entrepreneurs scale five to seven-figure businesses by consulting them and their team through marketing and launching digital courses. He's the host of the Glen Ellyn Show, a YouTube channel about digital marketing, and an entrepreneurial podcast called Unstuck and Unstoppable. He also works as an unpaid chef, housekeeper and, chauffeur for three kids who call him dad. What is the most effective way to build authentic connections with email list subscribers? It's to provide value to them. Definitely an imbalance of value over information about yourself or your products or pitches for your products and services. Right now, everybody is having to do a lot of their business online and a lot of that is happening through their email. We are becoming a little bit inundated and saturated right now so it's really important to show up as a person, and not as a product, and to nurture your relationship with the people who have entrusted you with their email addresses and invited you into their inboxes by continuing to give. For companies or organizations with multiple people, should communications be coming from the brand, or should it take that personal conversational approach? Let's say you are an organization. I've worked in the corporate space, where we had this challenge of connecting more one on one with our audience and our potential customers and clients and leads, and we kind of had to pick a face of the organization, and that didn't have to be the founders. For a while it was me, and it was another agent of the company who was just best suited to showing up and being on camera or creating engaging content. Sometimes that means me writing in the voice of this person, but basically having a face and a voice that people can connect to instead of a brand or instead of a company is better. One of the ways that I recommend people do this is when you're inviting people to sign up for something like a lead magnet or something that gets people into your email community, and you want to take the relationship to the next level. I am a big fan of things that are video-based, things that have a person on camera, engaging with you, talking to you, showing the values, and projecting those through personality.
What are some of the best ways to attract people into our audience when we're building an online community? A lot of reasons we're building an online community is number one: it's for the sake of the community. But also we're in business and we're not just in business, for the fun of it, and there is, of course, the commerce side of it, and we want to serve and help people, and we want to connect with people in a way in which it is financially viable for us. So we have things that we want to sell and offer that will help other people. When you're doing this, a lot of people are, you know, nurturing an audience from, say, a social media platform, or a podcast, and we want to bring the conversation in a little bit more intimately and deeper into, you know, non farmed land. Social media is kind of that rented space, whereas we have our community of people in our private groups and our email list. That's ours, especially your email list. So one of my favorite ways to build that, it's having some kind of a lead magnet or freebie that creates value for the people who are the ideal person to work with and serve. To do that in a way that is fully aligned with how you ultimately want to help them through your paid products, your paid offers your service. I'm seeing a lot of upfront mistakes with how they go about that. The best thing you can do for somebody is to solve a problem they have. A very small burning pain, that then gives them a next level, good to have a problem. If you can solve somebody's problem, you're going to have somebody who is going to become a...
Meet Kristen Kristen is a certified neuro-linguistic programming practitioner mindset specialist, trained under Bob Proctor curriculum developer, college professor, and passionate life enthusiastic. She brings all of these skills and experiences to help people define and live their vision in life. Not box-checking goals, but vision, the kind of vision that makes your heart leap, sets your soul on fire and makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. What made you so passionate about empowering others to define and live their vision in life? Honestly, not doing it myself. Basically, I did what I think a lot of people do which is I spent a lot of time doing what I was taught, which I thought was going to make my life fulfilling. I found myself literally sitting in this "perfect life," where everybody was like, "Yay, look at you, you're great," and I was thinking, "Should I tell them that this sucks," or like, "This isn't fulfilling," and I was afraid to admit that to myself and then to other people. It took this like, kind of peeling flesh from the bone process socially and emotionally and spiritually inside myself, to realize I'm just gonna do it, I'm gonna do the stuff that really makes me happy and feel good and excited, and let the chips fall where they may. Luckily, it all worked out and I've learned a lot, the hindsight is 2020. So now I like to support people in taking that journey for themselves because I think that the quality of our lives should be of our most importance and a priority to us. I recently heard a quote on Clubhouse which said, "You have to fill your cup before you can fill other people's cups," and that really resonated with me, because we all constantly give, but we're not necessarily taking care of ourselves first and it sounds like that's exactly what you did and you help others do that as well. Yeah, and something I like to share because it had such a pivotal impact for me is a book by a hospice nurse named Bronnie Ware called Regrets of The Dying. It was really fascinating because she chronicled the most frequently heard regrets. So these are things where people would say I wish I would have done this. The most frequently heard regret was "I wish I would have had the courage to live a life true to myself, and not what others wanted from me." When I heard that it really validated all of those secret fears that I just told you about, I was like, "That's it, that's my thing!" Then I thought to myself that I'm not gonna be that person, I'm gonna be sitting there at the end of the show going, "That was epic, you guys!" I imagine that you had to disappoint some individuals to get to where you are today, tell us about that a little bit. That's my favorite thing to let people know because it's okay to disappoint other people. Just like what you said about filling your cup first, or applying the oxygen mask to yourself before assisting others. Disappointing people is part of that process and usually, it's some of the most important relationships in your life. So people will be nervous about doing that, but the funny thing is, my experience has been and I don't like to be too specific sometimes because I'm not trying to criticize other people or their intentions, but the funny thing is after the fact once you get through that painful process of disappointing them, they usually come back back around and say, you know, you're my hero, or I'm so happy for you, or I'm so glad for you. I like to share that with people too because if that's what gets you through that challenge, it's worth it. What are the top challenges that people face when pivoting in life and setting out to live a life that really speaks to their soul? Fear is number one because there are all these outside influences we feel such as, disappointing people, and wondering if people are going to support me changing gears. Then there's self-identity where you have to let people know that...
Meet Elzie: Don't even try to describe him this way and he'll point that one out. Change your perspective and he'll lead you down another path, maybe without you even realizing it. He's a creative dude, an entrepreneur, a family man, a business owner, no box fits, it doesn't even exist. He's a man of original thoughts, all products of unique thinking. Above all else, he is a storyteller he unpacks topics from unexpected directions, weaving influences into the music speaking and podcasting. Society, business current events, you can never predict his take. Suffice to say, it's probably different than you've encountered. Why do things happen? How do they drive behavior? Meet Lorry: He has a CPA, has 40 years of business experience ranging from accounting operations, sales, and marketing. He specializes in returning companies to profitability. He owns four businesses in Milwaukee, a business turnaround and profit improvement firm, a bookkeeping and accounting service company, a networking training and event company, and residential rental units on Milwaukee's East Side. A core introvert he wanted a large network, but there was one problem: networking terrified him. How did the two of you get connected? Elzie: Well, it was funny, because I met Lorry at a networking event, of course. I'm very sensitive to my gut when my gut tells me that this is a person that I need to connect with or deepen a relationship with. So I had seen him on LinkedIn with lunch with Lorry stuff. I said to him that I'd like to do lunch with Lorry and we just couldn't find a time that works, because everybody wants to have lunch with Lorry. So we ended up doing breakfast and very long story short, he would ask me these questions that a person that you were just meeting shouldn't be asking. I thought to myself, "Why is this guy asking me these types of questions?" But it was intriguing, and it made me open my perspective to deepening relationships and being curious and open to other people's perspectives. So that's kind of how it all got started in terms of our relationship. This was a little bit before COVID happened and we couldn't you couldn't do lunch with Lorry in person so I said do it virtually. Nine sessions later, in lunch with Laurie virtual is still around. For those that are not familiar with Lunch with Lorry, why would someone want to attend? Lorry: Because we don't get to tell the story of our lives, it's usually your rush to business or getting something networking. Lunch with Lorry is about telling some aspect of your life story and the stories are compelling. There had been lunches when people have cried because the stories are sad and there have been lots of stories and we can stop laughing. But one thing people learn they're not alone, because there's a lot of common themes from the Lunch with Lorry. Elzie: I think I've learned things about people that I would have never learned in a zillion years in a business setting so it's refreshing to be able to see that side of people without even really knowing what they do for a business. It's cool to be able to genuinely meet people and have those authentic conversations. What are some of these common themes and are there a couple of stories you can share? Lorry: Well, I think some of the stories are amazing, there was a woman who I asked what her favorite charity was and why. But there have been people who have funny stories. We had a gentleman who drove a train. He's wasn't an engineer, he just drove a train. People have had cars going ditches when they're chasing people, it's just amazing stories. But one thing about it is it is equal opportunity networking because I don't let you say what you do for a living. I don't let you do your elevator pitch. That's probably the most unique part of it. I've had CEOs next to the unemployed, and everyone is equal and on a second part are equal. Every single person has to participate. Elzie and I
Meet Damon: Since founding his company SEO National in 2007, Damon Burton Writes for Forbes has been featured in publications including Entrepreneur Magazine, BuzzFeed, and USA Weekly. He's helped high-profile clients make more in a month than they used to in a year. Not only does Burton bring an easy to follow approach to increasing your revenue and online visibility, but he’s also a trusted educator on this subject and has literally written the book on how to outrank your competition. His book, Outrank, serves as a guide to those who want to dominate Google's search results without paying for ads. I was looking into your website and I'm intrigued by the story about how you beat a billion-dollar company in showing up higher than them in the search engines. Can you share that with our listeners? Yeah, that's a fun story. It was actually kind of in the infancy of when I jumped into the SEO world and it was just a little hobby site. So this around 2007, my wife was watching the Bachelor and she says, "Hey, babe, it's the season finale, come in to watch this with me. So I went in and watched a little bit of it and from what I remember from watching season finales with her before, is that they wouldn't announce who the next bachelor was going to be, they'd leave a cliffhanger and you'd have to wait. What was interesting about this year, and now in subsequent years, is they announced who the gentleman was going to be. So I was curious about why they did that and I went and looked him up, assuming that I would find information on their website about it and I couldn't find anything on their website. But it was this guy who was a Navy Captain, and he runs triathlons. So I thought to myself if I'm not really that interested in it because it was more just a brief curiosity and all these huge diehard fans are going to be interested in it, they're certainly looking. So I told my wife, I said, "Hey, I'm gonna be in here for a little bit," and so that night, I spent 90 minutes building a website, and cataloged any public information I could find about this guy and put it up. By the end of the week, it was the number one website for this bachelor guy and we were able to outrank The Bachelor website and ABC is a multi-billion dollar brand so it's a fun story to share. So at the time, I was in my early 20s, and I put AdSense on there so I was making like 1000s of dollars a month in passive income. But at the core, why that's such a good success story is because I solved the problem. I answered questions that the consumers were demanding and so that's a simplistic way of looking at SEO. That was not the most beautiful website, but it solved the problem. It had some pictures of the guy that people were looking for, had the bio on the guy that people were looking for, had resources on the guy that people were looking for, and then I'm hesitant to admit it, but then I started adding updates at the end of each show that season about what was going on with his story on The Bachelor. Let's talk about ads in search engines a little bit, why would you pay for ads when you can get sales from search engines for free? There are some pros and cons to any marketing campaign. The nice thing about ads is that they're quicker than SEO, SEO is a slow game, but that's the only advantage. The disadvantages of ads are that you always have an ad budget. So as that space becomes more competitive, you have to pay more, you have to increase your budget. Then there's also a shelf life to your ad. A lot of people will be familiar with the term "ad fatigue," where someone has an ad on Google or Facebook and it runs great for six weeks, and then you wake up the next day, and it's dead. So you're always having a scramble on turning these ads off and on. A lot of people I know that actively run aggressive ad campaigns, they are literally in their ad campaigns every day and that becomes tiring. So to the opposite of that, I'm not wanting to...
Meet Cyrina: As a business mindset coach and rapid transformational therapist Cyrina is passionate about helping business owners understand how to navigate growth. Their business is leading them to a place that is amazing, but also unfamiliar. Her work focuses on mindset and becoming confident to step into the next level, bringing you scientifically proven techniques to get your subconscious on board so you have 100% of your mind working with you and for you, no longer working against you. Why don't you share a little bit about how our subconscious affects our business? So the main thing to understand is that science can hook up things to our brains and measure them. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about your subconscious that it’s this deep dark place or whatnot, but it's our autopilot, it's our programming, and what happens is there's a state they can measure brainwaves. So there's a state that we're living in, between the age of birth and 10, where that's all getting programmed. Then around 12, you start being able to think abstract and more logically, and all that kind of stuff. So that programming is set, and then it's running and a lot of times the way we were raised, the experiences we had, the beliefs about money, the beliefs about relationships, and success, and all those kinds of things are in contrast to the direction we want our business to go. We might have grown up learning that rich people are snobs or greedy, or we don't want to be like those people, or money is evil. You might not notice them until then, and as a business owner, we have to show up more, we have to put ourselves out there, we have to accept more money, we have to raise our prices, we have to sell. So all those things, if there's anything in your past that goes against where you're headed in your business, it's going to mess with you. So it's affecting business owners anytime you're struggling to take the action that you want to take and I think it's something inherent in all of us as well, this idea to put yourself out there and selling your product and service. That takes a lot of belief in ourselves and there's not a ton of people that had the ideal growing up experience where you didn't hit any bumps in the road that knock that down and take your confidence and have at least a couple of beliefs that go against how you need to show up in your business. What is one way to change a limiting belief? To me, the number one thing is knowing that we can change. Old science was like, Oh, well, you're wet cement before age 10 and you're getting imprinted or whatever and then you're just stuck. I think a lot of the belief to overcome is like, "Oh, I just don't do that, I can't do that, that's just not my personality." But when you know, any challenge that you're coming up against, you can change. To me, that's the most powerful one. But it's awareness, it's knowing, okay, I raised my prices and I'm procrastinating, I'm not taking action to let anybody know, maybe there's something here. That process of self-reflection and awareness is a huge step. I have people get out a piece of paper, write anything that they're struggling with, and ask why am I not showing up? Why am I afraid to raise my prices? Why am I freaking out and procrastinating about this? Just that process of asking that question and listening is crucial because our consciousness is just thinking, thinking all day long, your heartbeats and your lungs breathe, and your mind thinks. But if you write down a question on a piece of paper, you ask yourself a question, and you listen, then you're automatically in that different state, instead of just like this constant diatribe from your brain, of all the things, you just kind of get quiet and listen and see what comes up. How is this different than positive thinking? Because that's another avenue that I see is just to remain positive to have a positive mindset, but this seems like it's a different...
Meet Joe: Joe is a Wisconsin native with a long history in the Milwaukee SMB community who owns a local tech company for 20 years. After divesting that he invested in a couple of startups. One of them is security-related and the cool one is Lite Zilla, a Milwaukee manufacturer of jumbo lite brites, yes, just like the ones you played as a kid. His day job is Mother G, a compass MSP that goes beyond offering managed services. They're 100% dedicated to providing lightswitch dependable technology to Wisconsin SMBs. What would be your number one technology tip for small businesses? My number one tip would be to check your security settings. If you don't know what that means, find a partner or a vendor who can help you check your security settings. A lot of small businesses, when I say confused, they feel like they're small so nobody wants to hack them. The reality is, it's all automated, it's all a business. In 2020, for the first time, the amount of money flowing through cybersecurity hacks exceeded the amount of money in the illicit drug trade in the world. They're not picking on you, because they want your secret widget designs, they're picking on you because you have an IP address, it's that simple. Look at your security, look at your vendor security. There been a couple of vendors in town, who you know, have been exposed, who've been hacked and once they get through there, they've got your keys to your kingdom. So be really, really careful, only the Paranoid survive. Can you speak a bit about how COVID impacts SMB technology? One of the big ones is the whole work from home thing and the whole remote connectivity, but that certainly ties back to the security factor. Those are all entry points into your company network. There's a lot of great tools out there. We use a lot of Microsoft Teams, and I've been using it for a couple of years since I joined Mother G. Probably the biggest impact of COVID is that a lot of those remote communications, remote collaboration, productivity tools have pushed down into the Small Business space because people couldn't come to the office. By the same token, on that security side, the bad guys are certainly taken advantage of people's uncertainty, people's conductivity, and frankly, people's people's goodwill, in terms of sending phishing emails to make a donation or support people who are out of work, that kind of thing and it's the bad guys trying to get your credentials and empty your bank account. So the security risks have gone up in the last nine months since everything shut down last March. So those are the two biggest impacts is the connectivity stuff and the security risks. What are your thoughts on the future of SMB technology? Not to beat a dead horse, but security is only going to get bigger. The other big thing that we're seeing with a lot of customers is looking at the productivity factors. One of the hidden benefits, if you will, of the whole experience of the last nine or ten months in terms of SMB technology is people starting to think differently. A year ago, there were a lot of small business owners who would think that everybody's got to be in the office and they can't be productive if everybody's not in the office and that's not the case. Now, at the same time, there are better and less good ways to do it. I think one of the biggest things looking forward to the future is how do we, as business leaders, and as business owners, you know, you own your business. You've got a staff of X number of people, you want to keep them both happy and productive, you probably have an entirely new appreciation today than you did a year ago, in terms of the struggle that some of your employees have. What does that mean to them on a day in, day out, based on how can the technology help to bridge those gaps, keep them productive, while helping them to balance the very real, very distinct responsibilities between the work in their family, between...
Meet Ashley: Ashley is the first and only networking concierge that puts you in the right situation or gets you out of the wrong one. As a networking concierge, Ashley trains coaches and speaks on becoming an authority at generating revenue by networking with intention. Ashley is the host of two digital TV talk shows on RVNTV and THIS IS IT TV speaking and interviewing on the topic of tactical networking. As someone who speaks, talks, teachers, coaches, all things networking, what has been the most effective networking tip that you have ever received? The best one that I received, which I try to talk about all the time is nobody gives a damn about what you do. Nobody cares, they care how you make them feel and what value can bring to their lives. So I think the biggest challenge a lot of people have in that capacity is that people always forget, when they're in a networking situation or, doing networking activities that they always have to be on. There is a level of good perception and good manners and being respectful, but at the end of the day, people buy or work with or connect with people that they know, that they like, and that they trust. So having that stigma of trying to sell something or trying to impress that person needs to go away because there's no room for that we've got things to do. How do you know how you're making someone feel? You look at their body language, and you can understand or at least start to be more in tune with how they're perceiving you as a person. If you're framing out a conversation that is beneficial to the two of you, you always want to lead with service. So one of the things that I try to tell my clients is that we are lucky to be able to network, really, how lucky are we to be able to do that. So when you are of service, and when you are communicating with somebody new, it's really important to make them feel good, but also to allow them to showcase their businesses. Ask the right questions, be naturally curious. You as somebody who enjoys to network has to lead them in a way that's beneficial to them. You'll get the information that you need from them, whether they're in a small business, big business, or if they're looking to meet that particular kind of person, but the goal is to be naturally curious, and you can make them feel comfortable by having actual interest in what they do. I'm interested in your coaching process, how do you educate your audience on what networking is? The thing I try to focus on is that networking took a significant change in the logistics, and the fluidity of it, so everything went virtual. A lot of groups and organizations did have virtual options, but it was kind of more cliche, and everyone would typically go to events. So the way that I coach my clients was different before the pandemic than what it is now because you adjust and you grow within the needs of your client, that's what any good coach does. As a coach, I have a responsibility to train my clients in a way that's meaningful to them, which means that my personality may not match everybody else's personality, but they still need my help. So my job is to make sure that I understand how they make decisions and what drives them to complete tasks. So within my coaching sessions, I run a disc profile on them, it's an emotional intelligence assessment so I know what activities to align their decision-making process with the networking activity. For example, for an introvert, I'm not going to put them into a 60 or 90 person networking event, even if it's online, because they're not going to have the ability to communicate in a way that's beneficial to them. Whereas identifying good groups to be a part of and giving them strategies to connect with people one on one, and how to ask for those meetings and putting more of a stress on LinkedIn is the better option for them so they feel more comfortable. Networking is a personal activity, it's not a one size fits...
Meet Pat: Pat's business, The Idea Coach helps small business owners understand their customers and refine their positioning so they can stand out and sell. Pat left a career in broadcast radio after 22 years to help small business owners grow. He focuses on coaching, content creation, and community hosting for small business owners. He hosts a weekly small business talk show called The Idea Collective Live, and two communities; The Idea Collective on Facebook, and The Idea Collective Collaboration Community. How is running a small business or being an entrepreneur different than being an employee in a corporation? The biggest difference comes from what happens every two weeks. I was in a corporation for a long time, 20 some odd years working for somebody else. One thing provided you're not in a terrible corporation you can count on is that paycheck. Now maybe it's not as big as you want it to be every two weeks, but it happens every two weeks. So that's what happens when you work for somebody else in a corporation. When you run your own thing, you eat what you kill. So if you run your own business, if you want to get paid every two weeks, you got to go out and sell something. Now it's kind of a scarcity mindset to focus on, Oh, I gotta go do something so I can make some money." But it also allows you to look at it from a supply-side and say, "Woah, if I go out and sell a bunch of stuff, I can make a lot of money!" So there is just a big difference between your personal relationship with your bank account when you work for somebody else, and when you work on your own. Can I get your perspective on how content creation ties into building a network and these relationships? It's something I've used a lot, creating content in order to get known. I know that sounds silly, but getting to know more people by creating content is not necessarily trying to become an influencer. You see on LinkedIn or on other social media platforms, or even just on people's websites, I'm going to do a blog, I'm going to do a podcast, I'm going to do a show and they think by doing content, people will know who they are and they'll get famous. But to me creating content is interviewing other people and using it as a networking strategy. So I create a weekly show called Idea Collective Live which is built on interviewing other people. I do that because there are a lot of smart people in our network and when you interview smart people, people give you the benefit of the doubt because you're hanging out with smart people. So they start thinking that you're pretty smart and then you also get yourself exposed to the smart people's network. So if I have Lori on my show, Lori has a lot of people who respect her and when she's on your show, then people who know Laurie know you. By doing content and building a stage or having a spotlight and shining it on other people allows you to go out and get known by the leading players in your network and meet people who don't already know you. It's a strategy that I've used quite a bit through live shows, podcasts, education nights, and networking events. The strategy has always been to build the stage and give it away because when you do that, you get a chance to extend your network to more people. What's missing for most small business owners’ lives that would help them to perform better? Time off, rest, support, all of this soft, squishy stuff that you don't learn in business school. I went to business school, they never talked about any of that stuff. They talk about finance, accounting, strategy, business plans, marketing, and sales. They talk about all that stuff, but they don't talk about all of the squishy, personal stuff that you need to be a great small business owner. Being a small business owner is a lifestyle, it's not a job. When you build your own company, and you build your own thing, it consumes everything around you. You make sacrifices with what you eat when you work out, how often you...
Meet Grace Coming from almost three decades and alternative healing, Grace is currently merging permanent health and wealth solutions to create a platform for metamorphosis. She shows individuals and businesses how to thrive using potent tools to evaluate wellness potential. You talk about permanent healing in your messaging, what exactly is that? Yeah, so you know, the way that I've been creating permanent healing with people is essentially, as a Sherpa, sharing tools with people who basically can use that to then create this internal alchemy, using vocalizations of sounds in different parts of the body and micro-movements to open up energetic channels. What I've noticed is that when people get these tools that they can use to shift their biochemistry, consciously. The basis for permanent healing really lies in that change in that internal terrain, where it is about accessing their DNA where they can turn it on and off at will and essentially be able to rewrite that genetic material. So that, to me, is really the foundation of where it needs to begin. So I read you talk about combining health and wealth, can you share a little bit about why and how you decided to combine those in your professional journey? Yeah, you know, it's really through my own personal journey through COVID and I'm sure a lot of people are impacted as well, along with myself. It's understanding and seeing wow, you know, through COVID, because my practice in Hilo was really very one with people. I do the testing where, yes, I'm tracking their biochemical changes that they're creating with these practices that I teach them and then being able to see the long term impacts on their cellular structure itself, in the blood. And through COVID, having to close down my own private practice really allowed me to transition on to a bigger platform and realizing where the other piece of the puzzle needed to be is. I can be the healthiest person on planet Earth, but without resources, we can't even meet our basic needs. From there, it's wanting to create impact, because that is really part of the meaning of life, for me, at least. So working on that healing piece of the financial piece of my life allowed me to then be able to access some potent tools that now I'm able to shift people's financial trajectory by teaching them essentially tools that the wealthy have always had and created for themselves, and now being able to use that for themselves in their own lives. I think there's a lot of truth to combining health and wealth. Would you put a prioritization on one over the other? You know, it's interesting, right? As you look at these two pieces of the puzzle, it's like I can be the wealthiest person without that health piece. I'm literally dead in the water, right? You can't do anything without that piece. And so they're really critical and practical pieces of life that we need to have both of them as that springboard from that space of having both of those pieces in place to be able to bring our soul gifts to the rest of the collective. For me personally, it really is about that collective transformation, because every single soul is precious. So when we can hold that space, and have these basic things in place for people to manifest from, that's really the only place that we can work with in terms of that foundation. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? So since COVID, what I started doing was really, you know, this is how you and I met too Lori is actually through LinkedIn. So that's mainly my platform in terms of networking, and what I'm doing on LinkedIn really is just reaching out for connections and getting to know people in my network and hopping on one on one calls, and really just meeting face to face if we can to engage all the senses. Through COVID, we can't meet in person, for sure now, as much as we have in the past. In...
Meet Jacob: Jacob first found his passion for global development in Peace Corps Ghana. He worked on projects focused on food waste elimination, value addition, and gender empowerment. Afterward, he created a grain distribution business in northern Ghana and has developed over a dozen global supply chains of specialty ingredients. As Agricycle's COO, he oversees a network of 40,000 farmers upcycling natural fruit abundance into value-added income for their families. Let's start with the Peace Corps, tell me a little bit about your time there. So I started really straight out of college, went to Peace Corps in northern Ghana, and was an agricultural volunteer. So I probably wouldn't even have been able to keep a plant alive for a week, it was kind of half of my cohort, and then here we are in northern Ghana, finding ourselves involved in a community develop their agricultural scene. So it was a huge learning curve and it definitely brought me out of my comfort zone in every regard from the actual task at hand, as well as the cultural language, barriers, differences, things like that, and total geographic isolation compared to suburban, Minnesota. So then I got my hands wet in education. So I went to schools and would teach whatever classes were needed that semester, and I went to the health center and the clinic they had there and helped out where I could with babies taking nutritional panels, even some metrics, and things like that for the doctors. Then some of my favorite initiatives were besides just dancing and playing with the kids and boot camps and things like that were just the economic stimulating business discussions and initiatives that took place mainly with the women of the community. Typically any initiative that comes into men gets the opportunity. So one of my favorite ones was a jewelry making business and I just never would have thought in high school or college that I'd be sitting in a tiny village in northern Ghana for making jewelry with women and trying to create value-added income for them through means of creation. There is some time dye batik fabric making all sorts of initiatives like that. And then those cultural ones, creating farming groups and subsidized inputs, things like that for increased outputs, a whole lot of different initiatives that was just life-changing experience. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your supply chain development experience across Sub Saharan Africa? During Peace Corps, I started seeing a demand for a need that was not met in my village and in the northern part of Ghana itself. There's very poor infrastructure to store and transport grains and so one of the main problems that occur in northern Ghana is in boarding schools. So kids come from all over the country and then food is shipped to the kitchens that cooks can provide food for the boarding students. In southern Ghana, it's really no problem, they can start right away, but in northern Ghana, there's a lack of up to maybe a month or two before the food reaches the northern half of the country. So some of the students are unable to go to school, or at least they're at school but unable to go to classes because they're they can't eat and after two months, some go home, it's really just a difficult situation. So one of the things we tried to do was create this business, a distribution company for grains and create that supply chain that can get to the schools. All that's really needed is just an initial capital investment and then proper storage techniques to buy low at market saturation and then distribute later throughout the year. So that was kind of the initial idea for getting my feet wet in the industry. I got an opportunity to work with a friend who I met in Botswana in Peace Corps as well to develop about a dozen supply chains across Sub Saharan Africa and connecting smallholder farmers and some larger farmers processing fonio was the main one and other specialty...
Meet Olympia: Olympia radically three x's income, fun, and freedom for six and seven-figure business owners who are overworked and want more. Olympia loves working and playing in the realms of millions and billions. She's an award-winning business consultant and speaker, a fortune 500 company partner, and a leader of the highest national security programs. By the age of 33. She was a corporate executive leading multi-billion dollar programs, making more than $50 million in sales and facilitating sales of more than $10 billion. Why is collaborative lead generation the best way to get lots of high-quality leads that are easy to convert to sales? That is a great question. Doing collaborative lead generation is the best way because you get to accelerate your sales and your success. You do that by getting access to your perfect clients through other people who already have them in their client database in their target market. When you do that, you're also elevated in status, and your credibility is also elevated because that person who you're collaborating with is basically recommending and endorsing you. So you really get to what I like to call have OPA which is other people's audience, and OPR other people's resources, you get to leverage those. I just came up with this metaphor today. So it's like, you want to see wild animals. You decide first, which ones you want to see, then you determine where are they located and who has them. Are they in a zoo? Are they in Africa or Asia? And then how will you get there? And do you want to explore on your own, or do you want to take a safari that guarantees that you're going to see these animals that you want to see and that you get the whole experience? So that is all about collaborative lead generation because you want to go where the wild animals are that you want to see and you want to get access to them by people who already have access and knowledge to them. So I know that you're an advocate for the gamification of marketing. What exactly is that and how can it help businesses and entrepreneurs grow income, fun, and freedom? Okay, gamification marketing is the latest and greatest in how to market your products and services, but then also how to amplify your actual products and services. So I'll talk about the marketing part first. Gamification really is about play and it's about triggering those four centers in your brain that are wired for happiness, fun, and play. Those four centers are dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin. So basically, you can think of these as your feel-good chemicals. The metaphor here is Pavlov's dog, you've probably heard the story where this guy, Pavlov had a dog, and he trained the dog to expect a treat when the bell rang, so every time the bell rings the dog gets super excited because he's going to get a treat. Well, that's basically what gamification is. In our application, we're putting it into marketing. So you can put it into your emails, in your website, on your landing pages, you can use it when you're speaking to people, whether it's in a networking situation, or online. So when you do that, you will get at least a 30% increase in your response rate and in the retention rate, retention of information. So, for example, when you use gamification marketing, it's going to increase how many clients you attract, it's going to keep their attention longer, it's going to increase sales conversion. And your sales will be much easier, by the way, they'll be easier and faster and funner for you, so you get a side effect of the fun aspect of gamification. If you have it in a, say a course or program, your students will retain more, they will be 80% more likely to complete that program. Then they will have the success and the results that you promised from your program and they will be the Pied Piper singing your tune and referring their friends and family to you. How does one get their perfect clients to say,...
Meet Bob: Bob is a sought after speaker at company leadership and sales conferences, sharing the platform with everyone from today's business leaders and broadcast personalities, to even a former US president. Bob is the author of a number of books on sales, marketing, and influence, with total book sales of well over a million copies. His book The Go-Giver, coauthored with John David Mann itself has sold over 975,000 copies and has been translated into 29 languages. His and John's newest parable and the Go-Giver Series is the Go-Giver influencer. Bob is an advocate, supporter, and defender of the free enterprise system, believing that the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve. He is also an unapologetic animal fanatic and is a past member of the board of directors of Furry Friends Adoption Clinic and Ranch in his town of Jupiter, Florida. Can you share with our listeners that may not be familiar with the Go-Giver? What is the premise of the book, what it's all about? It's a parable co-authored with John David Mann, who is just a fantastic writer. I'm kind of the How to person and he's the storyteller of the team, although he's a great entrepreneur himself. But the premise is really, that shifting your focus, and this is really where it begins shifting your focus, from getting to giving and when we say giving in this context, we simply mean constantly and consistently providing immense value to others. Understanding that doing so is not only a more pleasant way of conducting business, it's actually the most financially profitable way as well. And not for some way out there woo-woo type of magical mystical reasons, not at all it's actually very logical when you think about it. When you're that person who is able to take your focus off yourself and place it on others, making their lives better, helping them solve their problems, discovering what they want, need, desire, and helping them to get it well, you know, obviously people feel good about you. They want to get to know you, they like you, they trust you, they want to be a part of your life, your business. They're more likely to want to be your personal walking ambassadors. So you've got the five laws. Can you share a little bit more about that give us a high-level overview of what exactly that is? Sure, the laws themselves are the laws of value, compensation, influence, authenticity, and receptivity. The law of value is really all about making the buying experience so extraordinary for that other person that they feel as though they receive much more than what they paid for, which they did in terms of the actual value which is different from price right? Price is a dollar figure, value is the sort of relative worth or desirability of a thing of something to the end-user or beholder. What is it about this thing, this product, service, concept that brings so much worth or value to you that you will willingly exchange your money for it and feel great about it. It's like going to a restaurant and maybe it's a high price restaurant, and the bill is a high bill but the deliciousness of the food, the presentation, the exquisite service, the ambiance, the way the wait staff takes care of you, and makes you feel, every single thing about that restaurant is just wow. So you may have paid $150 or $200, but you come away feeling like a couple $1,000! So you got more than what you paid for and yet the restaurant owner, obviously, their costs are less than what they charge for the food. So they made a very nice profit themselves. So the law of value is all about providing that exquisite experience so the other person feels great about it, and you make a great profit as well. The law of value says that your income is determined by how many people you serve, and how well you serve them. So it's not enough for the restaurant owner to have, you know, one customer, right? They obviously need to serve or impact the...
Meet Rock: With three decades as a life coach and self-made millionaire, Rock Thomas inspires people to live a life on their terms. From humble beginnings that started out on a farm just off the island of Montreal, Rock Thomas rode to the top to become a self-made millionaire, best-selling author, and host of the top-rated podcast, Rock your Money, Rock your Life. For years, Rock traveled the world to study with Deepak Chopra, Anthony Robbins, Jack Canfield, Robert Kiyosaki, and more. With over 42 streams of income, Rock's mission is to teach others how to become financially free and live an epic life on their terms. How does one scale a business to get to 42 different levels of income? Well, one at a time. You just do them kind of every six months, I guess for 21 years. But the reality is once you figure out what the system and processes are to do things, you're basically looking for talent. So I'm actually working on my 43rd stream right now, which is the solar business and I have a current small organization that does $10 million a year of sales. We're going to scale that in 2021 to $100 million, using the system and processes that I have done in my past businesses. So it's really about finding talent, creating a manual for training because most people stumble in the training area, they don't know how to do it, and then making sure you have the Empire builders and the Empire protectors. The protectors are the finance people, the systems, the processes and guarding the money and the builders are the marketing and salespeople. So you're probably wearing hats on both ends which is frustrating because there's not one person I've met that flows in both of those dynamics. We were all meant for something and that's why we do assessments, the disk model, you may have heard of things like that, figure out which team you're on. Are you in the offense team or the defense team? Let's put you in the right place and let you flourish and then the offense doesn't have to worry about defense and vice versa. Let's circle back to the training and creating a manual for training. Where do you see entrepreneurs failing in that area? So when you get to be 58 like I am, you have gone through every trial and error and eventually, I decided to invest money in getting the experience from other people. I tried everything myself, but I got exhausted. So you know, you buy a book for 20 bucks, you get somebody with 20 or 30 years of experience, you take a course you get the same thing. What I learned is that a process called me, we, they. The biggest mistake that small entrepreneurs do is they work until they're working 60-70 hours a week, and then they can't take it anymore. They find somebody like their unemployed cousin or their neighbor's daughter or whatever, and they go help me out with some admin stuff. But they're so busy, that they don't train them properly. They do a poor job because they weren't trained properly, and then the solopreneur goes, "Nobody can do it like me." They Pat themselves on the back, they tell their spouse, their family how awesome they are and everybody else in the world just doesn't get them. Understand that business model, and that they have to do everything on their own. They play a little bit the martyr sometimes and then eventually they get burnt out over time. The solution is a step by step process of training called me, we, they. What is me, we, they? So you do your own sales? And can you do it? Like are you making a living? Yes. Right. So what you would do in that sales process, whatever it is, on the phones, are you sending emails or you're talking to people at networking events or you're on Zoom call. Whatever it is, you need to have the person you're going to hire that either has great sales experience, ideally, already, six-figure income earner, because you don't want to necessarily start from the bottom, because that will be a long cycle, they need to witness you doing it. So in one of my...
Meet Amanda: Amanda is an award-winning international speaker and trainer who is passionate about supporting vision and mission-driven entrepreneurs learn how to communicate more effectively and deepen relationships in their network. She combines her unique experience from over 20 years in corporate education and direct selling spaces to deliver and facilitate powerful and transformative training and coaching to her clients. The loves of her life, or her husband, three boys, and three dogs. What experiences in your past ultimately led you to do what you're doing today? For me, it really started back when I was in high school. My middle school and high school years were a bit tumultuous, I didn't have a great time at home. We had a couple of moves and I just never really felt like I fit in anywhere, except for my ceramics teacher's classroom. When I would go into that classroom, he just created this safe space and it was like I could take off my energetic armor and just be me. He helped me feel seen and heard and helped me gain confidence at a time that I didn't have any. It was that experience, that I realized the importance of relationships, the importance of quality communication. Sadly, it took me a couple of years after high school to realize what an impact he had on my life. I remember the day that I realized that and thought, "You know what, I'm gonna go back to high school and visit him and thank him and just let him know that he made a difference in my life." I kid you not hours later, I found out that he had died in a car accident, I never had the chance to thank him. He was just a major reason why I went into teaching and in doing that, I realized I have this love of facilitating connections, whether it be a person to person connection, a connection to some new content outside of you, that makes a difference, or a connection to something within. So that really was the driver in the start to why I do what I do today. How does marketing coordinate with sales and how are they different? And when you look at traditional prospecting and sales versus really building a relationship with someone. Speak to that a little bit if you can. Absolutely, I started off my sales experience when I got involved in a direct sales company and I started my direct sales company like I'm sure many other people do. I loved the product, and I wanted to make a difference and share it with other people and did not necessarily have a great experience with sales and you know, it was to share your message next, next, next, and eventually, you'll get it Yes. It just didn't feel good to me and I didn't like the way that I felt, I didn't like the way that other people responded and it just never felt authentic to me. So when I discovered this concept called relational marketing, it really resonated with me. When we deal with traditional sales, and it's all about learning a little bit about the person, spending a lot of time talking about what you can give them, and then spending even more time overcoming objections. It seems like more of a convincing type of experience. With relational marketing and prospecting, it's spending a lot of time, in the beginning, developing a relationship, building trust, and then through that, discovering and uncovering a need. By that point, that trust is there and the relationship is built, so it's a very easy transition into the sales conversation. It's more authentic, it's more service-based and for me, that was what really mattered in making the difference. So let's talk about referrals. If a business owner isn't getting the referrals that they want, what would you recommend they do? Yeah, so I spent a lot of time networking, and one of the things that I teach is actually building more of a referral base for your business, because the act of getting a referral from somebody, you're borrowing somebody's trust, right? Like if you've got this interesting connection and...
This week, I've got no guest, it's a solo cast. I'm going to be talking to you about building a blog that provides real value. The Importance of having a blog? I want to dive into the importance of writing a blog. I mean, what is a blog at the end of the day? What I want to share is that a blog is literally fuel for the search engine fire. It's giving you more content to share on social media, it's providing and proving your expertise. Studies have indicated that businesses that are actively blogging acquire more customers because they have a stronger brand presence online. It ultimately allows you to level the playing field and helps you to get to know your target audience and it helps your target audience to get to know you. The Keystone Click Blog: I look at our Google Analytics, I often will break it up into the different segments of the site and figure out what kind of elements of our site are driving the most traffic. Historically, there is a blog post that continues to show up as one of the top-visited pages on our website. Now, what's fascinating is that this post was written in 2014. So this blog post was written by one of my team members. It likely took her maybe about three hours, that's on average, what we budget per blog post, to do a little research and writes and then published it, and now today, it still drives traffic to our site. What Should you Write About? First and foremost, start with the top questions that are asked of you, from your customer base when you're in that discovery phase when you're getting to know someone from a networking standpoint, even established clients that you have. Anytime someone is asking you a question, just write it down. Do that exercise for a week and it will give you a ton of ideas for what to write about. The reason you want to do this is that oftentimes, questions are what is being entered into search engines, people often are searching a question to find an answer or solution. So if you're writing questions, or answering questions as a form of your blog content, is going to help elevate your opportunity to be found in the search engines. Conducting Interviews: It's no different than a podcast but you could do a written interview, like if you were interviewing someone for a written publication of sorts. The beauty of doing this is one it gives you a lot of content that you don't need to really polish up because you can simply transcribe the conversation. Also if you have a guest that you are interviewing or you're highlighting someone else's expertise, they're likely going to share that content with their audience, which extends the reach of your blog, on your site. The 80-20 Rule: 80% of the content that you create should be considered evergreen content. What that means is, it is a value to your audience today and tomorrow, and it was valuable yesterday. So it has a longer shelf life. Referencing that blog post that I talked about when I opened up, it was written in 2014, it is still relevant content today, therefore it is still providing value, it is still bringing visitors to our website. So identifying information, that is your expertise that will work for a long time, as opposed to saying, "Hey, we've got a special going on that ends on Friday," that is considered time-sensitive content. Leveraging your Team and Partners: If it's more than just you or even if you have resources, partners that you work with, they all have different areas of expertise. Ask them what types of questions they're being asked, and understand their expertise a little bit. Maybe you take the approach of answering the questions that are being asked, but taking the interview approach and interviewing your team and partners to get the solid answers Identify what your Core Offering is: Identify what your core offering is, and then make a list of the eight types of questions that people could potentially ask related
Meet Cheale: Cheale is the CEO and visionary rabbit of Visual Caffeine and for 25 years has stayed true to her authentic self and worked exclusively through her branding agency to help clients magnify and broadcast their message. Currently, visual caffeine continues to bring companies and communities’ goals to fruition, not only by building messages and magnifying voices but by building and magnifying a relationship. Let's talk about Instagram a little bit. What is one of the biggest mistakes that people are making on Instagram? Honestly, it's amazing to me, it seems to be the same mistake people have been making since Instagram started. It's the over promoting! People tend to stay really imbalanced with the amount that they're driving really quality-driven content that feeds their credibility, feeds their brand, and instead, they make their channel about sales. What are a few ways for a company to put their brand out there to exemplify their brand in social media? I honestly think it's two C's, it's content and consistency. Being consistent about who you say you are and who you are trying to be out there in the world and being perceived in an authentic way. But then also putting out quality content that you know your target market would be interested in and freely give it, don't hold back. So let's talk about the websites a little bit. What mistakes do companies make with their website that affects the user experience? First off, people approached the website, a lot of times as just kind of this online brochure, that is how the website started. I was in the midst of the web boom, that's when I started my company and it was all about making your website this online brochure like it was so great to even have a website. But now and for a long time, your website needs to be this fluid, organic space that you're nurturing your users that are coming in, because that glimmering back button is always there, and you have a very short period of time that you have to pull them in. Once they get there, they want to be pulled into a culture that is your brand, want to find what they are seeking and why they're there. So they want to be understood, they want to find what they were looking for when they found you. If you don't quickly give that to them, you are going to lose them as fast as they came in. Part of that is making things as easily communicated as well. I like the term "frictionless as possible", meaning that they have the least amount of steps to get what they want, and also for you to get a sale with them. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? Well gosh, I've had so many! I basically built my business on networking and relationship and I would say, it is one of the best ways to grow your business organically. I mean, yes, we would love our businesses to grow at an exponential speed. But to have relationships to build loyalty amongst groups of people, and to nurture that over time, and as well as that adds the circle is just an amazing thing, and I've been that is how I've grown for over over 25 years. But I would say my best networking experiences have been recently when I got involved with Highbury. It's an organization that was actually a co-working space in San Francisco. I read about Grace, who had started the organization several years ago, but when the pandemic happened, it was solely in San Francisco. When the pandemic happened, I was like, "Oh, I wonder if they have created a virtual space," and she has successfully created such a community of women and trust in her circle with everyone who is a member, and she did open it up into a virtual space. Ever since I've joined that community, I've just had these amazing connections with very like-minded women and I've actually even pulled some other people in my own network over there because I thought that they would love the experience as...
Meet Simon: Simon is the CEO of Strategy Sprints, Europe's leading remote growth agency. His global team of certified strategy sprint coaches do only one thing: they double the revenue of service-based businesses in 90 days. Simon also teaches growth strategy and select business schools and hosts The Strategy Show podcast. Can you just tell us a little bit about what certified strategy sprint coaches is? Sure, so we coach business owners, small business owners into having more freedom, more impact, and more revenue. Our goal is in 90 days of coaching to have them double their revenue or at least significantly move forward to fast track their growth goals. In this funky year, it's quite a challenge, but we are doing really well. Let's talk a little bit about goals. Your statement is that goals are a bad thing, why is that? You know, today in my city, Vienna, we just had a terror attack in the middle of the night out of nowhere. So the first thing is you check if your family is safe and if your friends save, etc. Whatever goals I had for these months are not helping me at all in this real-life situation. But the systems that I have in place limit how far we are going to fall down. So you never raise to your high goals, but you only fall as low as your systems are. For example, your systems can be your morning routine, who picks up the kids, your communication systems, your decision-making system. So my wife and I, we had to decide how do we do that, kids in school kids not in school? Which meetings do we delete? etc. So all the goals that we have are just for sunny times, and entrepreneurship is not about sunny times, it's an all-weather sport. So you need systems that help you especially cope with the bad weather and this year has taught us a lot about that. You need systems much more than you need goals. Having said that I just posted today my goals on LinkedIn publicly, so I like to have goals. But even that it's a system of telling the public what my goals are, because it will keep me accountable, and it will keep me rolling. It will also create some emerging properties that are super nice. For example, today in the morning, I posted that one of my goals is to hire a video editor. Two hours later, somebody wrote to me "Hey, I know somebody can I introduce you?" So even the goals I have, I use them as a system. The system of setting up the goals at the beginning of the month, of communicating them, of delivering them, and at the end of reviewing the amount and setting up the new ones and again communicating the new ones, because it creates more connection and a better and more truthful relationship. But in hard times you need systems more than goals. So let's look at 2020, which is the year of disruption. How can businesses survive and thrive throughout this year? This is a special year, we've never had a year like this. So the only thing that we all have in common is that nobody knows what's going on. So markets are shifting, and of course, cash crunch everywhere. Everybody has some form of cash crunch, but also massive opportunities are arising. We have this coaching program for business owners and the dozens of people I hear about because every Monday there's a coach meeting, and they tell me how business owners are doing. So I am out of fulfillment, I am the CEO now, and I don't do the coaching myself. But every Monday I coach the coaches so we go through every single business owner in our programs, and check the main three numbers: the revenue, the customer satisfaction score, and the retainment rate. So every Monday I see these numbers, I see the challenges, I see the problems, and I see the solutions. There is a way to grow even now, but it means re-shifting. It means you cannot just go on as if nothing happened, you have to embrace the current reality around you really think from the customer about how is their word right now changing and what do they need now. And you really need to change your...
Meet Adam: Adam is a managing director and MGA, a specialized commercial real estate firm structured to support the growing needs and concerns of occupiers of commercial real estate. Adam provides expert consultation and analyzing and executing solutions aimed to reduce their client's overall facility expenses while maximizing workplace efficiency and productivity. Never representing institutional landlords, MGA is one of the few firms that eliminates any conflict of interest from representing tenants and landlords. So you are in Washington, DC. What makes that region special to you? I think a lot actually. So my family has been in this area, we actually just found a newspaper article from earlier this year about my great great grandfather. It's just a story about him when he came to Alexandria, Virginia, in 1875. So we've been here for such a long time. I've got a lot of history and a couple of different stories. My great grandmother has a post off is named after her, we've got schools named after her family. We're not from a whole lot of money or anything like that, but it was just community involvement with both the civil rights movement and just general activity in mentoring younger people. So it's been a great region and area for me and it's been my second home for a long time. About eight to nine years ago, I moved here permanently. So let's talk about commercial real estate right now. What has the pandemic done and what does it mean for commercial real estate in the future? Yeah, I think that it's no secret, a lot of people are having success working remotely. Now, whether or not that means more business, they're going to go 100% remote, I don't think from the executives I'm speaking with, I don't see that happening, especially to those businesses that have a good number of employees. They're still going to have an office presence for the most part. You might have the four people per thousand square feet now, I mean, does that drop down to two or three people? How many people are going to fit into your office and how much is it going to be utilized? Still, the question that I think a lot of executives are wondering is, what does that mean for their footprint and what does that mean for their operations? So I think most executives are still asking those questions amongst their employees, and we're helping them create a strategy to offer their real estate based on some of those answers to the questions. So let's circle back to relationships here a little bit. How do you manage the new relationships as well as the old ones? Yeah, my life is based on relationships, and cultivating relationships. What I do is I keep a bit of a tracker, in terms of understanding the relationships that I'm building every year, and I'm adding on to it. I'm a member of a couple of different network marketing organizations. As you know, when we used to go out and shake hands, meet people and collect business cards, instead of just simply putting in the pile, and then you know, maybe in a few years, you ring them up and say, "I need some help with something," I try to create a system to where it's more intentional. I've got a top 100 list of people that I like to keep in touch with who aren't prospective clients of mine, but they're just referral partners. They're people that can help grow my business and then I can also help grow their business or they're your trusted advisors to where, if my client needs a referral, they're on that list. Then throughout the year, I'm making sure that I'm reaching out to those people, once a quarter, in different ways. Sometimes it's an email, sometimes it’s a call, sometimes it's a handwritten note or some sort of physical mailing to those people, just to make sure that we're staying in touch, and I'm staying Top of Mind with them. Also to really take that networking meeting that generally a lot of people don't get a lot of value from, and make sure that you extract all the value from that by...
Meet Kate: Kate Paine works with executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals to develop their brand and share their stories which differentiate them from their competition in the marketplace. She's an expert on using LinkedIn as a powerful personal branding tool and discovering an individual's story which makes her expertise unique in the world of online promotion. Kay volunteers her time training members of the US Special Forces on how to use LinkedIn as they transition out of their military career. So personal branding is a space that you support on LinkedIn. When when you discuss or talk about identifying your personal brand, what does that look like? And why is it so important to know what your personal brand is? Well, the personal brand piece is really something that you sort of need to self identify with. I think a lot of people when they hear the term "personal brand" or "personal branding," I think they have this notion that they're going to go around and sort of like shake someone's hand and say, "Hi, I'm Kate Payne, and my personal brand is," and you fill in the blank. That's not what it is at all. The personal brand is really similar to that other marketing term we love, it's like your unique selling proposition or unique value proposition. Except I prefer the person the term personal brand because I think that when you're thinking of a platform like LinkedIn, a lot of people see LinkedIn as a quote-unquote, personal branding platform. So it's a way for you to kind of consider your expertise. Your personal brand is essentially your reputation, and your reputation is made up of your values and your integrity, certainly your professional expertise. So really understanding your personal brand and how you're going to message that via your personal LinkedIn profile is really important. Then I add a component to that, which is a personal story, which helps make your personal brand more personalized, and really true to who you are, and helps you sort of creating that unforgettable feeling in someone's mind when they meet you because they know your brand and they know your story. You're now more unforgettable, so they'll remember you going forward. I'm the type of person that's like, "Here are all the facts." That's my storytelling and it's not that I don't want to, I feel awkward telling the world my story. How do you help people overcome that? So that's, that's sort of my niche that's sort of my superpower is I pull from my journalism, marketing, and PR background. When I interview a person I'm working with, I really kind of go back to, "Alright, so how did you get it, why did you want to become a realtor?" or, "Why did you go into the military, and then decide to get out of the military and go into being a financial advisor?" So there's this little nugget and I call it a nugget of your personal story that you can kind of identify and write about in like a short paragraph. So it's not the story from the standpoint of this long bio, you know, dirty laundry kind of thing. It's like you're taking this little slice of a life story or that story nugget. For example, when I have people kind of identify what that might be, is when you literally look at your LinkedIn profile, I want that to really stand out in the about section which used to be the summary and that's the most read section of one's profile. So for example, on my profile, I start out with like, the first line is I was an avid news junkie in eighth grade. Then I go into like my internship at CBS News and then I kind of say, I learned how to become a storyteller, and now I help people find their own. So it's like, I've taken that nugget and I've also made it relevant to what I do now. so that then sort of tying it all together and it's not like this all about my story thing, it's just a little slice of life. A lot of people when they start their about section in their LinkedIn profile, they don't really know what to do. So some people either ignore it
Meet Nicole: Nicole started her first entrepreneurial journey in 2007 with her husband. They decided to start an organic farm & micro-brewery in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. During the seven years that they ran Acadian Farms & Brewery, she was in charge of all things marketing- everything from events to social media to website design. Learning + doing everything on her own, Nicole created an SEO-friendly website that reached #1 on Google and utilized the power of social media and influencer outreach to get featured in prominent publications like The Oregonian, Portland Monthly, and The Seattle Times, as well as popular craft beer blogs. So let's talk about marketing because this is obviously your world. I know that you do a lot with marketing plans as we do as well. But how would you recommend that small business owner get started with a marketing plan? So that's like, the biggest kind of problem I see when I work with a lot of different business owners. They have ideas, and they have a little bit of a plan, and then maybe they have some people kind of helping them, but there's no overall cohesive strategy. So that's where we start and it kind of starts with your foundation, like, what are your goals? Who are your potential customers? Where are they hanging out? What are their struggles? It doesn't have to be like super overwhelming, once you kind of even just start writing everything down, pulling all of that information out of your head, looking at a calendar, and again, knowing who your customers are, and where they're hanging out online, or what their hobbies are. Just really starting to brainstorm all those ideas helps create a plan and an effective plan, and they leave feeling so less stressed. I was working with someone last week and she goes, "I am just so excited to finally have a marketing plan!" So that's what I love doing, and a little bit of planning really, really goes a long way. One of the things that I've learned is, even though you have a plan, it may not work out the way that you want it to, it's a lot easier to adjust when you have a plan versus trying to make changes when you have nothing fleshed out. Yes, totally. A lot of them will work out their strategies and just put their notes down all that and like a Google Drive folder, which is super easy, or you know, people can use Dropbox or whatever. But being able to refer back to that, as you said and be like and look like okay, maybe we need to shift like this isn't working or like, you know, we all just went into lockdown again, like how can we adjust where necessary, but having a place to look and kind of keep track really just really helps. So what are some of the most common things that you're coaching your clients on right now? So a lot of it is this planning that I've been talking about. Some are a little bit further along and then so it's just really trying to figure out which channels are best for them. Then we start exploring different ways to reach their ideal customers, whether it's, one of my clients just had a big challenge within a Facebook group, and it went really well, she got so many sales, and then another one is planning to expand her YouTube channel because that's where her potential clients are and spend a lot of time. So it's really just getting that plan, and then getting even more granular about where we're gonna execute this and then going into best practices with that, and their schedule, and then just kind of holding them accountable as well. We have so many things when we're running a business so just having that little bit of accountability is super helpful. Your LinkedIn profile says you offer simple marketing strategies. So can you elaborate on the use of the word simple and what are some simple ways that other small businesses can market themselves? Yeah, totally. So yeah, in my bio, you know, it mentioned that my husband and I ran a small business for seven years. It was a farm, so...
Meet Rocky: Rocky is a certified profit first professional who was shocked to learn most business owners don't look at their financial reports. Most business owners are not accountants and don't want to be. When he realized how much of a problem this was, he knew his purpose was to help business owners be profitable. Why do business owners struggle to create profitable businesses? First of all, accountants don't even know how to create profitable businesses, right? They know how to do taxes, they know how to put all the transactions where they belong, according to a formula that says, this is how we do things, this is generally accepted accounting principles. So there's really nobody focused on teaching or helping business owners to understand profitability. That's why I think so many of them struggle, the system I use is from Mike Michalowicz, he wrote the book Profit First. He is a serial entrepreneur, he thought he did it right, sold his companies walked away with a lot of money, and then lost it all, you know, the quintessential thing and it's because he struggled with this just as much as everyone else did. Then he came up with this idea of when we look at things, we're given the wrong formula and if you use the wrong formula, you're going to have the wrong results. So the formula your accountant will tell you is sales minus expenses equals profit. Where is profit in that formula? At the end, it's a leftover, it's something you find out at tax time. You go to your account, he goes, "Congratulations, you're profitable, here's your tax bill!" And the first question is, "Where is that cash?" Then they just laugh at you and they go, "You spent it." Mike said that's broken let's fix that. Let's do sales minus profit equals expenses. So we change the whole way we think about business, because we take our profit first, upfront because your business plan said you were going to be profitable. Well, why not take the profit upfront, remove it, and then learn to spend less. I think too often business owners, are told you got to spend money to make money and that's not necessarily true. Why is the bottom line far more important than the top line? So you've heard this so many times where people who've made millions upon millions of dollars and gone bankrupt. The saying we have is, "The top line is vanity, the bottom line is sanity, and cash flow is reality." What that basically means is, I don't care how much money is coming in. If more money is going out than is coming in, you're never going to win the game. You can't grow your way to profit if it's costing you more than what you're selling it for and that's why the bottom line is so important. The problem is, and it's kind of where we started this, if I wanted to know your top line, you can go look at your bank account and go, "Hey, I had a bunch of sales, look at all the money that came in." But if I said to you, "What's your bottom line?" It's very hard to figure that number out, you don't really know. All you know is I have money in my bank, or I don't have money in my bank, and if you don't have money in the bank, you run out and you get more sales, or you do collections. But it's really a struggle if you don't know what that bottom line is. As we talked about before, most business owners may not know until their accountant tells them four months after the year is over. That's a problem and that's why you've got to create systems and processes, and go in and figure out how much is my bottom line really? And am I appropriately charging for my products? And where is my profit coming from? That's something that even large companies don't have the answer to, is where is profit coming from? So if a big company with a CFO and all these big systems can't figure it out easily, it's really hard for the little guy. What exactly does a certified profit first professional do? So basically, what I do is, I serve with one simple goal to help you be profitable. The system that...
Meet Ann: Ann is the owner of reCollect2 Company and creator of the reCollect2recycler, a recycling receptacle used in hospitality and corporate office settings. Manufactured in Wisconsin, you can find her products, specifically in hotel guest rooms and various businesses and organizations in 49 states throughout the US. She's had the privilege of working alongside some of hospitality's most recognizable brands. But her goal has always been to offer a product that's functional, motivational, and impactful. So why don't we start a little bit about talking about being in the hospitality space and how this year has affected your business? Well, dramatically, like any business and travel, and tourism and attractions. So yes, I mean, the industry is hurting as a whole right now. But it's really important to notice that there are some markets right now, throughout the US that are seeing an uptick, they're getting busier, and they're doing better. Right now the overall goal is to restore that confidence in travel again, and I know that we will get there. But I would say the immediate need right now is to focus on just keeping hotels open, like literally keeping their doors open, because it's really a hard time especially coincidentally, today is the election and a lot of things are actually surrounded around what will transpire there. So our industry has been in a holding pattern, it's been hurting, but I just feel confident that we will see a light at the end of the tunnel here. It's also cool to kind of put out there that even though all of these hotels that we might see in like our backyard, or our surrounding communities, they have these globally recognized brands, but we need to remember that several of these properties are actually owned by small businesses, like ours. I mean, many are family-owned. So yes, we are hurting, but I do see that we will see some things moving here, hopefully, in the near future. Your business has a big emphasis on sustainability. Why should this topic be important to businesses and organizations in general? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that there's immense value within businesses that really choose to incorporate sustainability. And that's it any length or level big or small, whether it's environmental or social. I think that most of us have this inner voice that wants to contribute to a greater good and find ways to give back to something other than just ourselves. So I think that it's important that we can embrace small, incremental, and actionable steps that we can take and conquer larger issues. So this carries over into business. And yes, we definitely see how businesses want to operate more efficiently. Whether that's reducing waste or other operational tactics that they're putting in place. But it's also important not to overlook the people aspect as well. I think now more than ever, we're connecting the dots and we're recognizing how this mindset and social sustainability, their commitments are directly and positively impacting and serving the well-being of the people that make up our communities. Speaking of people, you've been compelled to bring awareness to human trafficking within your business, can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah it's a big issue, and I'll be honest, especially lately, it seems like there's been more conversation about it, which there are pros and cons to that, for sure. But I'll kind of start back up a little bit that I first heard about human trafficking, probably five or six years ago. Long story short, I was very triggered about the staggering statistics that I was hearing and seeing just from a global aspect, but nationally, and then even here in Wisconsin. So that was really my first glimpse into hearing about human trafficking. At first, I'll be honest, it's really easy to become overwhelmed by just the sheer magnitude of this crime, and I'm talking about just the number of people that we're finding out are actually enslaved....
Meet Lorraine: After spending too many years in corporate America, Lorraine said goodbye to the bureaucracy, glass ceilings, and bad coffee. Today you can find her at Round Peg, a digital agency located in Carmel, Indiana building smart marketing strategies for businesses who want to use internet marketing tools to grow Laureen is also the host of More than a Few Words, a weekly marketing conversation for business owners. In her spare time, she loves to travel and take photos. So you actually started your agency in more of the traditional sense but migrated to digital. How and when did you know it was time to make that transition? I would love to tell you that I strategically planned that out that I saw this whole digital thing coming and I anticipated it, but no. Actually what happened was, we were doing small business marketing and I hired a couple of young professionals who were like, you know, you need to take a look at this Facebook thing. This is going back 2007 or whenever, you know, right in that time frame. We started looking at it and what we realized, as we were looking at it is we were working with small businesses who didn't have a lot of money. We saw this, wild west where there weren't a lot of rules and there were a lot of opportunities to make a big splash on a small investment. That’s what really intrigued me so much about the early days of digital marketing. It's gotten a lot more static since then, but in the beginning, it was a great place to try out so many different things. One morning, I woke up and realized that that was most of my business and I've never looked back, I really enjoy it. Why don't you share a little bit about some of the lessons that you learned during this transition? I think the biggest lesson that I learned it took me a little while to figure this out was that the basics of good marketing, knowing who your customer is, knowing what their pain points are, knowing what your objective is when you have a conversation with them. A conversation can be a television ad, it can be a direct mail piece, or it can be a social share on Instagram. Starting with who your customer is, and applying all the same strategies of traditional marketing to digital marketing makes your campaigns much more effective. I said earlier that it was kind of the Wild West, but as digital marketing has matured, understanding that I have to go back to my roots as a classic marketer and apply that same strategy makes the content much more effective, makes it drive the results, and makes everybody a lot more satisfied with the content we're putting out and the results that we're getting back. So can you help our listeners remove any fear that they have around networking by sharing one of your most successful or favorite networking stories? So I love networking, I have to admit that when I first started the business, I was a bit of a networking junkie. I didn't have a lot of customers and didn't have a lot else to do so I was running around any, any, and all networking events until I kind of create a little strategy there. But one of my favorite stories is I was at BNI when I first got started. And I thought that was a great way to learn the basics of networking. One of the rules and BNI is that if you can't attend an event, you have to invite someone to take your place. I called a friend of mine who was a marketer. So I thought she'd be a perfect replacement and she couldn't come. But she said, "You know, I got this friend, Eric and he is trying to get around to all the BNI chapters in the city. I'll hook you up, he'll take your place. And so I was like, great. And we chatted on the phone, and Eric took my place." So I wrote him a thank you note and we went off on our merry way. Two months later, I'm at a different networking event and I'm walking through a doorway. Coming through the doorway exactly the same moment is this very large gentleman. I mean, he's built like a football player. S I do what I
Meet Kirby: She is the founder of a PR and digital media firm The Impact Kind, based in Michigan whose clients had been featured in Business Insider, Parents Magazine, Thrive Global, and other mediums to increase lead sales and brand awareness. She's got some amazing tips and resources on her website at www.impactkind.com Let's talk a little bit about what you did before starting your own firm, and how networking has impacted your life in corporate America. I worked in sales at SME Society of Manufacturing Engineers, which focuses on conferences and events for the manufacturing community. But we were starting lots of new products and new industries like getting into aerospace and defense. So I was kind of the new product girl, I sold everything that was new there. Building relationships was a key component of how I got my job, and then how I made relationships in order to grow all the new products that we were creating. So it was lots and lots of fun and it was a great experience. Because I was really the only woman in that area, but it was awesome. So I made a lot of cool connections. That led to the next products that we were creating so we had speakers, and we had exhibitors based on meeting those initial contacts. So it was a great segue into what I do now. How did living abroad ultimately inspire entrepreneurial growth? I had a great opportunity to move to Shanghai, China. I was able to see so many different kinds of pop-ups and different ex-pats from different countries, start new businesses. For me, at the time, I was having my babies raising my family. But being surrounded by entrepreneurs that were really making it like, we have a friend who was a fellow coworker, at Ford Motor Company, an American company, so that's what took us out there. But he stopped working at Ford, he started Mobike and he's like a billionaire. He's got different slip stations all over the world now and he's still breaking into industries. It sounds simple, you have bikes that you can rent and it's kind of like the American version of the Zipcar. It's really just finding where can you solve a problem. He saw that lots of people can't really get on the metro, and there are lots and lots of them in China, and take your bike and everything else you need. So he created different stations where you can rent bikes and put them back. Just because we were surrounded by so many kinds of successful entrepreneurs and successful business owners that did leave corporate and decided to try something different, it gave me that inspiration that hey, you know, I can do that, too. Can you share how making friends all over the world has helped you and really can help anyone that is interested in going into business? I love to travel. So that's like my thing, right? My husband, he loves to travel to so our family, that's what we do. But when you travel, you get to learn that you have to trust people in like, very odd situations. Sometimes when you get off the plane you have to find the right taxi driver or you have the right person is going to take you to the hotel. Even in those small instances, you can learn so much about the culture, the area, and how to position yourself, because, in every business, you really want to focus on your audience. Who are you selling to? Who are you speaking to? I think when you learn a little bit more about where you are, like where you're going, when you're traveling, I think it's so important to learn a little bit about the culture from people that live there because you'll learn important things from locals. Then when you do that, you're going to be able to speak to other people that you meet around and not generalizing culture or a population, but just you'll have more of a background to really communicate more effectively with. So that's almost like creating any kind of avatar brand, you want to make sure that you are really speaking to your audience, or they would be more...
Meet Ruthie: Ruthie is a US Army veteran, wife, and mother to four young children. She currently runs a small content marketing agency called Defy The Status Quo, where they focus on bringing stellar content to their client’s marketing channels, specifically focusing on B2B Consulting and service companies in industries like supply chain and business development. To start, why don't you explain to our listeners, what is authority marketing. So authority marketing, at least the way that we execute it at DTSQ is a blend of content marketing and online PR. So in a lot of cases, what I typically see across the very wide span of the internet, is that you have people who do PR, they connect with people like you and they want to be on your podcast, they may do speaking engagements, they might also look at more traditional PR media, radio shows, and things. But then perhaps their own content spaces, things like their website, their social media channels don't quite match up with the person that they're presenting in all of these opportunities. So I perceive this as a gap in the marketplace. That's what we do, yes, we look at the different types of expertise showcasing opportunities, which are in abundance right now, because so many of them are virtual, which means location is no longer a barrier for speaking, for example. But also making sure that when somebody is intrigued by you from a podcast interview, or a speaking engagement, when they go look, research, and check out your website, and now they see your videos, and they see that you're really active on LinkedIn, or Instagram or wherever it is, all of those things now match instead of you presenting as a very strong and knowledgeable professional but having limited content yourself. Then the same goes vice versa, you have some people who create wonderful content, and would actually appreciate getting out there and kind of getting in the spotlight and using their personal brand to grow their business. But maybe they're not sure how they're not sure where to start. They don't want to figure it out themselves and so we help from both ends. Let's talk about increasing our marketability for guest opportunities. How can we do that? Well, that really boils down to leaning into what makes you unique. So that's something I talk about a lot like on LinkedIn is I talk a lot about authenticity, and especially in the b2b space. We talk about authenticity, but when you look at a lot of the brands, and whether it's b2b products, b2b services, or whatever it is, we're kind of stripped of what we would consider an authentic personality, a personality that a real person would have. That's not to say that big brands can't still embody that type of brand. It's just that too often we dilute our brands down to professional, friendly, and competent. When you look to your left, and you see professional, friendly, and competent, and you look to your right, and you see professional, friendly, and competent, how do you market it? So what that means is leaning into what makes you unique. For us as people, it's our stories, and it's our experiences. As a consultant, I have a vast amount of experiences that I can tap as it relates to my story, but also my authority, and therefore, my marketability. So for example, I've done two podcast interviews that related to my military service, one of them specifically related to my military service, as it's helped me as an entrepreneur. Now, that's not a story that everyone has, but you have stories that I don't have. But if I hadn't been able to talk to that specific podcast host about that story, that I was willing to share in its highs and lows, and therefore provide a great experience for his audience, I wouldn't have had that opportunity on his podcast. So leaning into the different stories, and one of my buzzwords for this year is intersectionalities, which I've picked up from working with some DENI folks on their content. But your...
Meet Chat: Chad is a Believer, Husband, Father of two teenagers, and lifelong rebel and rule-breaker. He empowers sales professionals to become the best version of themselves by focusing on their mindset, skillset, and toolkit. Before launching ScaleX.ai and Salesclass.ai, Chad believed that sales were fundamentally “a numbers” game. Although he still believes frequency matters, he is now convinced that Revenue = Frequency X Competency. Chad is passionate about creating systems that empower people from all walks of life and these days you’ll find him hosting the AI for Sales Webinar and Podcast on The Sales Experts Channel and C-Suite Radio. Let's talk about sales a little bit, specifically AI for sales. What is it and how does it help or hurt that relationship when it comes to conducting business? Yeah, it's an accelerator. So AI for sales stands for artificial intelligence. I, in fact, wrote the book called AI For Sales, How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Sales. I put that out at the end of 2019 and there have already been more than 5000 copies sold. So it's a hot topic, as you know, as people use their Alexa device to order food and groceries. Then all kinds of AI are coming out. I think a lot of people don't realize they're using AI in a lot of cases, but it's becoming more and more prevalent. So it can help or hurt your relationships, I'll give you an example: If you use an AI bot, let's say to connect with people on LinkedIn and social media if you program that bot to be extremely cheesy, non-heartfelt, and all you care about is yourself and let's say you move from five or six requests a day to connect with people up to 50 a day. Well, now you're at 10x the amount of insincerity. Whereas if you're someone like Nick Kabuto, who I've partnered with, on the marketing side, he sends out a message that starts with a clapping emoji and it says, "Hey, I've looked at your profile, you look like a really interesting person. I'd love to truly and sincerely get to know you." And that's it. Then when he gets a reply, he'll go in on his LinkedIn, and he'll do a video and go, "Hey, I'm Nick, I'm sitting at the fire pit," or, "I'm up in the mountains skiing," or whatever it is he's doing, he'll reply back. So it can accelerate trust and social capital, or it can completely rip it apart. You just have to be careful and learn from other people who use the technology in an effective and efficient way. What are some ways that you use AI to connect more deeply with others? Well, revenue equals frequency times competency is what a mentor of mine taught me 20 years ago, Skip Miller, who's been training sales and sales leaders for so long. So the frequency part is easy: Do More. More emails, more voicemails, more calls, etc. The competency part takes a while. So for me early in my sales career 25 years ago, I didn't have the competency yet. I'd never been through any sales training and so AI can accelerate the pace at which you connect with people through all the different channels. It's important that as you go, that you're investing an equal amount of time in understanding what it is you're saying and how you're connecting with people. So I think what happens is that AI puts more stress on the human to human relationship, then has typically been there from a sales capacity perspective. So interesting times that we're entering in today's day and age. So the automated connections on LinkedIn, at least the ones that I can tell, I find really annoying. But what you're saying really is you have to have a strong message that's extremely personal, or at least looks like it. Big time. It's at the end of the day, whether I physically type a message one to one, or I do one too many, it's still a string of zeros and ones, right? It's an email, it's a LinkedIn connection request, it's a LinkedIn follow up. If you have a high EQ (emotional intelligence), I think EQ starts to beat IQ in today's day and...
Meet Paul: Paul is the CEO and president of Griffin living a company that develops and operates Senior Living communities. Paul's career has been marked with awards, including habitat for humanity's builder of the year, the building industry associations builder of the year, the National Association of homebuilders, and the Pacific Coast builders conference for design. Paul has overseen a wide variety of real estate projects amassing a career total of over $4.5 billion. Can you share a little bit about what your passion is and how it drives your success? So for business, I've found through my career that individuals in business approach it in different ways. I think there is a very important aspect of business, which is, what do I really think beyond the pro formas, beyond the budgets, the market studies, and the information that we can get to make a decision about whether we're buying into a company, or in our case investing in a project that's being developed. I think the part of a passion that is really using all of the information through every source that I have into my conscious of my subconscious and saying, “I don't want to make just emotional decisions, but what's the full scope of everything that I know, to this point?” Then I ask how does that match with the pro forma, and the project opportunity that's been put in front of me? I think that if you take our passions and deeper understandings, and you pair them together with the facts that are in front of us, they will help us with the sensitivity analysis. That’s because no business, or venture ever finishes out with exactly the same cost and the same income and the same timing that you expect. There'll be problems that come up in between that you have to solve and there'll be opportunities that present themselves that you need to take advantage of. I think all of that and pulling together, you know, the rational part of us and the emotional part together and analyzing business every day. I think it’s important to pull together the rational part of us, and the emotional part of us to analyze business every day. I think that the passion that I have, is more, an acknowledgment that I like to use all of the information I have and all of the experience I have to in our case, look at development ventures. Why is it important to be a servant leader in both business and networking situations? When we think about effective management in business in the 20th century, we had a great understanding of the efficiency of the military model since we had just been through multiple wars. This type of leadership was similar to the military as in the thinking was done at the top and the people at the bottom followed orders. That was the way that American business really was approached all the way through the 1980s. In my mind, people that were born of my era and later who came of age in the 1980s started thinking that there are more opportunities, there are better ways we saw people around us at work, and there are better ways to get them motivated, wherever they are in business. I think that the way that business was approached successfully in companies, you know, we've seen turn on turn around backward from the top-down approach. Now businesses are much better run by starting at the lowest level that you can make the best decision with the most information. Then from the top, working with every level in a company to really understand what the goals and issues are to get a commonality of what we're trying to accomplish in a longer plan and a shorter plan. Then let the person at the lowest level tell us how they would think they can best solve the problems for today which allows them to be more passionate because they’re involved in picking the solution. They also get fulfillment when they solve whatever problems in front of them that day at the level they're at, and they're participating more so businesses are more effective. For instance, in real estate developments,...
Meet Corey Let's face it in the 21st century, everything rises and falls on leadership in our ability to motivate and inspire others to peak performance. Corey brings a one of a kind approach to driving employee engagement and customer relationships to unheard of levels. Corey's unique program will not only get your organization focused and fired up, but he will generate amazing levels of excitement, optimism, and enthusiasm throughout your company that will last for years to come. So what is the fastest way to build trust based on relationships with other people? The big thing that most people are afraid to do today is to actually trust other people. That's a great question you asked me because the thing about it is Lori, you're not going to trust me until I show you that I trust you first. We're all built with mirror neurons and mirror reactions so when I come up to you, and I show you that, hey, you know what, I trust you not just as a worker, not just as a family member, but as a fellow human being, I'm doing two things. Number one is I'm giving you a space where you can feel comfortable and appreciated. Then number two, what I'm doing is I'm building my own confidence, because what I'm saying is that you know what, Lori, if you're one of my employees, and I give you a really important task, and I trust you to complete it, and I don't get my fingers all involved in it, and I don't mess with your agenda. What I'm also saying is that I trust myself so that if you do happen to screw it up, then I know that I can fix it. When you do that, what you're doing is you're actually creating a space for people to feel trust. Trust isn't something that you lend to somebody, trust is an environment that you create. You can walk through life in one of two ways. You can say, you know what, people are gonna rip me off, people are looking to take advantage of me. Or you can say, you know, I believe that everyone is my friend. And if people don't perform the way I think they should, or if people don't act the way I should, I need to step into their space and feel what it is like, and feels like to be them. How can the Successful Thinker help us build lasting relationships with our families, co-workers, and customers? So the Successful Thinker is a story that I wrote, based on what I was seeing in the corporations that I work with. As a pharmacist, I have been doing this for 30 years working in a small pharmacy inside of large buildings like Walmart, and Kmart. What you would see is that the pressures from above from the company would grow and grow and grow. We want you to do more and more and more, and we want to give you fewer resources, fewer people, less authority, and so what would happen is that People literally would get sick with stress within these organizations. In fact, in 2008, I wanted to jump off a bridge, it was so stressful. What happened on this night in 2008, where I didn't care if I lived or died, I just happened to stumble into my son's room at about 2 am. He's five years old, and I just didn't know what to do because I didn't want to live anymore. Then I had a coming to Jesus moment where I said, “Do you really want this beautiful five year old to grow up without a father over some stupid job?” So I recognized if I was going to fix that problem, what I had to do was figure out not how to do more with less, but learn how to do more by becoming more. So how do you become more? The answer to that is you grow your influence, you expand what you're able to do through using other people. What I found was that for everything I hated to do, and everything that I sucked at, there was somebody that loved to do it and was great at it. So I just started lending authority to other people. What I found was that when you lend authority to other people, and you trust them, all of a sudden, you exponentially grow your impact, you exponentially grow your influence, and you become much bigger than just yourself. I can only...
Meet David Belman: David is a second generation home builder, a real estate broker realtor. He served as past president of the Metropolitan Builders Association and past president of the Wisconsin Builders Association, as well as a director at the National Association of homebuilders. David has won numerous industry awards, including the 2020 Emerging Leader Waukesha County, 2017 Waukesha Freeman Citizen of the Year and his firm has won the Top Choice Award for Best Home Builder for six years in a row. I keep hearing about Operation Finally Home, could you tell us a bit about it? Sure, I basically was at a builder Show in Las Vegas of all places. One of my suppliers offered to take me to a concert which was a benefit concert for veterans and I learned about a veteran that lost his legs in the war. His vehicle ran over an IED and his legs were crushed inside the vehicle and he had to pull his mangled legs from the wreckage. The vehicle was on fire, and the ammunition inside the vehicle was gonna blow up the whole vehicle so he used mangled legs to put the fire out which saved his whole battalion. He had just enough strength to pull himself out of the vehicle before he passed out and of course, he had to have his legs amputated. This is a guy who was going to serve his entire life in the military and that was taken away from them. So you've got a guy that's 30 or whatever that now is handicapped, has no career option at this point, dealing with depression, all sorts of things. This organization came along, found him and gave him a brand new, completely free home which totally changed his life. I just thought that was the most incredible thing. He was there at the event and I got to meet them. I was like, "man, I want to be a part of this, I want to be able to do this kind of thing." So I got involved and brought it to Wisconsin almost seven years ago. I was the first builder to commit to doing one here in Wisconsin, and I've done six homes already and I'm planning on doing my seventh one. It's been super gratifying and these are all great people. I never realized how difficult it is for veterans to return back, especially if they have injuries so this is one way to really help in a big way and make a big difference. What new things are you working on right now? I'm actually in the process of writing a book all about leadership which will come out into February. So it's leadership growth hacks for developing professionals and anyone that wants to improve their leadership skills. I've held a lot of leadership positions over the years and I've been compiling ideas and notes which I'm excited to get out there and share with people some of the tips that I've created and lessons that I've learned over the years. Obviously Young Guns is something major on the horizon as well, do you want to talk about that a little bit? Young guns is something that was an opportunity that was given, partly because of the operation Finally Home stuff. I had met Paul Neuberger who had seen some of the things I was doing, and we had a conversation because they do some charitable work. I was explaining how our charity works and then then his insurance company did some things for our cause. Later he reached out to me a couple months later and said, "Hey, I've got this really big idea and I would like you to be a part of it." The idea was to put on a really killer business development conference and he wanted me to speak. So we had some conversations, and it evolved into the Young Guns brand which we became business partners for along with Andy Wines. It went from being a conference to now, we've got an online show, we have quarterly events and some other things in the works. We have our first summit November 12th and we have 2 really great keynote speakers. The first speaker is Ryan Campbell who was the youngest gentleman to fly around the world. Unfortunately, after that completed he was flying and he actually crashed on a takeoff and he...
Meet Cierra Lueck: You know how so many Facebook groups are spammy, dead, or only the admin posts get high engagement. All that changes, when Cierra steps in with the C5 strategy. She helps business coaches build a highly engaged Facebook group community where people are excited to be sold to, and refer others by turning their brand into a movement. The C5 strategy: To transform businesses to transform lives. How can we use the algorithm to market our business better on Facebook? So the biggest thing to keep in mind with the algorithm is that it is an absolute beast. If you think about Google search and how you type something into the search field, and then it auto populates what's going to be typed next, and it gives you all these suggestions and half the time it's right. Facebook is right on the tails of the Google algorithm. With the Facebook algorithm, anything that you put in terms of what you're wording in your post or any kind of images, it actually has a smart capability where it knows what the images are. If your words do not line up with the images that you're posting, that's that's just one thing to keep in mind. A lot of people want to post images because of Instagram or other social platforms where images help boost it, but that can actually be a detriment when it comes to Facebook if the image has nothing to do with the information that you're sharing. So on Facebook, you want to make sure that you are very targeted and very direct with the kind of words that you're using so that you can actually reach your audience better. How do you use Facebook for business sales? Facebook ads are probably some of the most strategically placed out there. But that's only one area that you can actually utilize on Facebook to market your business. So when you're a new business owner going out into the market, trying to do lead gen, if you immediately jump to ads, but you haven't actually validated the messaging that you're putting out and you haven't actually validated the offer that you have with your market and you immediately jump to ads, you're going to end up spending a lot more in ad spend, than if you will validate that organically. Through organic marketing obviously, there's your personal profile and there's a lot of people who are in the conundrum of, "should I use one or should I use the other?" So they're thinking should I use my profile for business if I have a bunch of friends and family? Obviously if you're going to only keep it friends and family, the answer is no. But at the same time if you don't announce what you're doing in your business, how will anyone ever know to refer anybody to you so you definitely can utilize your Facebook profile. There's also Facebook pages which you can use to run ads or utilize organically. On your Facebook page, you can share information with your audience on there. The way that you would want to do that is you want to provide, either news or kind of entertaining information based around what your offer is so that people have a reason to come back and look at your page. Let's dive into groups a little bit more, it sounds like you've got some really strong strategies around how to use Facebook groups for business. The idea is that there are five Facebook group types for businesses that are actually profitable. So the first one is for paying clients only, where you become a paying client then you are put into a Facebook group. It's got some really great pros, it's also got a few cons like obviously a paid clients only group doesn't generate new leads for you. So you have to be going out there and you have to have a really great way to get new leads. But it is a great way to get people to connect around your business and around the offer. The second type that I coach people on is a free community which is the lead generating group. This type of group is great because when the community is built around your offer, and what you do, it actually helps to sell your...
Meet Cynthia Kane Cynthia Kane helps people enhance their lives and relationships by teaching them how to speak to themselves, others and their environment in a kind, honest and helpful way. She has taught over 50,000 people how to change the way they communicate through her best selling books, How to Communicate Like a Buddhist, Talk to Yourself Like a Buddhist, How to Meditate Like a Buddhist, her daily home courses and the intentional communication training program. How can you begin to change the way you communicate? You can begin to change the way that you communicate by starting to listen to yourself. So starting to pay attention to the way that you're communicating with yourself and others in ways that are making you feel more fearful or anxious, and starting to pay attention to that. Then really, the practice begins from there to pay attention to the language that you're using, and then seeing in that moment, if you can shift to start speaking in a more kind, honest and helpful way. So looking at it through a lens of suffering. I know that sounds kind of like an intense word, but really suffering in this instance means any discomfort or, lack, fear, anxiety, embarrassment, anything of those sorts. So the idea is really to help yourself and others suffer less with your communication. So if you can start to see through that lens, then most of your interactions will change. So is it really possible to change an interaction if it's just one person talking differently? It is, it really is because the phenomenal thing that you begin to see is that when you start interacting differently, others have no option, but to interact differently with you because you're no longer connecting in the same way. So they no longer know how to engage. You end up changing the conversation simply by coming to the interaction through a different lens or coming to it with this one to be kind, honest and helpful. Is this kind of that communication of what you're pushing out they're reflecting back? In the sense that when I talk about mirroring, it's more like acknowledging where the person is emotionally. It's not so much repeating what has been heard, but more acknowledging where the person is. So if somebody is sharing that they're really frustrated because they've turned in a project, and it didn't go well at work. Instead of trying to fix the situation or trying to push the person to feel differently, the mirroring aspect here is more just saying, "gosh, I can completely see how frustrating that is, I know that you've, you've been working really hard on that." What's what's the best way to get started with intentional communication? So it really is about understanding and knowing that it's possible to change your interactions and really start having types of conversations that you want to be having, and understanding that your words are powerful. So paying attention to the words that you're choosing will really change how everything unfolds for you because the way that we talk with ourselves really dictates how we communicate with others, and how we see the world. If you just imagine beginning there and starting to think of connecting with yourself in a way that's more intentional with your language, moving yourself more in the direction of what feels better for you as opposed to language that can have you feeling less than, or down. You really begin to create more intention throughout your day with your language, because then you have more of an anchor. Can you share one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I have to say that I used to fear networking, I would raise my hand at that. What I have found is that this one experience that I had really changed that for me. I went to an event here when I first moved to Washington DC, and I decided on a whim to go to this event that was happening at a gallery down the street. I didn't know anyone there, I just showed up with this feeling. I had...
Meet Ariel Kopac Ariel Kopac is a podcaster, professional speaker and business coach who focuses on mindset and limiting beliefs. As a Certified Myers-Briggs Practitioner, Certified Coach, and Certified Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner, Ariel is equipped to dig in and help her clients to identify the mental and emotional roadblocks that are hindering their success. Her coaching practice (and her coaching philosophy) is Harness Your Hindrance. Why don't you share with us the meaning or philosophy behind the name of your coaching business Harness Your Hindrance? So Harness Your Hindrance is really the philosophy. The meaning is in the name. If you find the definitions of each of those words, what it really means is to take control and make use of whatever is holding you back. And that's really at the core of what I believe. That you can't always remove the barrier or the obstacle. You can't always eliminate it. But you can always take control and make use of it. Sometimes your greatest hindrance can become your greatest strength if you learn how to harness it. What are some key practices that help people with shifting their mindset? Oftentimes it starts with just awareness of what your mindset currently is, and what you want your mindset to be, you're going to be different. Honestly, it's the little things that make the biggest difference. Simply identifying, where's my mind? Where's my focus, right now, what is my mindset, and I recommend it using what I call triggers. So having a key word, or even a movement, a phrase, a sound, something that when you are recognizing you're going down a negative mental pattern, or you're losing focus, or your mindset is in a less than empowering state, you might say, using a trigger, to just say, okay, we're gonna shift, I'm gonna shift out of this. Is there a mindset or mindset shift that is important to have when it comes to networking? I'll explain this one with a story. I was working in Newport Beach, California. And I was in charge of the training and development of financial advisors for a firm out there. And one of my advisors would come into the training classes, and I led a lot of training classes. And he would say to the new advisors, if you want to learn how to network, go with Ariel. I'm not a financial advisor, why are you telling them that and he said, you may not be a financial advisor, but you’re the best networker I've ever seen. And I said, well, thank you for the compliment. But I don't know how to teach that. So what do you mean? Networking isn't something that I strategize or think through. I was looking for potential great recruits that I would want in my training class but I was going in with an openness and enjoyment. I would find excuses to go networking. And I said, there's certain things I can teach people. But the part that I don't know how to teach is a spirit of curiosity. So that's the part that I go into every networking event with is just pure curiosity. And that's when I think you really find the opportunities and the unexpected wins, and those powerful connections. So when I think about a mindset when it comes to networking, it's a mindset of curiosity and a mindset of exploration, trusting that there's going to be something fun, exciting, new and intriguing that you're going to discover, and you don't know who you're going to discover it from or where you're going to find it, but it’s there. Can you share with our listeners, your most successful or favorite networking experiences you that you've had? I would say one of my favorite or most successful networking stories was actually from a group involving Toastmasters. We can think about networking groups or networking meetings, but when I think about networking, I'm just thinking about expanding my network. And so you don't have to go to a networking meeting, or be a part of a networking group per se, those are great ways, but not the only way to network, right. One of the groups
Meet David Splitgerber David is a franchise business owner who assists people in business ownership exploration through a discovery and education-based method, to help people to discover opportunities that are ideally suited for what they are seeking. David is on the Advisory board for PONG, an advisor for 40 Plus, and guest lectures at Marquette University on franchising. He is married and has coached their 2 boys in their sports for the last 15 years and is now retired from that endeavor. You're no longer the coach of sports, but you are a career ownership coach, what exactly is that? Something that most people don't, don't know exists. What I do is, I help people to explore, quite simply business ownership, and I specialize in the franchise and owners alliance end of things. And what I do is help people to explore. And what that means is first helping an individual get to know themselves. So it's a lot of conversations and meetings and assessments that I have individuals complete that we talk about to learn about the individuals. In other words, who am I? And what is my career bend? So it has some elements that kind of look like in an interview to some degree. The ultimate goal is to both have us on the same page, who am I? What am I about? What's my career been about? What do I like and dislike, and then helping them to also see the future. Helping them try to figure out what do I want my life to look like a year from now personally and professionally? Sounds like you do spend a lot of time in the franchise business a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about what types of businesses are franchise businesses? I think that's a great question because I think there's the a lot of people who have that kind of assumption or belief that it's food and that it's well you know, I don't want to be in the restaurant industry. But honestly, there's probably 50 or 60 to 80 different business industries. I mean, it's everything that you probably have walked past but never even noticed or considered or thought about that were businesses that are franchise. So I mean, there's things that are in everything from like travel, sports and recreation, home improvement, senior care services, children's products, children's services, automotive, employment and staffing, recruiting - there's franchises in that arena. Distributor ships, web or internet or it based businesses, pet related businesses for pet services, there's mobile businesses. So those just a few off the top of my head are some of the industries that are enfranchisement. Let's say I'm someone that's already in a job and I like what I'm doing, I want to keep it but is there anything that you can do to help on that side hustle type of things? Absolutely. That's a great point. And that's probably about 30% or so of the individuals that I talk with are that exact individual saying, I've got a job, I really like it. But I want additional income or something on the side. Or maybe eventually I'd like to go and do something. But is there a way for me to start something and then grow into it? So depends on what the individual is trying to accomplish. So bottom line, it's called semi absentee and there's some that are closer to absentee. And there's some that are kind of absentee, what I mean by that is less than five hours per week, where it's more of an investment, there's less opportunities in that arena. And those are, I'm going to say quite honestly, quite a bit higher investment, because obviously, you're hiring a lot of people to do all the tasks of the business. But yes, there are some where you can work anywhere from five to 10 to 15. At most, there's a few out there, that would be maybe 20 hours a week. So someone can absolutely keep their job in these franchises are set up that way. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? So first, I'll say I'm right there with everyone else. When I...
Meet Tommy Thompson Tommy Thompson is an accomplished entrepreneur, executive coach, and passionate teacher whose heart is to impact people for good and for God. After more than thirty years of owning and leading a wide variety of companies, Tommy is now an active blogger, executive coach, and consultant, while also leading a mentoring ministry at his church. You talk and write a lot about margin, can you tell us a little about what you mean about margin and why it's important? This is kind of become a cornerstone of almost how the lens that I look at all of life through these days and really for the last 30 years, and came out of a time in my life when I was completely overloaded running four businesses, volunteering at church on about five different angles, raising a family. And I was completely exhausted and overloaded and came across a book by Richard Swenson called “Margin”. And it began to just change my life. And he defines margin as the gap between our load and our limits. And my whole mind frame in life had been we always run all the way to our capacity or over our capacity. And I never realized until I read that book, that life is better when we have margin just like a margin in a book, I would never consider taking the words all the way to the very edge of the page, it would make it terrible reading if you did that. So margin became the way I looked at relationships that became the way I looked at business, became the way I framed faith, all different areas of life. So in all of these areas, margin, creating some space, where we can breathe, becomes a critical way of looking at life. And I think it can even impact organizations and even the concept of networking. So how does the presence or absence of margin affect relationships? This is probably one of the biggest areas that it impacts. And all we have to do is to kind of think of how we act. And when we're exhausted, when we're completely overloaded, when we're stressed out, the first victim of us operating that way is our relationships. Most particularly our close relationships, we’re usually terrible with our spouse when we're overloaded and stressed out. And so beginning to create margin in the various places and spheres of our life. The first benefit of it is our relationships begin to breathe. And we begin to have better relationships at home, with our spouse, with our children, with our best friends. And then it even leaks into our relationships at work, when we become better people and everybody benefits from it. So relationships are kind of a key place. And also a key victim of the fact that our culture just operates in absolute high speed with no margin, overloaded, and thinking that's the best way of operating and our relationships are suffering because of that. What difference does creating space make in organizations? I don't think creating space is just so that we have a nice, easy life. I think part of the reason for this is so that we can be purposeful and more effective in the things that we do. And so I coach and consult with some decent size operations, as well as having run a half dozen companies over 30 years. And what I've found is, as I create space, in my own life margin, that I reflect better, I plan better, the organization's run more smoothly, than if we are always in this hyper productivity mode. It feels important on the surface, but it's not the way organizations run the best. So taking the extra time to create a good strategic plan, taking the extra time to plan, a marketing campaign. Those things are things that have gone by the wayside because we think we're supposed to move fast. So I've learned that helping organizations and the leaders of organizations live a more spacious life actually improves the performance of those organizations. I thrive off of that constant demand. Does that change when you've established space? It changes, but not immediately. I mean, the problem, one of the reasons I think that so...
Meet Brandon Fong Brandon HATED growing up on the free lunch program at school... but growing up without financial resources taught him to be resourceful. Before the age of 25, Brandon wrote a book, ran the marketing for an education company with over 250,000 students, traveled to 23 different countries, and even did a $45,000 launch on his first online product. Today, he's on a mission to help 10,000 entrepreneurs build wealth through the power of connection while prioritizing their health and relationships. What's the number one mistake people make when trying to solve a problem in their life? I got this from Dan Sullivan, who I don't know if you're familiar with his content, but he's a fantastic thinker if you guys haven't heard of him, but he has this concept called who-not-how. And I think what happens as entrepreneurs specifically or in our daily lives to whenever we come up with a new goal, or a new challenge that we're facing, our first inclination is to ask ourselves, how can I solve this, right? Like all the how questions come up like logistics, and it immediately becomes a little bit overwhelming. And so when it comes to solving problems, I love the filter that instead of asking myself how based questions, I asked myself, who questions so if instead of how can I figure this out and get super overwhelmed, who has already figured this out, that I can develop a relationship with in a genuine way, give back to them, and then leverage their skills and experience to solve the problem that I'm looking to solve a lot faster than if I had tried doing it on my own. So I think that that's an approach that can definitely help accelerate the process of solving any problem, whether it be business or in personal life. How can you connect with people in meaningful ways online? I actually recently wrote a book on this topic called The Magic Connection Method. When I open up my LinkedIn profile, I have probably over 100 connection requests of people that have copied and pasted messages without even reading anything about my bio or anything like that. So I think that they're in this world where we kind of like see this fake reality online. It's like we get desensitized to the fact that the people that we're talking to are real human beings. When it comes to connecting with people, when I teach them the magic connection method, I teach a three-part process. So the first part of the email or any, it's not specific to email, but the first part is what I call the hook. And the problem that most people have when they reach out to people is they use the first part of the email to talk about them, right? So instead of doing that, the first part of the outreach, I always teach people to talk about the other person. Then the second part is the irresistible offer. I'm always looking to add value to people. So whether it's an outreach to somebody that I want to do business with, or a networking event or connection that I have, I want to create something that I can do for them, that would add a ton of value to them, and make them actually want to move forward with the connection. The last part is the no-oriented question. I learned this from Chris Voss, who is an ex-FBI hostage negotiator. He told me in the book, “Never Split the Difference”, he talks about how we all have a finite amount of yeses that we have in a day, right? Every single time you say yes to something, you have to give away time, you have to give away energy, you have to give away finances, you're giving away something. So it's hard for people to say yes to things, but it's a lot easier for people to say no to something. So all my emails or all my outreaches they end with instead of a question like are you interested? It ends in a question like would you be opposed to? Or would it be a bad idea if or would it be ridiculous if and when you when you start a question that way it puts the ball back in their court. The real goal of that first email is to show that you're
Meet Tracy Brinkmann From hitting the rock bottom of drugs, divorce, bankruptcy and even the death of an 18 month old daughter to running the planning and marketing of some of corporate America's finest companies to his own marketing company. Tracy helps small business owners be seen. And now his podcast is focused on Driven Dark Horse Enterprises. Tracy Brinkman is also a business and success coach that realizes life isn't fair and participation awards do not feed your family or your drive to succeed. This Driven Dark Horse Entrepreneur is looking to share all that he has learned and is still learning about starting, restarting, kick starting and stepping up your entrepreneurial game all while not ignoring that amazing tool between your ears! What is the importance of reputation on and offline? I think reputation sometimes flies under the radar anymore. If you think even way back to the early days, when I say early days, I mean, pre internet, word of mouth was a big marketing tactic. And when someone told you about a great business or just somebody that they met, you took their word for it. So now if you take that into the new era of being online, on your phone or on your computer you're doing that same thing, but you're doing it with people you don't even know, as you're looking at a business, you're looking up online and say, wow, this looks like what I need as you're shopping, and then you kind of cruise through their reputation. And if they got the five-star rating, you're like, hey, right on. And I think what's really unique about this is you're taking the word of people you don't even know. So I think it's really huge to pay attention to your reputation on and offline. Why should we start stop trading time for money? I think this is probably one of the biggest issues I see a lot of starting entrepreneurs get involved in, especially in the coaching arena that I tend to service is like, they trade those hours for dollars. And I think the limitation on that is that we only have 24 hours a day, right? So if you say, you know what, I'm gonna charge $150 an hour, you can only make that much, 150 times 24. That's it, that's your cap, and you'll burn yourself out trying to maximize that cap. Or if you can start trading value for money now you can a raise your quote unquote, hourly rate, and then be worth less and make more. Why should I build a team or have a mentor or a coach? I'm in the coaching arena. So I'm kind of biased there. But I think one of the greatest things I ever did coming up through my career even when I was in corporate America was having a mentor and having a coach to teach me the tips, the tricks and the potholes of the trade to speed up my learning curve, and avoid some of the potholes that you know could definitely sink a career. If you can, like they say ride on the shoulders of giants, well, then you are gonna ride a lot faster and get to your destination a lot quicker. So that's a big thing about coaches and mentors. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I was attending the Direct Tech Conference in Las Vegas. And Direct Tech is a piece of software that a number of retailers use. They're all just like any other conference, there's the big sessions and then there's all the breakout sessions and I always have made it a point to break away from my clinic, my team that I would be attending together as there was like three or four of us and go sit amongst folks that I have no idea who they are. Right? And that takes a little bit of courage, right? You got to be willing to put yourself out there totally. You learn so much in the process. And of course, you meet new folks. And you learn new tips and tricks from how they're using, in my scenario, how they're using the software versus how we were using it internally. And you're like, oh, I'm gonna go back I'm gonna go try that. So I think trying that for the first...
Andy Gallion Andy is the CEO and co-founder of InCheck, Inc. A nationally accredited screening company. InCheck provides customized nationwide background screening and drug testing solutions to employers, volunteer groups and sports organization. Early in his career as a recruiter, Andy recognized an opportunity to fill a gap in the background screening industry and build a service-oriented business. Twenty years later under Andy's leadership, InCheck has been named as one of Milwaukee Business Journal's fastest growing firms. In Milwaukee BizTimes Future 50 company and Milwaukee’s Best and Brightest organizations to work for. InCheck is also a SPEARity certified organization with Andy being named SPEARity a strategic leader of the Year in 2017. Andy is past president of the Wisconsin Society for Human Resource Management Board. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about why you decided to start InCheck and what were you striving to create? The story is kind of interesting because I never in a million years would have guessed that I'd end up in the background screening industry. I don't think anybody sets out to be in the screening industry. But we just kind of ended up in that space as we actually planned to start up a staffing company. And so, as we were in the process of starting up a staffing company, we came up with the idea of starting a background screening company, and it was based on a placement that we were making, and we heard that there was like an outsourced background screening company that was involved, and so our curiosity was piqued. We looked at the market in Wisconsin, there was really only one other provider, and we thought we'd be able to leverage a lot of our relationships to get that business off the ground in addition to the staffing company that we were starting at the time as well. I am one third owner of Extension, Inc, which is a professional staffing company based in Wauwatosa, as well. I'm not really involved on a day to day basis. And I kind of keep that usually under wraps a little bit. I’m not trying to cross sell or blur the lines between the two companies. While I'm a third owner, I spend 99.9% of my time on the day to day at InCheck. Tell us a little bit about what your typical day looks like. And what do you most enjoy doing? Anything from sales and business development to account management, working on projects for clients that range from more complex compliance issues, coming up with reports, working through pricing, providing good customer service, providing leadership and management of our executive leadership team, working with marketing, budgets, just across the board. We're a smaller business, we have 42 employees. I'm kind of spread thin, but I really do I enjoy that part of my job. So the variety of it is exciting to me, keeps me engaged. Out of all that, I'd have to say that meeting new businesses, working with new people, signing up new accounts for InCheck, kind of working through the project nature of that part of the job is really probably my favorite. Can you talk about how that ties into your role as a CEO? Over the 29 years that I've been refereeing basketball, I started when I was 15. I think the biggest connection is that as a sports official specifically in basketball, you have to be able to talk to people, you have to be able to communicate, being on a basketball floor in front of a gym that might have 1000 or more people in a pressure packed game. When you blow that whistle the spotlights on you, you have to be confident, you have to be able to communicate both verbally and non-verbally. And I think all those communication skills really come into play in terms of trying to establish my presence as a leader within the business of InCheck in working with all the different types of people that I work with on a daily basis. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most Successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? It's a great
Meet Chris Larsen Chris Larsen is the founder and Managing Partner of Next-Level Income, through which he helps investors become financially independent through education and investment opportunities. He began syndicating deals in 2016, has raised more than $12M and been actively involved in over $150M of real estate acquisitions. What are some of those connections between generating wealth and relationships? When I was younger, my father passed, I was five and a good family friend, Clint Provenza not only introduced me to cycling, which was one of one of my real loves in my life, but also the miracle of compound interest. So it's one of those things where if I didn't have that relationship, I would have never been introduced to both of those concepts, and then just fast forwarding through life, and cycling partnerships, turned into business partnerships. And then ultimately completing our first syndicated real estate deal came from our network of investors that we put together. So I mean, whether you look at, you know, foundationally when I was very young, my sporting success or what would call investing success, it's all based upon those relationships that were built going back to my early teens. Let's talk about how you actually became an investor. Do you want to share that story with us? So really the drive to be an investor came from my desire for freedom. And when I got to college, what I wanted to do was race my bicycle. So I wanted to be a professional cyclist. I enrolled in at Virginia Tech to be an engineering student. But I found out in about two weeks that I really didn't want to be an engineer. I just I just really didn't enjoy it. And I continue to race my bike, I thought, I'll just get through college, I'll race my bike, I'll become a professional then I'll figure out what I want to do and maybe go back and get a math degree. Well, between my freshman and sophomore years, I lost my best friend, Chris. He died of a brain hemorrhage and it really kind of it put me into depression, kind of as I look back thinking about it, but after a year of racing my bike and really pouring my heart and soul into cycling, I wasn't really happy. Cycling wasn't like the beach. And all that it was before he passed away. For me, I started looking at other opportunities to make money. I want to be able to do what I want to do when I want to do it. I started trading in the stock market. I mentioned Clint, he gave me a Money Magazine article and talked about starting a Roth IRA I started investing in the stock market. But then I found real estate after a couple years of investing. And the ability to actually kind of, as I talked about in my book control appreciation or by asset and approve its value, was very appealing to me. Also, when you're a college student, you don't have a ton of money. I was able to buy my first investment property with less than $1,000. So I really became an investor to have that freedom. And then I molded my career and the rest of life around fueling those investments so that I could ultimately end up doing what I wanted to do and have that freedom to make the most out of not only my life, but also the talents that I've been given. How do you form relationships with high profile people? That's a complex answer, I think. But I think it starts with one simple thing and that's with integrity. So if you are a professional, if you're even a young person if you're listening, do your best. That's what we teach our boys. So you want to do what you say you're going to do, and you want to do it to the best of your ability and high profile people spot that. They see drive, they see talent, it's almost like they can sense it. Now, whether you're an athlete or professional in any aspect of your career or life, I think that's the foundation. The other thing is if you find someone, I talked about this a lot when people say what advice do you have, find somebody who you can model success. So find somebody...
Today, Lori does a solocast in which she focuses on data and analytics. She shares 3 simple rules for where you should focus your measurement efforts. Don't overwhelm yourself focus on what's easily available, confirm its accuracy, and most important is the information being collected going to allow you to make an intelligent business decision? So let's dive into available. The data you're collecting should be collected quickly, you don't want to be investing a ton of time to collect information that who knows if it's really going to help you to make some smart decisions. You don't want to expend the effort that far exceeds the value of the data. When you're looking at what you want to measure, make sure that this is something that is within an arm's reach. You can quickly export information or you're using tools that are compiling these data points. At the end of the day, you want to make sure it's available. So you've got Google Analytics or maybe you can see the number of followers on a social media channel, or subscribers to your email list, how many phone calls that you made that day. This is all data that is easily accessible. Let's look at the next one. You want to make sure it's accurate information. So we've all heard this phrase garbage in is garbage out. Well, at the end of the day, if the information that you're putting into a system is not accurate, the outcome of that information is not going to be accurate either. So much of reported marketing and sales data does not stand up to scrutiny. It's estimated, extrapolated and decimated to try and produce pertinent conclusions. You want to make sure that you have accurate information in order to be able to help tell the story that's being told with that information. Verify that your Google Analytics are set up properly and test that information. Confirm that when you have email subscribers on your list that they're not spam emails that are being plugged in. You want to make sure it's accurate information that's being used. And the third item related to data is that it's actionable. You never want to waste time collecting data of minor value. You want to make sure that the data you collect is meaningful and has the potential of moving the needle on your marketing and sales goals. I have a thing that we practice here. Ss this action going to help us move the needle? Is this information going to help us move the needle in the right direction? So are you going to analyze the information and become paralyzed and without being able to make an intelligent business decision? That's the goal at the end of the day when looking at data and analyzing the information you want to be able to make a fairly quick, I would say, but an intelligent business decision. If you need help with your data, diving into it, helping you figure out which specific items to measure, making sure they're easily available to you, confirming that the data that you have is accurate. And also, making sure that it's actionable, feel free to reach out. www.keystoneclick.com/ is my company. And this is what we do - digital marketing at its finest. This was a quick tip, fast episode, hopefully that adds a lot of value to you and your day. I'm happy to do more solo casts and if you have any questions that you'd like me to answer related to marketing, building relationships to help you achieve your business and sales goals, shoot me an email at Lori@SocialCapitalPodcast.com and I will gladly answer your questions.
Meet Takeyla Tyson I am an Accountant with 22 years of experience. I started as a bookkeeper and grew into a leadership role. I discovered that I really loved the field and was always asked questions by small business owners an thought about my own business one day. In January of 2016, I launched KMT Accounting Services, LLC. I wasn't quite sure what I would specialize in and so I took a more a la cart approach when I started. I now specialize in taxes, business operations/consulting and general accounting needs. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about how you got started in the accounting field? I started as a bookkeeper and when I first got into it, I really wasn't quite sure what accounting was. But I did know two things; one, I liked numbers and two, I liked puzzles. And for me, accounting was a good mix of that. So I started as a bookkeeper and ended up getting some good opportunities with some local entrepreneurs who had a bunch of different locations that they needed managed. And from there, I grew into their accountant. And as I moved from different areas of expertise from restaurant to construction, I started to pick up a lot of different skills and here I am now. What are some of the things that you learned that you didn't know before you got into the field of accounting? I did not know the long hours. I'm still learning things that I did not know about accounting, honestly. And I think if you ever stop learning, you don't grow. So, in the beginning, it was the long hours it was all these crazy schedules and how they interact with them. Different forms and when things are due and all these crazy things. In the era of COVID I'm learning all the new rules, and what they're allowing and disallowing and things like that. So, I've learned to never get comfortable with the county. What do you wish that business owners knew about their accountant or accounting department? That they’re assets. Your accounting department, your accountant, they are really your gatekeepers of your financial health, which is critical to any small business and I don't think especially the smaller businesses really get how critical having a very strong accountant or accountant team is to the livelihood of not only themselves but of the business itself. And understanding that it's not just them, quote unquote, doing your books. They really are your partners. And they should be working very closely together to make sure that the company is healthy. Can you share with our listeners, one of your favorite networking experiences that you've had? Networking is definitely still a thing. I know people sometimes ask about that or wonder about that, but it's definitely still who you know, and how well you're off, how good you are at building those relationships. So I'm speaking to previous quote unquote lives and my career, I've always made sure that people knew who I was. And it benefited me when I moved into another position where I say, oh, I worked for this particular company and this particular position, and right away, they're like, oh, you know, so and so? And all of a sudden, I went from the someone who was just applying for this job to someone who was given this job. It was amazing, because it was that point for me, where I realized that networking was so critical, because until that time, I didn't see the use for it. How do you stay in front of the network that you've established? I do that by sending those emails and keeping contact with them on social media, whether it's LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter, Instagram, wherever they are. Making sure I reach out if I see something that they posted or that they're talking about that I'm really interested in, I'll start a private conversation with them and say, care to catch a cup of coffee on me I want to talk about this a little more or you got 10 minutes for a phone call, I’d really like to know more about this and be genuine about it. People will definitely be open to...
Meet Dr. Susan Lovelle Dr. Susan Lovelle, The Thrive Architect, helps smart, busy women who are just surviving on caffeine and willpower design their own unique blueprint to the energy, power, and balance they want in their lives. Dr. Susan is the creator of Premiere Wellness, a comprehensive holistic health company based in Raleigh, NC, serving clients globally with customized wellness solutions for weight, energy, hormones, and more to help them heal from the inside out, leading to lasting, powerful change. What's the best thing that I could do or any of our listeners could do right now to optimize their health and begin to thrive? I come across so many people who literally are just surviving right now whether it's caffeine, wine, willpower, whatever it is, medications that they're on, they're just really kind of surviving. And what tends to happen is that you get stuck in that mindset, you feel that there's nothing that you can do other than just survive. And the most important thing is to realize that you can be proactive instead of just reactive. So by being proactive, you actually make steps to help yourself get better by knowing what's going on in your body. So that's literally the very best thing that you can do to start knowing your body knowing what it needs and then giving it to it. How do I know what's right for me? That is the number two thing that comes to me is that if go on Dr. Google and you know the Dr. Webb and everything and you either get way too much information and you think that you've got a million different things and you try and do a million different things. Or even if it is the right information, it may not be the right thing for you. So for instance, how many times do you hear about somebody going on some, whatever the newest diet fad is, and they lose, you know, 20-30 pounds, just like that. And then you try it and not only don't you lose weight, you actually gain weight. And what that's all about is that it's just not the right thing for you. What is the process to really figuring out what is the right thing? It sounds very simplistic, but the best thing to do is to listen to your body. Know the messages that your body is trying to give you. So for instance, if you were driving into the desert and your check engine light comes on. Would you just slap a little piece of tape over the check engine light? Driving? No, you wouldn't. Exactly. So we're doing the same thing what our body's telling us these little messages like when we have aches when we have bloating or abdominal discomfort when we have pain. These are the messages. These are the check engine lights that our body is giving us to tell us whoa, something's not right. Take a look and fix it. What's the difference between traditional medicine approach and functional medicine and really, why is this important? I actually grew up in the traditional health field and I was a plastic surgeon for over 22 years. I went to Columbia University in New York City, what you learn there is how to diagnose someone, and then what treatment to give them. So for instance, if they were diabetic, you're going to get this particular diabetic medicine. If you have high blood pressure, you're going to get this medicine with this treatment. And it really was about treating the symptoms, not for finding the actual root cause, like what is causing this person to have high blood pressure. And there are many different reasons why someone could. It could be a mineral deficiency, it could be stress, it could be food sensitivities, lots of different things. So rather than just treating the symptom and making the symptom go away, you dig a little deeper and you find out why that person is suffering with that particular condition. And you fix that and then it's kind of like instead of if you had a tree, when you want the tree to look pretty and healthy. Would you paint the leaves with green paint? Or would you heal the roots? Could you share with our
Today Lori’s solocast is on Digital Marketing Research Fundamentals. Now this is important because networking is all about building relationships and connections and likely for more reasons than not it’s because of business. And business comes down to understanding who that audience is that you want to be communicating with. So why is research important when we're talking about a marketing strategy? Well, the definition of research, according to Wikipedia, is research comprises of creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications. So if you think about this, you're going to be spending more time and money experimenting before you're getting things done, versus moving forward and doing the research to help you focus on where should you be targeting, where should you be investing your time. A lot of the guests that we have on the show talk about being very strategic in the events that they attend or the organizations that they're a part of and in hopes of aligning themselves to get in front of the right people. Let's start with yourself, you really need to know who you are. What is it that you stand for? What problems are you solving for the world? Why should people want to connect with you? You want some sort of distinction that you don't want them to turn to a competitor. You don't want them to think twice about going anywhere else. You want them to believe that they are getting the right thing. They're having the right conversation with the right person at the right time. Ready for more? Listen in as Lori goes more in depth on how to apply digital marketing research to YOUR business!
Meet Dr. Jim Bohn Dr. Jim Bohn has organizational expertise and insight from decades of successfully leading leaders and business savvy derived from observing the organizational behavior of multiple Fortune 500 organizations. He has taught as an adjunct at UWM, Marquette and Concordia, and has spoked at conferences and workshops throughout the U.S. After several decades with a Fortune 100 company, Dr. Bohn launched his own Change Management and Organizational Transformation Practice. So what is your motivation for writing and sharing your knowledge? I've worked in the corporate world for over 40 years, I've worked with literally thousands of people through that time. And what I want to do at this stage of my life is to share my experience, specifically targeting southeast Wisconsin from the Madison, Green Bay, Milwaukee chord and just share the things that I've learned my successes, my failures, through my podcasts, through workshops through keynotes, through books. I mean, my books are obviously available worldwide, but my primary goal is to help southeast Wisconsin be successful. I've lived here most of my life. I was born in Milwaukee, worked with several different companies in Milwaukee area, including Johnson Controls. So this is the area that I want to focus on at this stage of my life. What would you consider to be unique about how you develop your style? I'm a persistent guy just based on the notion that I believe things can be done. It just takes effort, takes work. And so my style is to try to get things that are complex. And clearly in a PhD program, there are plenty of complex things boiled down into two new fragments and concepts that everyone can understand. So there's not a lot of theory, but it's more actionable stuff that we can all use to get things done. Getting things into a format where we can start to look at action that's going to be valuable for everybody is really key. We have to move from words and rhetoric, which is very important, but we've got to move to things that we can actually put feet on the street and get things done. What should people know about the process you took to develop your capabilities? My capabilities specifically, I want to talk about my organizational engagement scale. And that would be the primary capability of the work that I do. It's an instrument to literally check organizational engagement as opposed to employee engagement. Employee engagements used across the world, but it's starting to lose a little bit of its steam because it's been used for so long. And in my PhD program, I learned that no one in the world that ever checked the idea of being able to measure what would be called organizational level efficacy. So I thought, Well, that sounds like a pretty easy project. Haha. So it took me 14 different companies again in southeast Wisconsin to design and develop it. And then the capability that I have there within that instrument and those tools are able to measure whether or not an organization believes it knows where it's going. Simple, concrete terms that mean a lot to everyone. As far as my own personal capabilities, again, I look back at just candidly knowing where I was going and what I wanted to accomplish and sticking with it until it got done. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I worked with some people in my research a long time ago. And that person happened to be somebody I remembered. And I continued to work through my research. And when I got done with it, I went back and checked this person out on LinkedIn, and said, can we get together sometime and we talked a little bit. And before long, she connected me with a bigger organization in Milwaukee, who then connected me with more people in the manufacturing community than I ever could have been connected with, no matter how hard I worked because this other organization knows just about every manufacturer. Always...
Meet Deb Seeger Deb is the managing director at BDO Resource Solutions. Deb has been recognized as a female entrepreneur by receiving the woman of influence award in 2015. Prior to joining BDO Deb was a co-founder of Patina Solutions. She spent over a decade in professional services consulting. She's an innovator, keynote speaker and panelists in the field of employment trends, workforce of the future, agile talent solutions and building strong cultures. How do you tie in the personal networking goals that you have to align the goals of that of your firm? Networking is so important because it's really part of everything we do as we go out into the business world. I thought of it from early on is this idea of really building friendships, maybe more for a business reason, but friendships to me start with getting to know people. And understanding that we can go a lot farther in with a group of people and the resources that we all bring together than we can alone. How does one appropriately tap their network when in that state when looking for a new job? Having been through a transition for really first time in my career, and also having been coaching executives in transition for many years now, I believe going forward, I'm going to be a better coach. Because I've already talked about the idea of networking. But I saw a lot of executives in my career who worked really hard to kind of build a wall of separation around themselves so that other outsiders, and sometimes competitive firms or vendors, providers, salespeople, you know, couldn't get in, so to speak. But then when those folks were at a stage in their career, where they were in a transition, they really didn't have enough of a network that they could go out and engage with in order to help them in their career transition. So I think it's really important for people to understand that you may never need to ask somebody a favor. And it wasn't until recently when I was in transition that I realized it was really valuable to have such a vast network of people that I've done a ton of favors for over my career. And I think about it as like the bank of the universe. If you're putting out favors and doing favors for other people one day, when you need something, you're going to have a lot of people that you'll be able to consider to call on for help. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking stories that you have? My son who graduated from college in 2008. And as he was really looking at the job market, one of the things he considered was going back to get his graduate degree, which he ended up doing. I said to my son, if you see anybody in my network that you want to go and just learn from, because you have a lot of learning to do about the kind of career you want. And maybe you'll see people who are in careers that you find interesting. But you got to go and just go talk to a lot of people. So I was really happy number one that he did in the two years while he was getting his graduate degree. He spoke to 100 people, either by phone or in person. And what I really appreciated about his experience was he came back to me towards the end of that experience, and he said, Mom, not one person said no to me. And that means I did a good job of doing favors for people who were happy and returned to do this favor for me. How do you stay in front of and nurture your network? I think the other thing about having a giving mindset or an abundance mindset is knowing that you have to intentionally and deliberately schedule time for it. Again, there's a person who wrote a book and in that book, the author talks about his internal personal discipline that every day he decides he's going to write X number of emails to reach out to people or make X number of phone calls, or how it reaches out but he's going to do it intentionally. To let them know that he either saw something they did and wanted to recognize reward a birthday, an award, a
Meet Tanya Stanfield A brand strategist, sales leader, performance activator, and well-being advocate, Tanya is a multi-dimensional entrepreneur dedicated to using her superpowers of content and connection to build brands and create communities for good. Her most recent project, MKTG XT, is a cross-training community built for marketers of all types to gather and build stronger skills, stronger networks, and transformed careers. What are some of the general struggles that everyone's experiencing right now in this current environment? First, I think a lot of people are experiencing a lot of uncertainty. And some might argue that goes without saying. But we all know that a lot of times marketing is the first to go when companies are struggling financially. So that's definitely top of mind. It's just a lot of uncertainty. But I think another thing marketers struggle with, and I think particularly marketers who work in house, more on the client side, is the thing I see here over and over stakeholder engagement, stakeholder management, influencing others who might not work on your team with who you need on board to accomplish certain goals is a constant challenge that I hear marketers talk about over and over again. What can marketing leaders do to support themselves and our colleagues during this time? I think during this time, what marketing leaders and colleagues can do to support themselves and each others is through continuing to just connect with each other and keep communication open with each other and continue to learn, educate themselves and also educate others. You know, when we talk about those stakeholders, again, there's just uncertainty all across the spectrum. And I think the more leaders and their teams can connect with others outside of their disciplines and really learn about what they value, what your colleagues value, and then share what you value as well. I think that's really important. It's all about capturing that. Our job as marketers is to capture customer value. But we also need to capture company value as well. So learning what's important to everyone from the C suite, in finance and everywhere in between. So really building relationships with each other and across disciplines I think is really important right now. So how do you personally continue to stretch and develop your skills as a marketer? I am a self-admitted introvert. An error I think earlier, my career was that I didn't really reach out a lot for help. Or I thought I had to learn things on my own. And while being self-sufficient, is really valuable. I found the most value in the past couple of years as I've progressed more in my career, in learning through speaking with others, and talking to others, and that's just not in my own industry, although that's been very important. Because our industry just changes so fast. I don't think there's any way you can keep up with the industry completely. But talking to people who are actually in it every day is a key part of how I've been able to keep up. So like talking to people in my industry, and then talking to people in other industries and just learning more and more about how other businesses operate. That's really how I've been able to manage my own education. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking stories that you have? About five years ago when I was still working at a consulting firm, and I was pretty early in my career there, I was really struggling to understand how I can move up. I can speak in front of big crowds of people that's not a problem. But when it came to more impromptu speaking, when someone asked me a question in a meeting answering off the cuff, I would just get my heart would just pound I could hear it and I would get so nervous. So from then I decided to join Toastmasters which I'm sure you've heard of. Every Toastmasters group is different. it's an international organization, complete with chapters, local...
Meet Jennifer White Jennifer began her career as an engineer and combines analytical ingenuity with a talent for leadership. With a decade of professional experience informing her expertise in supply chain strategy and process and systems design, Jennifer is a talented communicator with a passion for motivating clients to transform their assumptions and achieve high performance. She is known for applying her sharp analytical skills to develop innovative solutions. So what is a business transformation? Business transformation is essentially a change management initiative. So we typically walk our clients here at the MJW group from a current state to their ideal future state. And we focus on four essential levers which is people, processes, data, and technology. So within those four levers, whatever you're trying to change it normally will impact one of those four essential operations. Let's talk a little bit more about people, process, data, and technology. Why are those so important to business? People are your greatest asset. It is important to have people available and willing to do the work that your company provides services for. People hold keys, people hold a lot of knowledge. They hold the magic is usually what I call it. Processes are what everyone follows. It's beating to the same drumbeat. There isn't confusion. Data is being the funnel of your business. You have inputs of data and you have outputs of data. You need it to understand how well your company is operating. They provide key insights into certain metrics and criteria to really understand your business in general. Without data, we would have no idea how much money we're making, how many clients we're supporting. And technology is important because without technology now in 2020, we wouldn't really survive the amount of manual transactions that one may be doing. Without technology it would really cramp your people. I mean, they would not want to operate that way. So it's very important to have the right technology embedded in your operations and your business to keep everything going consistently. How exactly do you help businesses, especially those that have been around for many years? Well, one thing I'll say is we help you increase profit. And we do that through expense reduction in automation. So obviously, with technology, it's going to increase the amount of automation within your business say, if your accounting department was doing invoices by hand, you know before and now you've brought in a tool that can assist them with automating invoices and sending it to the client without you having to send it yourself via email. I mean, that's a huge transformation. Also, as far as a transformation goes, with expense reduction, think about the redundancies that happen in roles and responsibilities. So if you don't take the time to really deep dive into what your people are doing, you could be paying for two or three roles that are creating the same work. I'm hoping that you can share with our listeners one of your favorite or most successful networking experiences that you've had. I would say on the social media sites I've really upped my game during this pandemic. That's how you and I met, right? And I've just really opened and expanded my horizons to learning from other people and just being open and willing to have conversations more than I ever have. And it has led to some great partnerships and collaboration. But otherwise just having more of the face to face networking in person I was limited to local areas or regional areas and now, being more open on social media has allowed me to connect with people all over the world. And it's a game changer. I can totally see the difference in what I'm doing and it's made a big impact on our business. How do you make sure you stay in front of them best nurture these relationships that you've created? Recently I've taken on developing more of a content marketing strategy. For our business,...
Meet Wayne Breitbarth I'm still, as in three years ago, helping folks, organizations, companies understand how to use LinkedIn better. I know the site is confusing. It has a ton of power. And that's where, you know if it was easy, people would need me but it's not. It's complex. It's confusing. The objectives for people change so they don't know how to use it. And so I'm still in that space of helping people understand how to take the world's largest database, which now has almost 700 million and put it to use for them. Are there new rules to how you use LinkedIn now or are businesses jumping on board? Because everyone's online now, what do you see happening? So it's interesting because I do think there is more recognition of virtual tools like LinkedIn. Because virtual is something that like sales teams, especially sales teams have been at home, not able to go to networking, not able to go visit customers. And so they've had to find a way to stay in contact with their existing customers. Start some new prospecting balls rolling and I've got more business owners since COVID hit reaching out to me from years ago when they saw me speak way back in the day and say I think it's finally time for my sales guys to understand this crazy thing. And even me, I should understand this better. So those kinds of openings are happening. So what are some of your top tips or some of the top trends you're seeing specific for companies? I think especially when it comes to COVID that posting and sharing updates about what your company is up to and things going on has been hotter than ever. That people are now getting more comfortable with the posting process and starting to understand that there is an algorithm and that they have to play, let's call it or work the algorithm. I think that's something that people are learning or have learned. They've also learned the importance of having a better profile and company page than they probably did because they're getting more views. People are viewing profiles, because it's something you can do online. And so I think that improving profiles, improving company pages and understanding what a good post is seems to be the focus of a lot of the conversations that I’ve been having. Is there a framework or a formula for what creates a good post? Yeah, there is, and it boils down to understanding the algorithm. And how much organic reach LinkedIn is going to give you. So it's as simple as this. There are several things you can post you can post a document, you can post a link, you can post a video, you can post a text only. Here's the way LinkedIn looks like the algorithm is working currently, they do like polls because they're brand new. Whenever something is new on LinkedIn, they give it more organic reach. They like videos. And I don't mean videos that go to YouTube or Vimeo as they do not like those. But organically uploaded videos perform well. Documents perform well. Links perform the least well, text only will actually perform better than a link and it boils down to this. LinkedIn does not want you sending their users off site, if you can avoid it. Now, that being said people like you and I, we like to get people to visit our website. And so that's the lowest organic reach that you're going to get that being said, do you still do it, you bet you do it, we still do it. But what you want to try to do, in all these cases, especially if you're going to do a link to a website, or a blog post, or something like that, is you got to work on getting your engagement up. And that typically means this that you need to get some folks in your organization or if you're a real small company, some friends, too, that are going to engage in your posts, especially in the first hour. What about the company pages? What I'm seeing right now on LinkedIn is very heavy with the individual posting content and not so much content coming from company pages. The personal page post is going to do about four times
Meet Heather Breedlove Heather grew up striving for the perfect life: a fairytale romance, the perfect family and a successful career. But while working her way through the checklist, she found a disconnect. The person she was at home was not the person she was at work nor even the person she is. She's now found excitement in bringing full self to every aspect of her life. Through Shine Your Bright, she hopes you find the peace and courage to do the same. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what the checklists we all kind of have for our lives are? I grew up with what I consider a white picket fence family. I met my husband in college, I had my checklist in front of me and I was going to graduate high school, go to college. start my career, married by 25 children by 32. I think a lot of us grew up with our life put before us. And we just worked down the checklist constantly striving to hit that next little notch. And, for me what happened is I made it right up and got married at 25, just like I'd always wanted to do. And we got back from our honeymoon and three weeks later found out that my father had stage four cancer and we were going to lose him. And he was gone by Thanksgiving. And then there was that realization that he wouldn't be around to see most of my adult life, he wouldn't see his grandchildren. And so that kind of hit me with a little bit of a detour in life. Life wasn't the way I pictured it or imagined. And then going forward We found out that we weren't necessarily going to be able to have children. Again that checklist that little girl dreams of her whole life. It didn't happen. So how did I navigate my life? To still have those joys and find out who I was and happiness even though it wasn't necessarily happily ever after? Like I thought I'd be. Tell us what it means to shine your bright? I had hit a point where our marriage was super hard. I had grown up with what I said was a white picket fence. Tommy, my husband, had grown up in a more volatile lifestyle. And I guess we both thought that marriage would really mirror what it was for our parents and not necessarily be what we want our marriage to look like. And we went through some marriage counseling we went through really a lot of just trial. And we kept finding out that we had to deal with kind of the way we had grown up in our past. And when we finally got to our breaking point, Tommy had gone to a living center program in Tennessee and spent a week really kind of diving back into his history and working through how he had grown up. I ended up going to the same program. One of the afternoons they did horse therapy, and with the horse therapy, I didn't realize it's such a reflection on how people engage in their life. It's how they interact with these horses. My experience with the horse was I felt like we were almost negotiating with each other and we started kind of building trust as I would lead him around the ring, he would get more comfortable and we were really working together. And what happened is I started to feel this glow in my chest, and I didn't, embarrassingly enough, I didn't necessarily recognize that it was pure joy because it had been so long since I'd been in an equal and balanced relationship. It was a shock when I really started to feel that and it planted a seed. It did make me realize that it's been a minute since I felt that and the visual I had in my head was very much this glow coming from within. And that's how shine your bright was born and I created a movement really around. How can you find joy in yourself and happiness in yourself just in your ordinary, everyday life without necessarily making sure everybody at work is happy, everybody at home is happy and really putting yourself on the back burner. So I think that's what showing your bright means to me. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? My most amazing networking experience, I...
Meet Agostino Pintus As a former INC 500 Technology Chief, he had great success...until he failed in spectacular fashion that kicked off his "10 Dark Years". He was rudderless, with no direction and financially broken. It wasn't until a friend introduced him to the power of buying large real estate deals that changed the entire course of his life. Agostino ended up building a real estate portfolio as the General Partner on over $42M of deals in 32 months! Today, he helps people get into real estate deals and build their wealth. Why don't you start by sharing your thoughts on how we think we've been conditioned to not take risks? I was talking to my friend about this the other day actually. And if you think about it, when we were kids in grade school, and you made a mistake on a test or something like that, at least when I went to grade school. We had nuns that ran the school and if you made a mistake, they whip out the ruler and wrap it right across your knuckles. Right? Because you made an error. And if you can imagine that type of behavior to a child, amplified, and done day in day out where you're worried about your score and you're worried about being wrong. It's the conditioning. We're conditioned to be very good employees, that is what we are trained to do, because we live in a very antiquated system, right? We live in a system where we were told you're going to be good employees, you shall not make a mistake. And I need you to work eight hours a day. And then you're going to get eight hours to yourself, get eight hours of sleep. This is the perfect balance. You're going to do this for five days a week. You're going to do this for 40 years until we don't longer need you. Then you're going to go on to a pasture and live out the rest of your life that we permit you to have. Why do people live in fear even though they have a secure job? That's the thing, that's the fake thing. It's not secure. It's this belief of security like you said in the introduction there. I was working at this this company. It was a fine company, a great company, we had a great deal of success. We helped grow this business from a few hundred employees to a couple thousand employees. I mean, we're doing remarkable things. But what I did was while I was working at this company, I got into real estate back then doing like single family homes and stuff like that, because I was I was living in fear, even though I was earning a six figure job, even though I had stock options and all that fun stuff with this company. And even though they supposedly loved me, I still thought one day these guys are going to turn on me. That was always in the back of my mind. I already knew it because as long as your future in the hands of someone else, they will define when you can take your time when you can take your time off and when and where you can go, that even comes into play, too, right? Because if you're given two weeks and I say given two weeks or three weeks of your time, your time must be taken into account as to where you want to go and you have any flexibility around that if you want to take a longer trip, there's no way it has to be included in your time off that is again allocated to you. But at any rate, all this stuff is a facade. It's not real. And I’m a perfect example. You have really achieved some major successes. What are some of the best habits that you've employed to help you achieve these goals and live without fear to some extent? I would say that before can answer that question, there has to be a realization. And I'll tell you that when you have this reawakening and you develop a whole new focus around what your life needs to be, you start living on purpose, and that's what I've been doing now. So, what I do as far as the ritual is concerned, I wake up early every morning, 5:15, I avoid touching the phone, I avoid all that I go to the gym and do CrossFit, come home, start the coffee, and I start writing. I write down my...
Meet Lyle Stoflet Lyle is the Managing Partner at Stratus Industries, Gear Grove and Containers Up. He’s a lifelong learning advocate. People connector. And strives to be 1% better every day. What is the difference between networking and real connections? You can collect a lot of business cards and have those fun conversations at the different events. But it's really about after that event of what you do, and making those real connections, and some of them for myself have been many years of connecting with people, and if it's personal, or if it's on the business side of things I've had both and some morph to both of them. So it's really about caring for people and trying to have their best interests at heart when you meet them. But also take that to the next step and not just talk about things but actually put action to it. How do you anticipate small specialized events evolving or taking place in what is being referred to as our new normal now? In our containers upside of our business, we take shipping containers and modify them into bars, restaurants, meeting spaces, pop up shops, all different pieces and try to figure out the new cycle, what are people's needs? Everything from parklets downtown Milwaukee, we're looking at putting in offices that we can drop off in your driveway that have two large windows, a patio doors, super comfortable, but you can walk out and have a different office. Most people are working from home and sometimes you just need that different space, especially if you have a driveway or a space to be able to put a 20-foot container. In your experiences, what networking venues are the best? Everybody has their personal opinion, but the name tags and the venue that is intimate so you don't feel like you're jammed in a space. Something that’s not this huge hall where you're like, wow, there's a lot of people here and you're intimidated, but also having the name tags that are color coded. So you kind of know who you're trying to meet and the people you're looking for because not everybody's a fit. Networking events have been successful for me, and it's also been a total, well, you know, there's X amount of insurance people here. That's great. They're out there too, and they have to make connections too. But it’s do you really want to try to make those long-lasting connections with people. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? We use an HR firm, and I met Shelly Miles with City Partners through that. And it was truly a cold networking event and we traded cards. And you know, the thing about networking events is everybody's there to meet people. It's not anything scary to walk up to somebody because that's what everyone is going to do. If you’re the person walking up or the person that is sitting there talking or jumping into a conversation. So from my story, the connection was simply that I walked up and started having a conversation. And you have to have your elevator pitch ready, if that's what you want to call it that 30 seconds. It was, oh interesting. You know, tell me more about that. And, you know, really getting to know what that person does on the other end. So now, this has been five years now and she's been our outsource HR partner. So when you went into that networking event, did you go in looking for an outsourced HR partner? No, but it probably took three meetings after that. But it wasn't a hard sell at that point. It was getting to know that person, and to see if that person was a fit for our culture, what we stood for. So, it was going in with that open mind of, hey, either I can help, or I might be able to connect somebody that could use their help. And part of that is that I think finding other people who you can help is a lot of fun, just in general. How do you best nurture these relationships that you're creating? It takes work, like any good relationship, it takes work, it takes...
Meet Matthew Clark Matthew Clark is the founder of The Virtual Edge and co-creator of The Rainmaker System - an online marketing system that helps entrepreneurs get 2-5 high value leads per day from LinkedIn without paying for ads. With their flagship programme Matthew and his business partner Wesley Longueira have helped thousands of businesses in seventeen countries grow exponentially. They are now on a mission to reach 10k businesses worldwide and build a vibrant community of Rainmakers along the way! Tell us a little bit about the Rainmaker system? What we do is that we help entrepreneurs get two to five high value leads per day from LinkedIn without paying for ads. we've got a three stage process that we take people through, and how it works is the three main stages are position connect and scale. So first stages is all about positioning yourself for success. You want to go from being in visible and just being you know, another person on LinkedIn to someone that's completely irresistible to your ideal client. Now, the key on there is that you have to know who your ideal client is. And the more focused you get, the more targeted you get the better at this works. Once you've got that, instead of trying to target everyone, we use the power of one solve one big problem for one ideal client, we then create what's called the pickup line, okay, which is all about the message that you're going to put out there so people know how to work with you, before they even talk to you. Once you get that right, then we do the LinkedIn makeover which turns your profile from an egocentric profile focusing all on you to a client centric sales page that focuses everything on your ideal client. And that's how you go from being invisible to irresistible. How did you get started in business? I started out doing door to door sales. I started off in the UK, selling gas and electric, getting people to switch over to our provider. Then when I came back to South Africa, I had an opportunity to work with someone I worked with in the UK, and we started selling telephone systems switchboards, copiers, and CCTV. A couple of years later I started my own business with two friends. And it really took off. I mean we got up to doing seven high seven figures. Within four years, we had 60, staff members, and it was just like a lot of fun. My experience doesn't come from the online digital world. It comes from door to door sales and connecting with people. So sure, everything I've done has been built on that. And that's obviously why I like LinkedIn so much is because I can literally, I can virtually knock doors, and I can build great relationships. Can you share with our listeners whenever favorite networking experiences that you've had? One of the funniest ones for me was, I was working with a guy who is based in Ireland. And he was helping us with some stuff. We were running a big event in South Africa and I met this other speaker who came along, it was a social media event. And I mean, this guy was amazing. I've never seen someone saw like this where people are literally rushing the back table and stampeding to get there. And him and I got talking. He's got the social media course. And he's like, well, I'm looking for someone that could do LinkedIn, and boom, here you are, and we're going to do it. And we're setting up a webinar on Thursday, this week. It was a Sunday. We have 400 people on and I want you on the presenting on LinkedIn. So I was like, well, that's amazing. That just kind of came out of nowhere, out of the blue. And so we set that up, and we did that. How do you stay in front of and invest and nurture your network? Content, very simple content. I post out content not as often as what I should. But also just have conversations with people. I like to talk with people. I love building relationships with people. I genuinely I love it. And so very often that I'll just reach out to people to ask how's it going, just checking in,...
Meet Richie Burke Richie Burke is founder and CEO of GGMM (GoGeddit Marketing and Media) a marketing agency that helps brands including Trek Bicycle, Colliers International, Thrivent Financial, Komatsu, Marquette University and many more grow through services including podcast production and marketing, brand strategy and digital marketing. He is the co-founder of PodFest MKE and regularly speaks on digital marketing, storytelling and podcasting. He is also the host of The GoGedders Podcast, a local Milwaukee podcast, which is syndicated by OnMilwaukee over 100 episodes, and it generates 10,000 downloads per month. How long have you been podcasting and why you decided to get started? We started our show in 2016. The GoGetters, it's a Milwaukee Community big show we do a very wide range of topics. I had the idea for it and kind of started it back in 2012 as a YouTube show. And then I pivoted my business in 2013. I was a fan of some podcasts and I saw an opportunity in the local market. Again, not very many people at all, were doing it here. I saw a lot of national podcasts on marketing and success and stuff like that, but nothing really being done on a local level to highlight interesting local stories or business leaders via audio and Facebook video. So we started that in 2016. Very naively, we did a lot wrong. I think there's something to being different and unique and the storytelling was still pretty good. And it did pretty well locally, surprisingly. And we saw what it did, from a business standpoint for an agency and thought, hey, everyone's listening to audio, no brands are producing audio. Why don't we start podcasting for other companies and start offering this as a service and launch that service in the spring of 2018, and thought it was going to blow up right away, and it didn't. We got our first client five or six months later, but now we get to produce a number of shows for some of the brands that you mentioned in the intro and we significantly upped our production game at that time for ourselves and got serious about the medium. Let's talk about the Milwaukee focus a little bit. Why did you decide your content should be focused in the Milwaukee market? I think when you're marketing or starting any product, it's good to really start narrow and then grow from there just because there's so much noise out in the marketplace, and I would advise that to anyone starting a show today. And in 2016 there were very few if any shows highlighting Milwaukeeans and for Milwaukee as far as podcasts and not a lot of people were producing Facebook videos telling these stories. There’s obviously, more now, but I saw the whitespace in the market, I thought it would be cool to do, I thought it would be fun to do as well. And selfishly, I thought it would be a good way to network and grow my business and I don't have people on the show to sell them on my services, but that typically just happens naturally. So you talked about some of the hurdles. When you started your podcast, if you would do it all over again, what would you do differently? I mean, there's a lot of things that I would have done differently off the bat like much better equipment. I mean, we had good guests, we did a pretty good job of marketing it that's why it kind of still took off. Although I look back at the old episode covers and I think the branding was terrible on it. There's little details like that. I also think going into something with kind of blunt naiveness can be a benefit because you don't exactly know what you're getting into and how hard it's going to be and I'm sure you've experienced that with your show and just starting a business from scratch. Going in kind of blind and really learning as you go and adapting fast, and it can be a benefit. I think a lot of people spend too much time planning or trying to get something perfect and then putting it out there, when in reality, you launch something and you never really know how the...
Meet Laura Nicolaisen Laura has over 10 years of experience on the life coaching and career coaching side in the university setting and through my own business, and most recently at a start-up and in the outplacement industry. Her alma maters respectively for my bachelor's and master's are at the University of Nebraska and Concordia University Wisconsin. In my spare time, I love listening to podcasts, exercising, spending time with animals, reading, traveling, real estate investing, meeting new people and giving back to her community. What is one rule of thumb that you live by? You know the phrase treat others the way you want to be treated. I actually rephrase that to say treat others the way they want to be treated. So the way I kind of phrase that is really listen to who you're speaking with, understand what their needs and aspirations are, and treat them the way they want to be treated, as long as it's a way that you feel authentic for yourself and that it's okay with you. And the rule of thumb can easily be applied to networking as well. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? In 2017 I attended an event for professional leaders and the United Way volunteer community. I was a guest I wasn't a participant at that point at the Emerging Leaders Program and that's for leaders who are in their 20s to 40s who are giving monetarily and through volunteering through the United Way. I went by myself to this event, and I stayed and luckily met a great lady named Jeriah Ebling. So at that time I met Jeriah, she was the major gifts officers for women's engagement. After the event we connected for coffee, she told me about all the amazing opportunities open at United Way. I didn't pursue anything until late in 2019. But at that time because I had heard about this through her, I decided to apply and be a part of project lead training. So that's really a training that allows participants from diverse backgrounds in the Milwaukee area to learn about the intricacies of becoming a nonprofit board member. It was seven weeks long and during the graduation event I saw Jeriah and thanked her. And currently, I'm looking for the next board to serve on or my next volunteer opportunity, as well as investigating women united. So that's where women in Milwaukee and Waukesha provide their talent, time and finances to give back to the local community. So without that introduction, I've would not have had all these opportunities I just described. That was an amazing networking experience for me. How do you stay in front of or best nurture the relationships that you've created? Whenever I find out about an event, if I see an article or information about business trends, I really think about who in my network may this benefit. And then I reach out to those people and I share the information I have. And I also like to keep a spreadsheet of all my networking connections and recording when I met them where and how, and reaching out after an initial connection to either have a meeting via zoom or in person. A good rule of thumb I use to reach out to my network connections every four months or so. My goal is just to always offer my support expertise or connections to other people. And I feel strongly that when someone changes their mindset and thinks about how they can give back rather than what they can receive from a connection, that is really when connections flourish and remain long lasting. What advice would you offer to business professionals that are looking to grow their network? Finding some networking, professional associations and volunteering at nonprofit groups that are of interest to you. So the way I would recommend someone starting is picking out three to five associations of interests and attending an event for each of those organizations. And then attendees can get a real feel for is this a group that I would love to be a part of? And as someone...
Meet Roman Roberts Roman Roberts grew up in foster care until the age of 9 when he was adopted into a family that was less than ideal. At 18 Roman joined the US Army as an interrogator and deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan, and worked with Special Operations. Once he returned home Roman had a challenging transition, and almost lost his family. It was there he finally found himself, and then utilizing his skills from the military and foster care he began to help businesses with policies and more. Let's talk about you being an interrogator. How does that translate into the business world? The first thing that people always think of when you say that is that it translates over in like an aggressive way of questioning, right? Like figuring out who did this or that and that component certainly does exist. But the main piece is, it's about rapport. It's about conversation. It's about understanding and really and truly, every business is in the business of communicating no matter what you do. How you communicate internally and externally, can affect the flow of your business. So, for me, really, and truly the thing about interrogation that I often use is that rapport and communication piece. Those are the main things that translate over and are the most important. What is the main thing that businesses get wrong when it comes to policies and procedures? I help businesses write policies and procedures using my time in the military, my time in aerospace and working with nonprofits and financial institutions and other types of businesses. And really, truly the thing that I always see is when people write a policy, whether they're at a growth point, they're trying to hit that next level, or they're in the beginning. It's always it's got to be perfect. It's got to be perfect. Yes, it's important that they have structure behind them. But it's okay that they grow and evolve and that they're not perfect. Because really, and truly, it's a framework, right? It sets those outer boundaries to let the business operate and flourish. What did foster care teach you about business? Foster care for me was an interesting time. And I was in a very interesting time in the system and I went through abusive homes and some amazing homes and it would change in almost a blink of a hat. And people have different names for it whether it's grit resiliency, whatever you want to call it. I say when I'm speaking to foster kids or anywhere else, your hustle has to be bigger than your struggle. So what's your why or however you want to look at it? How dedicated are you to this thing that you're doing? And are you going to be willing to work through the hard times? Like right now with COVID? Are you going to be willing to push through that wall, that barrier, whatever it is, to rise to that next level? Because it's amazing what you'll see on the other side. What is one of the most important skills that you learned in the military that you brought over to business? I think the biggest thing was helping others. Like at the core, the military is a service of helping its country or helping the country that it's in. When you really take that mindset of being there to help, and being willing to work through the hardest of issues or situations, and keep that forefront of service in mind, then that's really what drives success and whether it's individually as a contributor on a team, or as a business owner. If you're thinking about service and helping others and that selfless service, then you're going to hit the next level extremely quickly. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? My favorite actually came from LinkedIn. I got connected to this group called the Veteran Roundtable. And it just connected me to a ton of amazing people in all kinds of different fields of veterans, people who wanted to help veterans. It was because that was my first time to engage in a
Meet Dylan Sessler Dylan lost his father when he was 6 years old to suicide. In the aftermath, he struggled through a number of difficult experiences to include domestic violence, bullying, and suicide ideation. At 18, he joined the military as an infantryman and deployed to Afghanistan by 22. Dylan's personal struggle with PTSD, trauma, and the difficulties during his childhood brought him to the brink of life at just 25. He built Invictus Development Group to help others overcome adversity and choose to live. What is your message and the goal behind what it is that you're trying to do? I'm writing a book that that pretty much states it. The title of the book is, “Defy the Darkness.” So many things that I've been through in my life have really just brought me to the brink of life, of happiness, of sadness. I've seen every emotion from the bottom to the top. And the one thing that I want to help people with is to find a way to move forward. To progress their lives and defy that the pain, the struggle, the suffering, the darkness, everything within and take that step forward. What brought you ultimately to start Invictus Development Group? It started with my book. The, the idea of writing this book has been in my head since probably eight or nine years old when I actually learned to start writing. I just felt like I needed to write down my story. Not necessarily for other people at that time, because it was it was really just me and my way of expressing myself was always through writing and I just felt like I needed to write that. So I did it here and there but I never really focused it on a book until about four years ago when I started. Invictus Development Group came from the necessity to want to build a platform for that book and for the message of giving people the information that I have, because I've overcome all of these things. I've overcome so many mental illnesses that I've struggled with that it's time for me to build something that can stand up to my message. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? My favorite is it started back in University of Wisconsin whitewater when I was going through my undergrad. I started just going to the veterans lounge to, you know, I guess I had just gotten home from Afghanistan, it was just like, I'm looking for a place that kind of fits me. I met a number of people there that had really changed the trajectory of what I'm doing now. I started undergraduate research on interviewing veterans about what they have encountered in terms of successes and failures of entering into college life and moving forward after they're in the military. I didn't know it when I was doing those interviews, but they changed my life because a number of those interviews got to a depth of talking about suicide talking about you know, depression, anxiety. PTSD, some very difficult stuff that that I didn't expect to actually go into in those interviews. Later it would come to come to a point where a number of those veterans called me later on, like six months down the road, two years down the road, send me messages years down the road talking about how I saved a couple of their lives from suicide. How do you stay in front of and best nurture your network or your community? Honestly, it's always tough, right? You can build a network, but the long times between connecting with people can really eat into that network because some people will forget you. But I think one of the biggest things that has helped me is the power of empathy. People will forget what you say to them, they'll forget what you can do for them. But people rarely ever forget the power of your story and the power of your ability to communicate with them, and the emotion that you gave to them. If you have the ability to be truly empathetic, and truly kind and offer who you are as a person, rather than your service or whatever you're doing at the time,...
Meet Lucretia Anderson Lucretia Marie Anderson is the founder of Joyful Muse Coaching, a social entrepreneur, educator, and writer. They have been using their background as a theatre artist, mindfulness coach, and team building workshop facilitator to bring creativity, compassion, authenticity, and self-awareness to the forefront of work, school, and home environments. Look out for their contribution as an author to Raising the Global Mindset: Empowering Children to Be World Changers (2020) What led you to begin your coaching business? My business or my foundation is actually in theatre and the performing arts and I began my career as a theatre arts administrator in Washington DC. I just always enjoyed being a part of something that was you know, meant to uplift the human species. So I got into teaching and working, in particular with middle school girls, an all girls middle school here in Richmond, Virginia. I was responsible for helping to evolve a character and leadership curriculum for the girls. And while I was doing that, I was working on my own personal development, I became a little bit of a self-help junkie. I realized that this was something that I really wanted to pass on to adults. I wanted to pass on to educators and other caretakers of children in particular And then particularly women, because there really isn't a need for this idea of transformational thinking and self-empowerment. And so I began this business. What do you feel attracts people to your message? I feel that we are at a pivotal time right now where we are all kind of searching for something that's going to bring us out of the bogginess of life. The way that I connect with people is through putting a focus on and the lens on that vulnerability and allowing myself to show up as a leader in that way and just showing my authentic self. I think there’s real connection to that and I think that when you are sharing your story and the highlights and the lowlights of what's happening in your life, and that you can still be successful, regardless of all of that is thrown at you there's real value in showing that. Can you share with our listeners one of the most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? So I was taking this class and I happened to mention that I really want to continue to separate myself out from the pack as far as like writing about mindfulness and writing about vulnerability. And as I mentioned that, I was introduced to someone who knew someone else who was in that class and they were starting up a blog in Richmond. And so a fellow blogger from that particular cohort of bloggers who are all contributing to that blog, asked me to join them in writing a book. And so as we are building our community around that book and sharing tools and guidance with the other collaborators there, I was just sharing some information with one of those collaborators on Instagram, actually, and she liked one of my posts. And I in turn started being followed by someone else who was following her and then that person saw what I had to offer as far as my knowledge and asked me to, in turn, be on one of his podcasts about mindfulness. And it took a few years to develop that particular chain of events of networking events, but I think it does just go to show how showing up in community, whatever that community is, and sharing about what it is that you do, what it is that you're passionate about, or what your interests are, you never know where that road can lead. How do you stay in front of and nurture these relationships? I think it's important to engage with people and show interest in them just as a fellow human being. I think it's really important for people to understand that as you're sharing what it is that you do that you are also just sharing that human connection. So whether that's commenting on someone's post, and I'm talking about social networking, online, in particular, using social media, showing interest and...
Meet Charles Alexander Charles Alexander’s mission in life is to help busy professionals stand out in a crowded marketplace that is filled with “me too” advisors. He does this by creating story-based explainer videos for busy professionals, like Financial Advisors, Insurance Agents, or anyone else that is in an advisory role, that helps them explain what they do and show personality. How do you create the perfect little story? I always work with clients who are usually in an advisory role in some way, shape, form or fashion. One thing I always want to get across to them a lot of the video out there right now is just somebody staring mindlessly into a camera rambling for about 10 minutes hoping to eventually land another point. More than anything we need stories in our videos. In my particular case, I have folks fill out this really simple six question form and from there is where I'll write the story. And what I want people to understand is that the hero of the story is your client or potential customer. They're the ones that need to see themselves in the story in the video. They're the ones that get to take this hero's journey, so to speak. What are some of the best ways to incorporate videos in your marketing that ultimately help you just generate the best ROI. I tell them first and foremost, your website needs to have video, primarily video above the fold on the landing page of the first thing that someone else sees, because even though there are a dozen different ways to drive traffic to your site, one of the most common ways from somebody in an advisory role or any small business or whoever it could be is still word of mouth or referral. The first thing people do is go to websites. They don't necessarily pick up the phone, they don't email they visit them online. When they do that if they go to your site and it looks like everybody else's, they don't really have a good reason to call you. You didn't stand out, you didn't speak to them. One of the very first places I tell people to put video, put it on the homepage, take off all of the jargon take off all of the used stock photos, get rid of it, put a video there. What are some hidden do's and don'ts when it comes to video? One don’t is don't make a video that sucks. I know that should be a given and I do want to give people leeway because you've got to get started somewhere. I create animated videos. And there's the opposite of that is the talking head video. And if you'll scroll through any social media platform, you will see countless talking head videos. So the don'ts for those is, don't skip the storyline. Don't go in without a script. Don't go in without a plan. And there's a lot of people that just hit the record button. So do your point. Have good audio. That's one key ingredient that a lot of people skip. We will watch a grainy video with a good message as long as it has good audio versus a Hollywood produced video with bad audio. We won't watch it. We'll turn that off. So make sure you get you invest a few bucks in a mic. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I can tell you about one of the very first networking experiences I had, and we'll talk about what worked and what didn't work there. It was a chamber of commerce leads exchange. It's kind of an entry level networking place where you'll go in for 60 seconds, everybody will introduce themselves and do their elevator pitch. Nobody told a story. Nobody asked how they could really help anybody else. I think the best overall out of all of them was a florist at the end, who hopped up told a story about how they had just helped somebody. And that was it. Everybody wants to go speak to him afterwards. And everybody blew off all the high-power folks with nice ties. How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network in your community? Primarily through content marketing that goes as much or more through email...
Meet Amanda Guralski Amanda's career has transformed from her first entrepreneurial pursuit as the co-founder of an online career coaching magazine bizMe.biz, to author of the book I am NOT a Smartie Pants to hosting Tucson’s popular entertainment/lifestyle show, The Morning Blend. She pivoted into becoming a powerhouse account executive for two Fortune 500 companies and currently is working in the technology space. Amanda is also the newest host of Discover Wisconsin. Throughout your career, you've definitely been a big believer in developing a strong personal brand. How has that helped you with your networking? Personal brand, I think is really everything. Setting up who you are as a person and being not only transparent on who that is and what that looks like, but being consistent in that. So if you want to put the persona as a positive, upbeat person that wants to be a voice in the community, that's exactly how you have to show up every single day. And there are times where I don't feel like showing up like that. So guess what, I don't show up. Because the reality is, is that as much as we like to say I don't want people to judge who I am, first impressions are based off exactly that. So developing a strong personal brand is vital, I think to building up your network of community. You've definitely pivoted into different industries and worlds. How have you leveraged your network for that, and how has your brand, maintain consistency while you've done that? So when you look at my hot mess of a resume on paper, you're thinking this girl is crazy and can't figure it out. But when I articulate what I've done in my career, every single position that I have gotten has been through my network. I started out with an online magazine, the Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come and they did not come shockingly enough. I realized that I had to really get out there and pound the pavement and put the feet on the street and get out there and promote myself or promote my brand, promote my mission and be a voice in the community. And that's exactly what I did is I started getting out there I was going to colleges and professional groups and universities and anyone that would give me an opportunity to speak in front of an audience and talk about my mission and what I was trying to accomplish, is exactly what I did. And from there as you begin to meet more people and start this conversation, you show up in a very genuine, authentic and sincere way, people start gravitating towards you. You want to share a little bit about what you're doing in the technology space? I fell into technology through a friend of mine who I went to college with. I did pharmaceutical sales and then from there the most recent president of the Journal Sentinel reached out to me on LinkedIn was like Amanda, we've got a great opportunity. You know the space, you know digital advertising, and we've got a sales manager position open and at the time I was in sales, I'd been in sales way at the beginning of my career. And I did that for about a year and a half and then a friend of mine reached out from Salesforce and was like Amanda, we're really looking for people that have a digital advertising background and you do. Would you be interested in coming here and I did my research and I was really impressed with the suite of products. So I applied, I got that position. And I was there for about a little over a year. And then through networking of friends I really wanted to get into the services space. And I find that the services space what I am now that I'm able to really have very deep conversations where not only are you educating clients on the technology space, specifically marketing, automation space, but also like challenge them on at some level, their education, their historical education on what they know, because what you know, is not what it is today. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking...
Meet Greg Keating Greg Keating is the Director of Sales & Operations for Hangar12. Greg received his undergraduate degree in Marketing & Supply Chain Management from the University of Illinois and received his MBA with a focus in data analytics from the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He brings Fortune 500 experience from Coca-Cola & Ecolab including project management, data analytics, & selling expertise that helps his marketing agency build brand equity, trial, and loyalty for companies of all sizes. I know you're more in the consumer-packaged goods market. Can you tell me a little bit how the consumer-packaged goods market has changed in the last few years, especially as it relates to shopper marketing? In the past, I think shopper marketing was defined as any kind of marketing activation that took place in a retail store. So this might be product sampling or a nice fancy aisle end cap, in store signage, those types of things. Nowadays, well, those things I just mentioned still exist and are very important. The shopper marketing environment has definitely moved online. So the amount of digital activity from retail consumer shoppers has dramatically affected that shopper marketing landscape. So we're talking about six figure media buys for walmart.com homepage takeover, utilizing the I bought a rebate app and leveraging programmatic banner ads that link out to things like store locators. You're really working to create a kind of seamless, online and offline shopping experience. What are some newer, interesting, b2b social media insights that your agency has come across recently? The unexpected channel our agency has really leaned into recently is Pinterest. Pinterest maybe has a stigma around it of being only for the super niche audience of artsy people. And that really just isn't the case. Well, we've seen from some of our recent campaigns is that people of all genders, ages, all these different demographics, are using this platform as a more effective visual Google search. So the click through rates have been shockingly good. The cost per click is low, because I think advertisers maybe aren't fully bought into its validity yet. So it's a really good blend of cost and benefit at the moment. Can you share with our listeners one of your favorite or most successful networking experiences that you've had? My first boss at my previous employer, Ecolab, would bring me at the time into these really high level supply chain strategy meetings with her because I had this sort of very specific knowledge on one of our company's key customer delivery metrics. I got asked a direct question by our chief supply chain officer who's again, this big, intimidating genius. And he asks about why the metric is a certain way. And I was able to give my two cents on why I thought it wasn't necessarily representative of reality. But ultimately, because of that one moment, I got put on a project where I traveled across the USA, to our top 10 production facilities and essentially worked on mapping out our supply chain network and manufacturing capabilities over the course of the next six months to deliver that to our chief supply chain officer. So the reality for me is that none of that would have happened if my boss did not recognize that I had this particular knowledge and then put me in a setting I was honestly unqualified to be in solely to give me that shot at that one opportunity to contribute. How do you stay in front of or nurture these relationships that you've created? So one thing is that our agency that I currently work at is fully remote. I would say I've got Zoom down to a science. With our current coronavirus situation, I would say I'm always initiating video calls wherever possible to meet people face to face and just have an honest conversation with them. I think that has probably helped me faster in business opportunities far more than any phone call I've ever made. What advice would you offer the...
Meet Elena Nunez Murdock Elena Murdock is the founder of Ascend Communications, specializing in PR, strategic partnerships, & branding for startups, venture capital, and private equity groups. She managed a 350 million dollar brand, rebranded a 1.5 bil-dollar company in 6 weeks, developed GTM strategies for multi-million dollar tech products, & creates branding strategies for CEOs. Elena is giving a talk at the Stanford Business School titled, "Leveraging Your Brand as a Young Executive." Networking is her superpower. What are some tips that you can share with someone that actually hates networking? My two top tips are, number one, research the event beforehand and the event you go to, now virtual, and just see who's going to be going and then message them on LinkedIn. If you don't have LinkedIn, definitely get a LinkedIn and start messaging them so you have at least five to ten people that you already know before going. Then secondly, I would also go with a friend. So it's just you. If you still feel uncomfortable going, find a friend to go with you, and then bring them along. And that way you'll have at least somebody to lean on for support. How do you avoid or get out of any sort of awkward or uncomfortable conversations that someone might be in a networking event? So the really great thing about networking events is that they always have food at them. I know this might not be a standard “get out of jail” free card, but I always get a little bite of something to eat, but don't fill up your plate because then you can always be like, oh, I have to go throw this away. Greet someone and then excuse yourself to go throw your plate in the trash. Then go and fill up a plate, but if you fill up your plate, you're kind of stuck there and you're just awkwardly nibbling on the plate. So just always have a little bit around and just kind of circle the room. And for me, that's always worked. Let's talk about social clubs a little bit. What are social clubs and why are they important? One of the things I talked about when I was at Stanford is the importance of social clubs. And it's a little bit hard, especially during this time to go out and socialize. But hopefully when the world gets back to normal, I really advocate for people becoming a part of social clubs. A social club is basically a community that you pay a membership fee to go to and there's three tiers. Tier three being the lowest and what I would see as like the Soho house, if you've ever heard of the Soho house, they have them in select cities all around the world. And it's more for the creative types or if you're in communications or marketing, it's a great place to go and meet other creatives, directors, actors. Tier two social club would be a golf club. They're like mid-tier professionals and all the directors. You can find very senior executives there as well. And it's more formalized as there is a dress code. Then level one would be something especially in Los Angeles on the west coast called the Jonathan Club. There's also the California club. In New York, for example, there's a University called the New York and similar clubs like that. And those memberships are typically upwards of $60,000 a year or more. I would highly recommend if you're a senior level executive that can afford that kind of membership to do that. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? So one of my favorite ones is something that happened to me last year. I had heard through the grapevine of a community that I'm involved with that this billionaire who has this company at the time was worth 1.5 billion, that he was looking for somebody with the exact services that I do. So I specialized not only in PR but on LinkedIn getting clients trending on LinkedIn and the topics and also in the news section. And I had heard through maybe a 10th degree connection, like in passing, this guy was looking for somebody...
Meet Violette de Ayala Violette de Ayala is a Cuban-American serial and social Entrepreneur, Founder of FemCity, and virtual mentor to over 20,000 women. She’s also the International best-selling author of The Self-Guided Guru© Life Lessons for the Everyday Human. Violette has been quoted in Success, Forbes, Entrepreneur, CNBC, Fast Company, Thrive Global, Medium, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Small Business, Authority, Business Insider News as a small business expert overall. Let's talk a little bit about FemCity. You founded this global women's networking organization, just tell us a little bit about that. I started femme city in 2009. I myself was looking for community in my life. And even after going out to many, many networking events here in Miami that are all spectacular and great. I always left feeling a little depleted and like I was missing some sort of connection to others. And after doing that for a couple years, I just decided to start something very small, but it would be just for 20 women here Miami and we would just gather once a month and help to support each other in business and personal development. And throughout the years, because of pictures on Facebook that we initially posted and launching other chapters, we started watching more and more. And now we are a members only organization. We help women in business personal development, and we create communities around the world. You've got a couple new chapters opening up in all different parts of the world. Would you like to share some of those places? We moved out, so we grow very organically. And you can see our growth patterns starting in Miami, and then we kind of grew up the east coast and then moved over to the west coast. And then we started growing in Canada, in Toronto. And so it's natural for us to start launching in other countries as well. So before all of this started happening, we had started kind of having the conversations of launching in Paris and Madrid and in Dubai and we're excited to continuously grow and create communities for women with personal development, online resources, literally anything that they need in order to design and create the life that they envision for themselves. So you're an international best-selling author. What inspired you to write a book while you've already got this global organization underneath your feet? So it's actually a really funny story. Many years ago, some of our members kept asking me for a book, oh, you should write a business book. I started to write it. I reviewed it. I'm like, gosh, this is horrible. This is like a horrible book. I can't do this. So I kind of put that on the back burner. And then I had a goal of writing it by a certain time. And I thought I just need to write it. Let me just write it the way I want to write it in the voice that I generally use when I'm speaking or lecturing. And so I wrote this book, it's 10 chapters, with life lessons that I grew from and how I actually transitioned and pivoted my life stories from going from welfare to wealth stories of being married to someone for 20 years divorcing and getting back together. And just even like the stories of growing up with a mother who was a drug addict and suffered from mental illness. So all these kinds of stories that people knew about, that I lectured. That's where that book was really birthed from. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? So I believe you can network anywhere, right? I think my favorite networking story is I was asked to be a speaker on a panel many, many years ago for Gymboree, here in Miami, which is where I live and I went and we networked a little bit before the panel started and then we networked a little bit after and I got the opportunity to meet the founder of Gymboree, she was also on the panel, Joan Barnes, and we just connected. It was like we had known each other our whole entire lives. And she ended up we...
Meet Janice Porter Janice began her career as a teacher and was a corporate trainer and has now been in business for herself for several years. She found her niche coaching and training business professionals to network at a mastery level and turn their connections into new business. Having an innate curiosity, she has leveraged that into building business relationships, and teaches others how to do the same. Connecting people is a skill that Janice uses when needed, and only when she feels that it will be managed most professionally as she holds her relationships very dearly. LinkedIn training is a huge part of Janice’s business. She believes anyone in business or looking for a new position needs to have a professional LinkedIn profile, and that LinkedIn is a powerful, underutilized online platform for attracting new clients. You can listen to Janice on her relationships, rural podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher and most other podcast platforms. Let's talk about relationships and specifically relationship marketing. What is that? So whenever you think of the words relationship, and marketing, most people or I'm going to go with that 80/20 rule a piece that 80% of the people would think marketing first, and the people that I like to surround myself with and those that I train on such things, we talk about the word relationship more. We want to make sure that people connect with people in an authentic way and build an authentic relationship with them. It's not just about sending you my stuff, or connecting to add another number to my Facebook friends or my LinkedIn profile. It's about truly taking the time and interest and having the curiosity to find out about people and find out how they work and how they think and what can you do to support them? That's my idea of relationship marketing. So why the focus on LinkedIn? When LinkedIn came around, I was not sure what it was all about and so I asked a couple of people who were using it and one of them kindly put me on to this young man. She said call him as he knows all about it, and he will talk to you about it. Well, this young man was very knowledgeable. He was also a really good teacher. And so I got him to teach me all about it. And what I found was that this makes sense to me. This is logical. It's kind of left brain and it's also a business platform. I find it a much easier platform to deal directly with and to be authentic on it, because the majority of people on this platform are our decision makers, and therefore, it's easy to get to the topic at hand, to the business that needs to be done faster. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking stories that you've had? I met somebody on LinkedIn, who introduced me to somebody else on LinkedIn, because they thought that this person would be an interesting guest on my podcast. He's in Australia. And I have since chatted with him on Zoom a couple of times. He has been on my podcast. I really enjoyed this gentleman and he's very smart, but he gives back and he's very passionate about what he does. And through our conversation, I then introduced him to one of my mentors Kody Bateman who owns Send Out Cards, which is a company that I'm involved with. And Kody had a bit of a vision around children and card sending and showing appreciation. And this gentleman does all of that in spades and teaches young entrepreneurs and he has an online academy. So now I've introduced him to Kody. He's now been on Kody's podcast. And now we're coming back to me training him more on LinkedIn and goes around and it all came from just connection online. So how do you stay in front of or best nurture your network in your community? One, mostly through LinkedIn where I try to stay visible, and that is by engaging with people on my newsfeed and posting things when I think it's appropriate or when I have something worthwhile to share, and, two, by my podcasts, and three, is by sending cards and...
Meet Emerald Mills Emerald was born in Waukegan, Illinois. She’s a business strategist, culture builder and public health professional with almost two decades of cumulative experience. Emerald is also the founder and leader facilitator of Diverse Dining and events educational organization, whose mission is to cultivate courage, compassion and connection through meaningful conversations centered around diverse foods and cultural exploration. Diverse Dining strives to establish and maintain interpersonal and interprofessional relationships among persons of varying culture, economic, ethnic, political, racial, and social backgrounds. As a philanthropic initiative, Diverse Dining, which Emerald is now involved with full time is prominently been featured on Dear Milwaukee, On Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Spectrum One, Fox 6, Visit Milwaukee podcast and plenty of other mediums. So why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about why you decided to start Diverse Dining? I lived in Zion, Illinois. And it's just a very small community that was pretty diverse at the time that I grew up there. And when I relocated to Milwaukee in 1997, which was my junior year of high school, I kind of got a little bit of a culture shock at how separated it seemed that people were, particularly by race and ethnicity, but in other ways as well. I learned after living here for a while. So, I created a Diverse Dining as a solution to the segregation, racism. I really think even you know, cliques and just silos a solution to the silo problem that we tend to have where we have challenges connecting with people that are different from us. Who inspires you? And why? Martin Luther King and Oprah inspires me. People inspire me who just dare to do something different to break the mold. People who endeavor to find solutions to problems that seem that they have no solution are typically people that I draw my inspiration from. So, Dr. King, for sure will be one. There is another lady who is Joyce Meyer and I'm inspired by her. I am inspired by various different people in various different sectors, but mainly for the reason of breaking the mold or breaking past the barrier that is in place. What advice would you offer to women that are starting their own business or considering doing it? Well, I believe relationships are just key. And my business is focused around building authentic relationships. I really recommend that women are starting their own business, find spaces where they can be vulnerable, build effective partnerships and relationships with people who are like minded or who are supportive in some way or another of what they're endeavoring to start. And so, you can use that encouragement and support is fuel to keep going and to strengthen them when things get difficult. Can you share with our listeners one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? An event that I had when I first got started. The networking was kind of easy, but it was with someone who came to an event that I had hosted, but their event organization did some similar work. And so the young lady who came to the event and myself actually were able to meet for coffee, have a conversation about ways that we could possibly work together but ultimately had built a pretty close friendship as a result of it. We support each other and anything that we're doing and also have support in the work that we're doing. So that was probably one of my most recent favorites experiences. How do you stay in front of or best nurture these relationships that you create? One of the things I had to do early on when I got started in my business was investing in CRM, which is a customer management system. And that would help me to keep track. I know that is something that I'll have to probably continually advance and improve over time. But that one of the things that I do to help me out a lot. And then also really knowing on the onset what I need or...
Meet Bill Bice Bill Bice has always been an entrepreneur, starting his first company at age 14, putting on road races with corporate sponsors. At 18, he started ProLaw Software, the first integrated ERP for law firms. After selling the company to Thomson Reuters, Bill became a VC as a founding partner in the Verge Fund, investing in high tech, high growth companies in the Southwest. Bill is the CEO of boomtime, the Word of Mouth marketing company. So you've built and invested a lot of businesses what's been the biggest challenge? It really is that good of market I mean, that's the reason I started Boomtime which was my frustration in getting great marketing for the companies that I started. I mean, it's a tough thing to do really well. And it's really tough as business owners to make the necessary commitment behind marketing because just like always spending money and not getting results, and there's some key reasons for that. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see people making in their marketing? I think there's two really big ones. So what I consider the biggest mistake in marketing is talking about yourself because nobody cares. And marketing is so much more effective if you flip that around, and really pay attention to what your audience cares about. If you instead turn it into insight, perspective driven help that you're giving to your audience, it becomes so much more effective. And then you get to the really hard part, which is the second step, which is that you've got to do it consistently. There is no magic trick in marketing. It's actually really hard work that has to be done day in and day out for it to be effective. You've done a lot of work in B2B sales, applying the challenger sale, what have you learned in doing that? The challenger sale is all about creating new sales opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist. If your business works where you can just be an order taker, then that's great. But if you're doing something that's complex and has multiple decision makers as high value, then then you need to be able to create new sales opportunities. Let's be consultative, let's make everything in our marketing have this perspective, insight driven approach, get your audience to think about the things that you're really good at, give them a different perspective. And if you do that you'll create new sales opportunities that didn't exist before. Can you share with our listeners, one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? I'm very much an introvert at heart, but yet to do what I want to do, I have to go out in the world and talk to people. I love LinkedIn for this very reason. Because it's like the perfect cocktail party, it's going to be a room full of only exactly the people I want to meet, I get to do it under my control, I don't have to eat horrible food at the same time, and I get to build a network of exactly the right people that I want to talk to. I found that if you treat that the same way that you would that cocktail party where when you meet somebody, you just don't dive into a sales pitch, you have to build a relationship first. If you do that same thing on LinkedIn, that works really well. It's been the perfect way for me to build my network and be able to get my message out. How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network? If you do a regular flow, and this is what's really hard, quite frankly, is because 90% of the effort is great content. And most companies have a really tough time doing that internally, you've got all the ideas, but actually executing on it day in and day out is really tough. You got a business to run and sitting in front of a blank screen doesn't get you there. So you know what, the only way to solve that problem is to build a network of subject matter experts who are able to write that stuff. So I think you have to outsource it. The ideas have to come from you. The really hard part is getting the voice,...
Meet Ian Moyse Ian has been a sales leader for over 25 years and focused on the cloud computing industry for the past 13 years. Now serving as EMEA sales director for cloud telephony vender Natterbox. He sits as a non exempt on a number of industry bodies and firms and is a social influencer for a growing number of global brands such as Oracle, SAP and Sage. He's a recognized keynote speaker and blogger on cloud, social selling, and personal branding. As a sales leader, what's the landscape of sales looking like right now? How is it changing? So I think it's already changed and it will continue to change. And I think the reason for that is we've all changed ourselves. We now live in a world that's different. And it's different because of mobile smart devices, the internet, the World Wide Web, rather than the internet, the true definition social media. Our behavior as a buyer has inherently changed. So from a sales perspective, the game's changed. And it's changed years ago. And it continues to change both because of the environment we live in. Because of millennials and Zeds having grown up in that environment. You're an advocate of social selling, what is it and how do you use it as a sales leader? I think the name itself is a misnomer because when I speak to a lot of people they get well, that wouldn't fit our product or service. We couldn't sell that over the internet. You couldn't sell it over social certainly. Social selling isn't about selling over social. Social selling should be called something like how to use social media to get a first engagement conversation open that you turn into a real world conversation, then move on to use all your normal selling skills. But how do you package that? Social selling is about finding a way to engage authentically, with a potential customer or buyer that turns that into a real world conversation. It is not a quick fix. It's a sales nurturing methodology to try and get engagement. What can you share with our listeners about what exactly personal branding is and why is it important? Personal brand isn't some illustrious thing about you need to be a celebrity. It isn't something your company is responsible for in terms of branding of a Pepsi Cola or some big logo out there. It's pretty simplistic. It's about how you represent yourself. How are you viewed online? If someone searches your name, what will they find? And what will the impression give? Today's world, often the first impression is digital. Because if you're going to meet someone, it takes them five seconds to put your name in LinkedIn and just have a look. To put your name in and see what comes up in Google. And to take an impression of what they see. And you need to be cognizant of that. So think about your social profile your brand is how you look online. You have control of that to the majority. And it's not complex, isn't it? You can do it for free most times. Can you share with our listeners, your most successful or favorite networking story that you have? The traditional one is going along to an event and there's loads of strangers there. And I don't feel comfortable just walking up to introduce myself. What I always go back to is where I went to an event. And I sat down to listen to a speaker and I sat next to someone so I just started chatting to them. Which bit are you interested in today? Where were you from? And did basic fundamental question because I sat randomly next to this person. And it turned out they were the European CIO of a major brand organization. And we chatted, and I wasn't trying to sell to him. The conversation naturally just accidentally ended up in the right place. To the point that we said, well, we should talk after this. That progressed into meetings that progressed into me selling them across the whole of Europe and then traveling out to the states to meet the global CIO, etc. How do you stay in front of our best nurture the relationships that you're creating? I...
Meet Ian Reynolds Ian Reynolds is a Partner and Chief Solutions Architect at Zibtek, a software development firm focused on helping businesses of all sizes in the US solve their core problems with software. They empower entrepreneurs, growth companies, enterprises and visionary firms to achieve greater profitability and efficiency, valuation and ultimate success by building the right tools through custom software. What is it that your company is doing to innovate and stay on top of the latest technologies? We have a select group of engineers who are just looking at a sort of smattering of the biggest and sort of most available trends and technology, mostly AI and these sorts of things. Just dedicated research to see if they can come up with any sort of projects that are going to be interesting, going to solve problems for our clients that we can then turn around and present research. We see the market going this way, here is something that we really feel will be of benefit to you and hopefully, of course, a benefit to us internally as we sort of provide services to the workplace. Can you talk a little bit about the types of clients that you help? There are three major categories that we serve. The first category is small businesses in the United States, which accounts for 90% of those firms as maybe 20 to 25% of our business. And these are folks who either have an idea or have a need for a piece of software that doesn't exist, and they're sort of bringing something new to market. Then we have midsize businesses, which account for the majority of our business. And they don't necessarily have that team in house that can solve that complex engineering problem that they have, that would resolve the core issue in their business or would basically allow them to focus more on operations. And of course, we have enterprise clients like Google and Adobe, that we serve, and we're building and supporting enterprise projects for them in house. And those are those are much more structured. Can you describe the process of building custom software and how a company goes about doing that? So building custom software is very much like building a house, you have to have a plan. You also have to have certain access to certain things. So we start with really sitting down the client understanding their needs. We had people come to us with literally just napkins where they have an idea. And so we have to take that translate that into a formal or textual document. We then go into a design and architecture phase, where we're actually reviewing the technologies that would be best fit for the solution. And then we're designing it. Sometimes we'll do a discovery phase, that's a couple weeks to really kind of test and make sure build what is called like a POC a proof of concept to see if this can be done. We then go into principal engineering where we pair a team that has built something before together. And then depending on the nature of the project, you have QA teams to make sure that the quality is sort of meeting our standards. Can you help our listeners by sharing your one of your favorite or most successful networking stories that you've had? I was actually revisiting a college campus. We were doing some recruiting. And I had bumped into a colleague that had basically made a pretty wild transition in their career and we just caught up very briefly. That conversation sparked a chain of referrals, which I found out later, where I had just sort of talked about what I was doing. And I took rather a sort of unconventional career path, started a chain of conversations on that person side. And then I find out years later, that they had actually come into also my circle of work, doing engineering, largely because of this conversation that I had with him. How do you stay in front of or nurture your networking community that you've established? I've taken an approach of trying to write very thoughtful pieces. And share those directly
Meet Dr. Matthew Waro Dr. Matt Waro is a family practice chiropractor that specializes in athletes. He works with his practice members to reach their goals by championing them through chiropractic care. Dr. Matt uses functional movement assessments to determine how best to correct the spine, arms, and legs to increase athletic performance, prevent future injury, and rehab current or old injuries. He loves working with people of all ages and levels of activity at Core Chiropractic, his practice in Oconomowoc. What exactly is a chiropractor doing? A lot of people think that I'm a bad doctor that you come to me when you have low back pain or headaches or neck pain, but what I treat is the nervous system. So the brain It's up top and sends down the nerves in the spinal cord. And when a bone in your back comes out of place your body braces out with inflammation. And that inflammation can sometimes irritate that nerve root, which causes the back pain, hence why people come to see me with back pain. But I'm not actually treating that back pain, I'm more concerned about something else. All that extra fluid in the area can put compression on the nerve roots. So my job is to go through the spine and make sure that all of the pressure is off those nerves so your body can function on its very best. Why did you choose to specialize in sports chiropractic? It makes my day interesting. So each different type of athlete has a different need. I work a lot with hockey players. It's their legs, their shoulders. For the goalies as their knees. For runners we have to deal with feet, ankles, knees, hips, just different. Different conditions that pop up each day. My job interesting. What about cyclists? So cyclists are actually pretty good. I'd say a big part of it is the pressure that's always on your pelvis. And then also, of course, we got the hip motion though. The ankle motion and the knees as well. What other projects are you involved with outside of the clinic? Outside of the clinic, I have a couple different things going on. One being I do corporate care practice. I actually go into corporations around the apartment area and deliver chiropractic adjustments to their employees on site. I'm actually just launching another project called Plants for Local Partners and this is based off of Dr. Anna Koeck idea. It's having to do with small business owners and people that typically don't offer insurance benefits but giving them an option that their employees or themselves can buy into to have regular care. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking story or experience that you've had? I like networking events that aren't necessarily common to the reader card to people, right? Because that's very impersonal. In all fields, people tend to do business with those that they know, that they like, and that they trust. And at those events where you're just handing out cards, you're not building that trust. You're barely even getting to know somebody. So one of the big ones for me is actually eWomen's Network, which is kind of funny because I'm a man. But the eWomen's Network is very inclusive of males. But you go there, and you just feel like family. As you continue to create new relationships and build your community, how do you stay in front of or best nurture these relationships that you're creating? It comes down to consistency. So a lot of these networking events, these gatherings of people, they happen at a set interval. So you make sure that you are always at those events. You talk with all the people that you've already met, and make sure you pick up a couple new people. So you can start building more relationships. Outside of that, it's connecting with them maybe on LinkedIn or connecting with them on Facebook can and pushing content so that way your face stays in front of them and they recognize your name. What advice would you offer the business professional who's looking to grow...
Meet Rylee Meek Riley is the founder and CEO of the Social Dynamic Selling System, which turns dinner seminar marketing into a science. After responding to a small add on crisis in 2009, Riley was introduced to a new concept of selling, one in which radically changed his life forever. Having just $673 in his bank account, but more importantly, a burning desire for more, Riley went on to produce over $80 million in sales over the past eight years. Now that he has perfected his model, through continual trial and error, he is sharing this learned wisdom and is on a mission to help other entrepreneurs and business owners achieve their revenue goals that they have to live the lifestyle they desire. Everything he teaches, is tried, tested, refined, and proven to create a predictable, sustainable and scalable selling system. Can you just explain what Social Dynamic Selling is? At the core of what it what it is, is it's gathering a group of people in person in which there is a social dynamic happening. No different than if you were out at a restaurant or a bar, there's a social dynamic happening. What we do is we create a setting or an environment in which we gather people together, that allows us to create an environment for the host of that event to have listeners eager to hear what they have to hear about a topic in which they are the expert in their industry, and then they have the ability to deliver a presentation. And then ultimately, try to obtain sales or make sales after the fact. Why does this work so well? I do think that in person, kind of touch we'll call it is something of the last art in the in the sales world. I think you're gathering people in a in a neutral environment in which they're not feeling pressured coming into a retail store or something along those lines. It's usually an environment in which they've been to before or they know well, and they're not threatened. It's not like they're in that high-pressure sales environment. In your bio, it states that you offer predictable, sustainable and scalable selling systems. What exactly do you mean by that? My background was always selling one on one. And it was this constant struggle of lead supply or lead flow. That feast and famine kind of lifestyle in the in the direct sales world. Where was your next lead was coming from, how you were obtaining that and then ultimately making presentations to close deals. And so this system really allows us to have a constant supply. For instance, if the business owner is in San Diego, California, and they're looking to expand into the Phoenix, Arizona market, but they don't have a brand or any recognition, any wherewithal, within that industry they could call upon someone like us. We then could host events and have a room full of qualified prospects eager to hear what they have to talk about whenever they're looking to expand into any particular market. What specific industries are you working in? Or have you worked in? We're kind of all over the board. Financial advisors, they were kind of the pioneers of this. I have to say that I'm not the creator of doing dinner seminar sales by any means. I do feel like I have perfected it taking it kind of out of solely in that financial industry. We've expanded into the home remodeling market, general contracting into the medical world cosmetic surgery, dentistry, regenerative medicine, into the travel world, into investment clubs. It sounds like it's very heavier focus is on the business to consumer side of things? Yeah, for the most part. Part of the reason is we do a ton of direct mail. I do hundreds of thousands of pieces every single week. And it's easiest to buy that data and send that direct mail piece to that end consumer. If I'm looking to go b2b, typically the business owner, and it's not always the case, but the business owner usually has that gatekeeper, we'll call it, that's actually collecting the mail for themselves and it doesn’t get into the...
Meet Steve Fry Co-founder of a number of businesses, including two that have made the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 Lists. Today, Steve spends his time matchmaking organizations that genuinely want to grow or increase collaboration with a team of experts in E-Commerce, M365/SharePoint and Digital Marketing. Steve serves on a number of boards where he gets to see up close how non-profits work. Having been to about 70 countries, Steve loves to travel with his wife, Jan. They have two grown daughters and live in suburban Des Moines. Tell us a little bit about your company and what exactly it is that you do and introduce the company in general? We have a couple of companies, but they're all under the banner of spindustry. And we're based in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa. And we do really two major things. The first would be large scale web application development. And as a part of that would be replacement parts e-commerce. We do a lot of that. And then the other side of our business is Microsoft Office 365. And as a part of that platform, we do a lot of work with SharePoint, Teams, Power BI, and some of the tools within that suite to move businesses to the cloud. As people are working more and more remotely, that is a platform that is very busy for us and serves our clients well. How did you get into this space and tell us a little bit about your background? It started about 35 years ago, when I first got out of school, I went to work for an insurance company and then I moved to Iowa back in 1990. I was involved for a number of years with an exporting business. We sold old firefighting and safety equipment that was manufactured in United States, but all of our clients were international. And I, for a number of years, covered Asia Pacific. So, from Japan down to Australia, and then back west to India, and got to do a lot of traveling. And that was back in the day when we didn't have email. And we didn't have the ability to communicate like we do today. And then in in 1996, we started a new company. I met a guy when I was working in a product fulfillment business, Michael Bird, he's my business partner. And he helped us in the exporting business to automate everything that we were doing. And he just did a wonderful job and he was entrepreneurial. And my business partner and I and other businesses decided to, you know, let's start a new business. Where do you see the future of business going today? So I in my business career, I have seen incredible change. I remember When I was early in my career, the fax machine became a prominent feature in most offices. And that was a revolutionary tool that you could actually send something, a piece of paper for from one office to another. And we do so many things that I couldn't have thought of 30 years ago, even 10 years ago, we do things today, we wouldn't have thought of. And I think looking forward there's more change. I think there'll be careers that people do 10 years from now that don't exist today. I know a lot of people are involved in social media work today. Well, if you go back maybe 10 or 12 years ago, that's really when that all started and there was nobody working in social media today. That's a big, big business. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or one of your favorite networking stories that you had? I have belonged to a breakfast club for several years now. It meets twice a month, and this is going back about 10 years. One morning after we had our bimonthly breakfast, one of the members that I had just met but didn't really know him very well came up to me and we were chatting and he said he thinks he may have a client for me. It was a hog farmer in northwestern Iowa. And I looked at him and I said, Jim, do you know what I do? And he laughed. And he said I think you'd be surprised, and I thought, I don't know how we're going to help a hog farmer in northwestern Iowa. But I will tell you in the 10 years since, between that relationship and...
Meet Brian Weaver Brian serves as CEO of Torch.AI and has more than 20 years of experience leading mission driven high growth technology focused companies. Torch.AI helps leading organizations leverage artificial intelligence in a unique way via proprietary enterprise data management software solution. Today Torch.AI supports clients like H&R Block with fraud detection and mitigation. And the US Department of Defense with machine learning enabled background investigations for all federal employees, supporting the determination of an individual's trustworthiness and security credentialing. So how did you end up starting your first company? So I was sort of a serial entrepreneur even an employee. I got out of college and I conned to this guy to hire me, no experience, I was the youngest employee that they'd hired a company called the Kansas City Star. I had a normal day job and I've always considered myself someone that really enjoyed working with others and trying to solve problems for others and in a business development or sales capacity as a 21 year old kid, but I always had kind of this curiosity and this bit of a creative spark. And so I then left that job and actually followed the guy that had hired me right out of college. And I was a manager over a whole group of people. But the way my first business started, I actually got in trouble at that job. I NASCAR came to Kansas City. We did a great job on NASCAR’s project. And it went very well. But my employer didn’t like it and I was written up for the project. So I went actually went to the NASCAR guys that had had the project and asked would you guys be willing to hire me? And I'll start my own company, and you can be customer number one, and they agreed. What has been one of your biggest lessons that you've learned as an entrepreneur? So in order to grow and actually in order to build a real business that’s financially viable where you can have resources and innovation as a function of the business and actually solve problems for big companies and even maybe make a difference in your community, you have to have a little bit of a different attitude because it's a living, breathing thing. And you ultimately need to figure out very quickly how to put to build teams. And you might be as a business owner or an entrepreneur, you might be like the hero CEO type, where you've got a lot of charisma, you can make a sale and you can kind of keep the thing going. But the real measure of success is can you build an organization that is sort of independent from you and that skill set or character trait? Can you share it with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I think the way most people network is like a complete waste of time. So I think I'm a good I'm a good candidate to help share some information. I think your relationships and your reputation are everything. I find that the way I do it is maybe a little different. I don't like going to a networking type of events. I've never been wanting to join a chamber of commerce or another organization. I always approach it is that I am looking for opportunity. I have a desperate need to solve a problem. So I'd say number one, I'm self-aware of what I need as a human being. And believe it or not, I think that that's directly applicable to your success. I think the more you know who you are and are comfortable in your own skin, the easier this whole thing will be because you won't be asking yourself to do something that you're just not naturally inclined to do. If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of, less of, or differently with regards to your professional career? I think it would be don't stress so much. It's easy to say and I just think I'm wired to sort of be hyper motivated and sort of driven by fear. The wisdom that I found doing this for over two decades and having failures and great successes and the whole
Meet Tim Fulton Tim owned and operated several small retail businesses in Miami. He also taught as an adjunct professor and served as the interim director of the Family Business Institute at Florida International University. Tim was a Vistage chair for 16 years, retired from Vistage in December 2018 and currently enjoys chair Emeritus status. In 1992, he started his own small business consulting firm, Small Business Matters. He has an award-winning newsletter and has self-published two different books and co-hosts a popular podcast. He also hosts one of the largest annual events in Atlanta for small business owners. What are some of the entrepreneurial myths that you're aware of? There are some myths about entrepreneurship that just tend to pervade no matter what. And so, an example, many of your listeners may be familiar with the book, The E-Myth, one of my favorite books of all time, written by Michael Gerber. We tend to think that most small businesses are started by entrepreneurs, you know, people with great ideas and initiative and drive and vision. Kerber found that it’s not the fact that most small businesses instead are started by, by the term he used was technicians. A technician is someone who has a particular skill and expertise and experience that causes them to then want to start a business around that experience. So that the technician is the chef who opens up the restaurant or the attorney who starts as his or her own law practice. And so that's how most small businesses get started not by the ideal so to speak entrepreneur, but by the technician. So entrepreneurship is on the decline in the US. Why is that? One is, health insurance, which is always kind of a hot topic. But when they study that they found that fewer people are starting businesses because they're afraid of losing their health insurance, because maybe they have a pre-existing condition. We've also got an issue around immigration. But the reality is we have more restrictive immigration policies today. About 30% of new business startups can be directly tied to immigrants, people who have just joined this this country. About 30% of new startup activity due to immigration. When we restrict immigration, it just makes sense that we're also restricting small business. The third factor that comes into play is capital. When businesses first get started, many of them need startup capital. And for some, that means going to relatives, family members. For others, it means going to a bank. And ever since the recession in 2008, bank capital has become increasingly difficult to acquire. Any suggestions for those that do have a business and helping them grow and take it to the next level? So a couple ideas around growing the business. One is the importance of having a plan. You've got to have a business plan. But the reality is that the SBA has studied this, the Small Business Administration, fewer than 20% of all small businesses have any type of plan. Again, you look at failure rates in small business it's more than 50%. And some judge it to be 75-80% of small businesses fail within five years. I think there's a connection between those two, that if a business does not have some type of plan, business plan in place, they’re at risk of failure. Can you share with our listeners one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? There was a book that was written, you may be familiar with it. The book is called Netweaving. It takes a very different take that weaving suggests or ask the question, when I meet you for the first time, what can I do to help you? What in this short conversation, what could I learn? That would put me in a position where I could be a benefactor of yours? So maybe it's connecting you with someone within my network? Or maybe it's recommending a book? Or maybe it's inviting you to another event that might be advantageous, but it's just turning the table. How do you stay in front of and...
Meet Peter Yawitz Peter Yawitz is a management communication consultant helping individuals and groups at global companies communicate more effectively. His website someoneelsesdad.com has videos, an ask-dad column, and a podcast, giving tons of practical and humorous advice on how to manage life at work. His book, Flip-Flops & Microwaved Fish: Navigating the Dos & Don’ts of Workplace Culture, is full of advice and humor for young professionals and anyone else whose questions are rarely answered in the workplace. So let's talk about your book little bit. Why did you write it and who exactly is it for? It's for young professionals entering the workforce, but it's also for anyone who feels a little bit disenfranchised, going into a work and feeling they don't fit in. I just found that over the years people would start asking me questions that they were not getting answered from the HR department or of any kind of orientation session. And these were just things that no one had ever told them. And it could be something simple about, well, how do I construct an email? Or what should I do in the subject line? Or how does my tone come across? But then it got a little bit deeper. And people would say things like, well, what happens if you're talking to somebody at work? And that person is totally hot? Like, how do you focus? So let's talk about the young professionals right now. Gen Z is officially entering the workforce. How would you recommend they start building a network now that they're just starting out? So the first thing I would say to people who are starting out is chill, just chill a minute. I mean, it's nice to develop a network, but it's not necessarily the first thing you have to do when you start a job. Start your job and learn to do your job well and develop a little bit of credibility about what you do. And then once you've done that, then try to look for people just to get to know and to let people know what you're doing. I'm sure you've been leveraging the digital space a bit to grow your audience, what's been the most effective social medium for you? I say the most effective thing is hiring someone to do it for me. That's been the most important thing I would say. So I would rather provide content and have someone tell me where to put it or how to design it. So I know that I'm doing it in the best way. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I've had a lot of success with my alumni network. Who from my college, who from my grad school is around? Who is doing something interesting or working for a company that I want to target that I should just contact. You never know where things are going to come from. I would just say, don't be afraid to be assertive about what you're looking for. And just be polite about how you're doing it. How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? I don't want to be so self promotional, I guess I'm more self promotional now because I've got a book to sell. So I will have a MailChimp list. So if there is an Ask Dad that I find interesting, I'll email it to those people. I also post on LinkedIn and use other social media. If it's interesting, I try not to jam it down people's throats, but I figure I'm only going to do something if it's a topic that I think a general population might be interested in. Between digital networking and traditional networking, which one do you find more value in digital or or just traditional? Definitely traditional. I think it's my generation. And I would rather have coffee with somebody and schedule an actual meeting because you get more done that way. But even if I'm trying to network with a junior person, or even let's say some of these young CEOs that I am trying to get on my podcasts, I will approach them first on email, but then I'd like to have a phone conversation. And if I can do something in person, I just find you develop...
Meet Dr. Wayne Baker Dr. Wayne Baker is the author of All You Have To Do Is Ask: How to Master the Most Important Skill for Success (Jan 14, 2020). He is the Robert P. Thome (“Toe-May”) Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, as well as Faculty Director of the Center for Positive Organizations. Wayne is a co-founder and board member of Give and Take, Inc., which develops technologies based on the principles in his new book. Why is asking for what you need such an important skill for success? We found that people tend to be very generous at work and in their lives and they're very well regarded for that. Most people want to be helpful and will help when they can. But they don't ask for what they need. And because they don't ask, they don't get the inflow of all the resources you need to be successful. It could be knowledge, information, referrals, ideas, contacts, Any kind of resource that you need to be productive and to do well at work. So why is it so difficult for people to ask for what they need? There's a couple of reasons. One is that people are concerned or they're worried that they'll appear to be incompetent, weak that they can't do their jobs. Another very common obstacle is that people figure no one can help. Many, many times I've run different events and activities using the tools in my book, and people will take me aside and say, you know, I'm not going to ask for what I really need, because I know no one could help me. And I always tell them the same thing, which is to never know what people know, or who they know. Until you ask. What can people and teams do to build social capital? The most important thing is to give yourself permission to ask and to realize that asking is an essential part of the equation. So if everyone wanted to be a giver, and everyone wanted to help, nothing would happen. So what we found that in the workplace is that most people are willing to help. In fact, the studies there show up to 90% of the help that is given in the workplace is in response to a request, but most people don't ask, so therefore, nothing really happens. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? Well, I think the one I would have to relate goes back a number of years. When my wife and I were coming up on our 10th wedding anniversary, I said to her, you know, what would you like to do? She said, I want to be on Emerald Live in New York City to celebrate our anniversary. I was participating in the orientation program for all of our incoming MBA students here at the Ross School of Business. I said, you know, I'm gonna take my own medicine I'm gonna make a big request and I use the "smart criteria." Like five people came forward and said, one person said, you know, I know someone who's dating Emerald's daughter and I can make an introduction for you. We were connected. As you continue to build and grow your network and community can you share how you stay in front of over best nurture these relationships? There's a couple of things that are important to do. One is to stay in contact, but stay in contact in a meaningful way. Look for opportunities to share something of value. It's like a little investment. I just think it's part of the importance of building a network is that you want to be an investor, you want to help other people, you want to be generous. What advice would you offer the business professional who is looking to grow their network? I would say it would be three parts Join. Give. Ask. So it'd be to join a meaningful group. It could be join a LinkedIn group, or there's so many online communities. Then look for opportunities to give, you know, a few, almost every conversation, you can listen with that intention in mind. And then of course, whenever you need help, to ask for it whenever you need a resource to get your work done, to solve a problem, to ask for what...
Meet Drew McLellan Drew has worked in advertising for over 30 years, and he has started his own agency McLellan Marketing Group in 1995 after a five year stint at Y&R and still actively runs his agency. He also owns and runs Agency Management Institute, which serves over 250 agencies small to mid size covering advertising, digital marketing, media and PR. He helps them increase their AGI, attract better clients and employees, mitigate the risk of being self employed in such a volatile business. And best of all, letting the agency owner actually enjoy the perks of agency ownership. Drew often appears in publications like Entrepreneur Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Agency Post, CNN, Businessweek, and many others. The Wall Street Journal calls him one of 10 bloggers, every entrepreneur should read. Can you share how running your own marketing agency transitioned to the success and helping you advise other agency owners? I started my own agency like most agency owners do, kind of by the seat of my pants. And so I just, without any fear, leaped into the unknown, and then very quickly learned how hard it was to run any business. And so very early on, I found an organization that acknowledged that most agency owners were accidental business owners, and so I learned a ton from that organization. Completely changed the way I ran my own agency. Can you share any tips or best practices for building a community in general? There's so much buzz and talk around building a community of your customers and all of that, but what people don't really talk about is you actually have to like those people. And I would argue that you actually have to love them. And if you love them well, and you create an environment where they feel safe, and you encourage them to be kind and generous to one another. There are not a lot of places in the world where you do feel heard, and understood and cared about, and that it's safe to talk about the things that are hard or scary. If you genuinely create that space for the right reasons, which again, I believe are because you actually love these people. And then they gather and then they create it to be something far bigger than what you could have ever created. Other than money, what advice would you share as far as some of the biggest hurdles to starting your own digital agency or just agency in general? Well, I think the challenge is it's a very crowded space. And so if, if you don't do something differently, and if you don't have a depth of expertise around something, whether it is a certain audience, a certain industry, Whatever it may be, it's pretty easy to get sort of swept up in the sea of sameness, and look just like everybody else. Can you help our listeners remove those fears by sharing one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I think we have given the word networking a terrible reputation, which is, I'm really out just shaking people's hands and collecting business cards so I can sell you stuff later. For me, every networking opportunity is I just look for ways to help. I just ask as many questions as I can. How do you stay in front of and best nurture these relationships that you're creating and establishing? I think it comes in layers, right? I mean, I think professionally, we are very content driven. So we're always trying to create content that is relevant and useful to people. And then I'm very active in email and on social and so I try and be very, very responsive. I think it boils down to actually caring about the people in your network and you cannot give everyone the same level of attention. But you certainly can touch everybody at a certain level so that they know that you're out there. What advice would you offer the business professional who's looking to grow their network? If you want to grow your network, help more people, that's as simple as it is. The more people that you help the more accessible you make
Meet Lori Mendelsohn Lori Mendelsohn is an intuitive matchmaker whose purpose is to introduce people who were meant to meet each other. Her company is SmartFunnySingle. She has introduced 15 couples who have said "I do." Lori had a successful 33 year career as a fashion designer in LA and NYC as well as founding, building and selling Wisconsin's largest and highest awarded pet sitting and dog walking business, Wisconsin Pet Care. Tell our listeners how you got started as a matchmaker? So I started it when, when I was 19 years old. I had a feeling when I met someone that I knew someone who would be perfect for them. And then I introduced them and long story short, they got married. And then this kept happening over and over and over again until we got to the number 15. I think it's time for me really to look into this and figure out if this is something that I should be doing for a living? So the answer was yes. How is networking a part of your business? I am networking all the time, as a matchmaker, I can't sit in my office and expect people to come to me or knock on my door and say, "Hi, I'm single." So my part of networking is I'm always out meeting people. In fact, I go up to complete strangers, and I will go up to them and ask them if they're single. And if they answer that they are single, I will ask if they'd like to have a cup of coffee with me, I'd like to get to know them, and like to see what it is that they're looking for, and if I can be of help or service to them. How is it perceived when you just randomly go up to someone and ask them if they're single? Well, sometimes people think that I'm hitting on them, and I have to preface it by saying it's not for me. Most people are very receptive. You know, at first they're a little put off. But then to me it's a huge compliment that you're going up to someone and saying, you look interesting. It's a compliment. Can you share some tips on dating? If you're just starting out from a divorce or a loss? So the first tip is just to get started. Get yourself out there and don't look at it as the first date that I go on. I'm going to meet the man or woman of my dreams. If we go into it with really unreasonable expectations, we're only setting ourselves up to be disappointed. Now's the time to reinvent yourself and figure out what it is that makes you happy, and what it is that you want and need. So the best advice is to get out there and just kind of jump in the pool. And enjoy yourself. Can you share with our listeners one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? Well, I am lucky enough to be in a really great group of networking individuals called eWomen Milwaukee. And I know that you're also a part of that. And actually, Laurie, my experience is you came up to me, and I'm gonna use this as an example. And you said, you know, Lori, I have a mother. You start to tell me about your lovely mother. We had lunch together, we got to know each other a little bit better. I think that our purpose really was to get to know each other better, rather than for me to find someone for your mother. But as it turned out, that whole magic happened. And I met your mother and and the rest is history. How do you stay in front of a nurture your network in your community? I like to reach out and thank people as much as I can. And using that line, "how can I help you" does just that. Someone may not even be thinking about me. But if I reach out to them and say, what can I help you with? They may think, yeah, you know what, Laurie, you may know someone who can help me. What advice would you offer business professionals looking to grow their network? Much like dating you just get out there and do it. I don't always feel like going out. But I forced myself to get out. And I forced myself to go to a meeting and show up. And if I show up in the position of, I'm going to meet someone and hopefully help them. I'm doing something good for the...
Meet Craig Lemasters Craig Lemasters is an advisor, entrepreneur, investor, and board member with more than two decades of success in executive leadership positions, now dedicated to helping leaders get unstuck on major growth challenges. Craig works with global enterprises, focused on identifying knowledge gaps, aligning organizations around core initiatives, and enabling critical decision making. He was previously the CEO of Assurant Solutions, where he led the firm's digital transformation and global expansion. Help me understand this stuck concept to what is it and why is it so important to networking effectively? Yeah, so I've used the word stuck for probably the last decade or so when I ran a big company and that's that's sort of my background. Now the last three years with GX GE and building this business model was this idea that, again, in very simple terms, we as leaders get stuck on really hard stuff. And let's just be super candid about it and have the humility to admit it. But we always have to be transforming and moving these enterprises forward. And the further away we get from our core, and in my opinion, the harder it gets, and that's where we tend to get stuck and it's what happened to me at Assurant. So where does the networking come in or my version of networking really, is what I would call this wisdom based learning that would that I bumped into, quite candidly six years ago. You caught my attention with the phrase wisdom based learning, can you kind of go a little bit deeper on that? This whole business model really that we build was around the idea that when we get stuck on hard stops, what it really means is, and my definition of wisdom, again is very simple. It's this unique intersection of knowledge and experience. But it has to be both. And so what I've found over the years that if we get stuck on hard stuff, if somehow we can very intentionally interject that definition of wisdom, so other people that happen to have the knowledge and experience that have just simply gone before us, and done the things that I'm trying to do, and we put that into a highly facilitated format, we can get unstuck very quickly. We were meant to learn, or at least I believe we were meant to learn very quickly if it was in the right format. And so that's what I mean by wisdom based learning is how do we put people around us that have gone before us and have the knowledge and experience on very specific things. And the specificity is super important. When it comes to asking for an hour of someone's time, that can be very intimidating. From your experience, why would someone want to participate in a one on one conversation? We work on two formats. One of our formats is sort of our version of executive coaching, which is, we build a learning ecosystem around a leader, which really are individuals that we think have the right wisdom to transfer. That's the one-hour conversation that we facilitate with people. And then we also do advisory board work where we're actually asking individuals to join the advisory board which is a day and a half commitment, three meetings over eight months. And we actually have a waiting list of people that want to do this. People want to help other people. And if we ask them in the right way, at the right time, and then we do the work for them. We don't then ask people to do a bunch of work and we don't ask them to be uncomfortable with their schedule. Then I find people love pouring their wisdom into others. What inspired you to ultimately embark on this 2.0 career after leaving your public company CEO life? A lot of my friends and family thought it was kind of nutty, quite frankly, because it was. A few years ago, actually, before I turned 65, that it just really struck me that I've been blessed with good health and same with my wife and we both just kind of wanted to do some other things and just try to help people in different ways. And a big part of it was learning this...
Meet Luke Doubler Luke Doubler is an innovator in talent sourcing. He has trained 1000s of corporate and agency recruiters to be the best at what they do: source talent to achieve a purpose. After a decade of leading recruiting teams at Target, Cargill, and Schwans, he currently leads www.recruitercentral.io, a Wayzata, MN-based search firm. He’s also an active blogger and partner of www.realfoodrn.com and www.ellieandherchickens.com, Why did you leave a solid six figure, corporate America, job and dive into starting your own business? At the end of the day, it's about fulfilling your purpose. About five years ago, as a nurse, my wife would go in and she became a nurse to help people but she wanted to make a bigger impact and really put her her name onto something greater and she was helping people but she felt she could help them a lot more and she really felt that really the key to great health is is a great lifestyle and ultimately, healthy food to be or your medicine. I was working in corporate America at Target Corporation. Loved the company, loved my team, but I felt I could lead bigger teams and really do what I love which is sourcing talent and teaching people how to be better recruiters. And so thus began Recruiter Central where a team of 12 recruiters who feel difficult to fill jobs that recruiters central we fill difficult jobs. And that's really kind of the impetus for where I got to where I am. Why do so many people fail to realize what their full potential and purposes? The first step is often always the hardest and not everybody takes it. I went to college, have a degree and I realized that a lot of my mentors were the wrong mentors. What I started doing was just reading everybody who was successful. What I mean by success is either they've accomplished something great, they're happy in life, they've built businesses. And when you start to really listen to those people who usually are smarter, more talented than me, certainly, you'll learn a number of things, but there's a lot of common themes amongst their books that you probably maybe miss in college and surrounding yourself with people who are smarter and more talented then certainly me has been my real secret to success in life. So what's your advice on I'm obtaining true health and wealth? With my wife's blog, Real Food RN, we always talk about just eat natural, eat healthy. Happiness is something that's different for everybody but to achieve to really fulfill your potential, health really has to be part of it. So dedicate yourself to a healthy lifestyle and the secret to success is just to get up and rededicate yourself to it every single day. It takes a lot of hard work, and I have so much to learn, but that's what worked with us so far. Rededicate yourself every day and that for us that starts at five o'clock in the morning, you know, hitting the gym, eating healthy, but once you got those things in line, everything else kind of becomes a lot easier. You don't have to worry about being fatigued, you don't have to worry about being sick or tired. You get your diet in place, and you can think clearer, you have a lot more mental stamina. Recall is so much better. For me, it's the only way to live. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? Networking is an ongoing thing. It has to be an ongoing thing. And we have great tools out there like LinkedIn. Always be networking and have that mindset. You never know who's going to be that next key for you. And with tools like LinkedIn, you can easily nurture and constantly provide value to a network. So everybody you meet, get their name, get their title, get their their contact, include them in your network. It's something that needs to be ongoing and constant. How do you stay in front of or best nurtures relationships? Ask yourself one thing, what is your brand? What is your brand and when you define what your brand is show up
Meet Christopher Gerg Christopher Gerg is the CISO and VP of Cyber Risk Management at Gillware. He is a technical lead with 20+ years of information security experience tackling the challenges of cloud-based hosting, DevOps, managed security services, e-commerce, healthcare, financial, and payment card industries. He has worked in mature information security teams as well as building secure technical environments – all while working with the boardroom to promote executive understanding and support. Your company does a lot of work with incident response, what is the most common kind of attack that you're seeing right now? I think probably over 95% of what we're seeing is has to do with ransomware and wire transfer fraud. Wire transfer fraud is more of a human problem than is it is a technical problem and it's really just someone tricking someone else into transferring money where they they shouldn't. A lot of people have in their mind what ransomware is, and I think what a lot of people have in their mind is is wrong, frankly, you don't just get something in your email, double click it and then you have ransomware. Ransomware is the last step and kind of a conventional attack and a conventional hack, where they've been in your environment for four to eight months or longer. And they find where I jokingly say the soft chewy center of your company is and and encrypt that so that you're you're almost forced to pay the ransom or face a huge amount of downtime. So what advice do you offer to help organizations protect themselves from these types of incidents? Use multi factor authentication, the little code generator app on your smartphone is a good start. Locking down services that are available to the public internet. Windows remote desktop protocol RDP it's a way to get a remote desktop on a computer and people use that for remote access to their computers from from like trying to work from home. I think the two other things would maybe be make sure everything's up to date with patches. And I think finally, just kind of awareness. I didn't come up with it, but I'm using it a lot more is the human firewall. The people sitting at the desk are a big and important component to your information security program. And so the people sitting at the desk and checking their email and doing your company's business really need to be aware of what to click on what not to click on. How would you recommend a smaller organization such as my myself, help to educate the other team members and to make sure that they're not clicking on things they shouldn't? There's one that's actually local to me called the InfoSec Institute. They do online information security awareness training, and also phishing testing. They charge by the seat, and so it almost doesn't matter if you're a four person shop or a 3000 person shop. You're paying just a fixed amount, it may be, 10s of dollars a month. But that training is kind of a big deal. And the nice thing too is it's not just information security awareness training there's also kind of the certification training too. Do you see smaller companies or are these larger corporate entities kind of getting the majority of these attacks? I think it's pretty democratic and how it goes after things. Everyone has a chance of getting it. They really do just scan for vulnerable services and if they find one they get in. The other aspect of this that kind of blew my mind when I started doing this kind of work is, these are organized, essentially companies, that are doing these criminal activities. They've got help desks, they've got websites, they have email addresses. And so they have different teams in that there's some teams that just scan in an automated way the entire internet looking for vulnerable services, if they find one, they try to exploit it usually again, in an automated way. And if they get one it shows up on a list and then they they pass that list to the next phase, the other team and...
Meet Froswa' Booker-Drew I am intrigued by relationships, particularly building networks to address issues in organizations and communities. Because of my extensive background in leadership, nonprofit management, partnership development, training and education, I've been quoted in Forbes, Ozy, Bustle, Thrive Global, Huffington Post and other media outlets around the world. As Vice President of Community Affairs for the State Fair of Texas, I lead a department focused on community initiatives and philanthropy. You've been doing some research so can you can you share with us what your research is about? When I started my dissertation, I was really thinking about this term called asset based community development, which really is looking at how all communities, no matter how challenged they may be, have these assets. And part of that is social capital, and that relationships are found in every community. And so just going through learning about how social capital has shown up, I wanted to find out how women who were diverse, shared social capital, because there really wasn't a lot of research that looked at how diverse women come together and do that. How do you identify assets in your community for local business? Two authors, McKnight and Kretzmann, talk about five areas that exist in every community that are assets. It is the local economy, looking at businesses, chambers of commerce, it is associations. So those homeowners associations, looking at sororities, fraternities, all of those, and then they talk about institutions as another one. So your hospitals, media, those are institutions. And then lastly, kind of open space. So for local businesses, it's really important to think about in those five categories, where can you find potential partners that can either create visibility. Are there opportunities for corporate social responsibility where you can do some of your giving? And in every community, regardless of how challenged or marginalized it is, there are all these assets that are opportunities for businesses to engage where they can create a client base, but in addition, look at it as a way to give back. So you've got a book out there, "Rules of Engagement to Making Connections Last." Can you tell us a little bit about that? That book is really based on my research group with these women. I started learning all these lessons from these ladies, and I think that's the power of social capital is the storytelling. When we're in proximity with people, we can learn so many things. And I noticed the women in the group experience something called "perception transformation." It's when I'm listening to you, what I may have is an idea can change because I'm in a relationship now and I'm going, wow, that happened to you? It may not be my experience, but now I can identify with it. And so I took all of these experiences that I learned from the ladies, including my own and created a workbook that has a number of lessons in it to help people think about the way that they engage. Could you share with our listeners, one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? My former boss taught me this tool that he said when he meets people, he doesn't start off talking about himself. He always asked people tell me your story. And I found that to be so profound, because one thing that we know, many of us like to share about ourselves and talking about ourselves, and it takes away the anxiety of walking in going, here's my business card, who are you? So how do you stay in front of her best nurture your network and your community? I am one who likes to immediately when I meet someone within 24 hours, I would send an email and thank them for meeting with me. Or if I got a card, I try to follow up with people. Instead, we can sit down and have lunch, it's become a little bit more complicated now because of the work that I'm in and the number of people that I'm blessed to meet. But I try to make...
Meet Elzie D. Flenard Elzie D. Flenard, III is the founder of Enterprise NOW!. Elzie is also the host of the Enterprise NOW! Podcast. Elzie has more than a decade of experience as an engineering professional and entrepreneur. He thrives on thinking outside the box, bringing the best out of entrepreneurs, and driving results. He provokes thought, challenges creativity and inspires persistence. He holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Carroll University and is an Accredited Small Business Consultant. What is a good way to communicate brand message? I think the best way to communicate anything really is the way that's authentic and genuine to who you are and your voice. What is the best way to get started in podcast? I think a lot of times people say just get started. I'm gonna advise against that. I'm gonna say do some homework first. I always advise people to get a coach. Get someone who knows the ropes, who's done it before to kind of help you save time and frustration. And really just focus on your why. Why do you want to do a podcast? Are you doing it because it's the big thing? And everybody else is doing it? Or is there a method to it? So know your purpose, get a coach, and then just do it, don't sit on it. How would an entrepreneur know if podcasting is a good fit for their business or their brand? Hone into your point of who your audience is and where do they hang out? If that's where your audience is, and that's where you want to reach them and audio is the method that you want to use, then podcasting is probably a good method for that. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking story or experience that you've had? So I have a guy on my show once and I'm at a networking event and I'm in the room just mingling and introducing myself and I hear this voice from across the room. And then my ears perk up and I recognize that voice and so I poke my head up and I see the person from which this voice is coming from and I'm like, hey, so and so and he sees me, he hears me. He's like, hey, how are you? And we like meet in the middle of a room and there was like this, this reunion of people and yet we have never met before. So that just speaks to the power of podcasting and the ability to build those relationships. And it's really networking. How do you nurture or stay in front of the community that you're building? Continuing to network because a lot of times I think people will start strong and then they kind of temper off. Because in my mind, relationships are the whole game. So in terms of follow up that looks like paying attention, being present, actively listening and really embracing and being deliberate and intentional about building those relationships. So I think being authentic, intentional and just deliberate. What advice would you offer that business professional who's really looking to grow their network? I always say find the right pond. You just have to make sure you're fishing at the right pond. So find the pond and again, be authentic, be genuine, and do more of the things that work and stop doing the things that don't work. Digital networking or traditional networking, which one do you find more value in? I'm going to give the answer of both because, honestly, it is both. For example, this morning I met for coffee with a gentleman that I met on LinkedIn. So glad that that we were able to connect. I'm going to say both and I think you can't really have one without the other. But I tend to lean toward the face to face personal interaction. If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of less of or differently with regards to your professional career? I would tell myself to focus on learning how the business operates, focus on it from the owners perspective. And I would tell myself to focus on the focus and to always pay attention to perspective and how that impacts my current world....
Meet Cory Nichols Cory is the co-CEO of Yes Life Companies and operates Yes Life Financial, a non-traditional financial coaching firm that offers one-on-one advice in a subscription format for just $25/month. Cory is the go-to for just about everything. Retirement planning? Check! Student loan questions? Got it! Building a deck? He’s done that, too. Cory brings an MBA, Fortune 500 experience and small business executive experience with him. What should I look for in a financial advisor? When you're really working with a financial advisor, I always tell people we want to be clear about where compensation comes from. Financial services, one of those odd ones, to me, it's kind of like health care. We don't necessarily know what we pay for. Don't be afraid to ask the question of your advisor. How do you get paid? Where does it come from? Is that in my best interest? I think that's always a great place to start when finding a financial advisor. What is the best way to ensure that I stick to my budget? Well, first, get rid of your budget. I know that sounds odd. The issue with budgeting for most people is they only include the big items, housing, car, gas. They never consider the fact that it's always somebody's birthday, or it's a holiday or something is going to break in the car, the house or a medical bill. And so what I encourage people to do is actually look backwards, do an expense tracker and say, hey, look, if I'm going to start fresh today, what do I spend on average, every month. And let me do that by looking at the past three months worth of expenses. I think it helps people have a little bit more of like a personal realization about where they spend too much money. What should I do to prepare for a possible recession? So this is one of those ones where in my opinion is less is more. But the reality is, a recession is probably coming. It's not really a matter of if, it's just a matter of when, but that doesn't mean that you need to be doing anything else or anything different. If you've got your emergency fund, you're good there. If you've got your, retirement set up and it's invested appropriately, don't change anything. It's really stay the course. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or one of your favorite networking experiences that you've had? I met an individual who owned a business, gave him a tour of my school's campus at the time and it was a relatively casual conversation but ended with here's my card and that was it. We walked our separate ways. I think I saw him like once or twice the rest of the semester. But other than that we didn't really interact at all. And then I graduated from school, went to work and one day, like two years later, I got a phone call from this business owner and he said, I'm looking for somebody to run a branch of my business. I'd like to hire you will you relocate back to Richmond? And that's where I'm from now. How do you stay in front of or nurture your network in your community? In the last couple of years, social media has become more prevalent than it used to be. And so as a result, you can do a certain amount of nurturing by just staying top of mind by constantly engaging with them on social. So it might be as simple as a like or comment on some of their posts. And then I made a much more conscious effort to identify strategic people inside my network, and really make an effort to actually spend one hour with them maybe once a quarter. What advice would you offer business professionals looking to grow their network? You got to get out there and be authentic and just do it a lot. And so that's hard work. Like I think some people just think networking comes natural to some people but I don't know anybody who networking comes 100% natural to them. They may be good at it, but that doesn't mean it just came naturally. Like it's probably just that they put themselves in a position to do it enough times and eventually they just get better
Meet Nela Dunato Nela Dunato is a graphic designer and brand strategist with over 15 years of experience building brands and digital platforms for service based businesses and non-profit organizations. She’s also the author of the book “The Human Centered Brand”, a practical guide that teaches service based business owners how to create an authentic brand and grow meaningful relationships with their clients. What does it mean to have a brand? What it means is that there are people outside of your immediate social circle, people that you never met, but that they've heard about you, about what you do and they have formed some kind of opinion and impression about you. So that means that you have a brand because there there are people who have never met you but you've entered kind of their consciousness and their sphere of influence. What exactly is the difference between a personal brand and a corporate or business brand? A personal brand is, as the name says, it's related to the person and it follows you around. No matter where you work, no matter which company you're in, and it's an asset that you can use. Corporate brands are a bit impersonal. Sometimes we forget that there are people behind the brand, although people have made them but they really belong to a group of people or a business entity. Do you have any tips that you can share with in regards to leveraging branding when it comes to networking so that people remember you better? When you're meeting new people come up with a really short and clear and concise introduction. My tip is don't use industry jargon or buzz words. Talk like real people talk. Another tip that I give to people is to wear a signature color, like a detail or a clothing item that is in what I refer to "your color" because I'm sure most people have something that they feel is their color and double down on that. Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? My dearest and best client that I still work with, we met when we were teenagers, and we met accidentally on a bus while we were going to school. About 10 years later he started his own business and contacted me and asked if I could create a logo and website for him and six years later we're still working together. Don't discount those relationships that you make on a daily basis because you never know where they may lead. How do you stay in front of or best nurture your community and your network? I use a combination of showing up at local events in person to meet new people and to deepen the relationships that I already have with people in my community, and I use social media to keep these people updated on what I'm working on and just staying in touch. So it's a combination of in-person and digital. What advice would you offer to business professionals that are looking to grow their network? Go and find something fun to do around other people because networking doesn't have to look like business conferences or meetups or brunches. You can meet new interesting people at a book club, or an organized hiking trip, or cultural events, or anywhere that there are people that kind of like the same things that you like. If you could go back to your 20-year-old self what would you tell yourself to do more of, less of, or differently with regards to your professional career? I believe that I would do better if I didn't listen to so much other people's advice at the time and I would prefer not to have second guessed myself and my own decisions because that was a big issue with me in my 20s. Are there any books that you're reading or podcasts that you're listening to or anything you want to share with our listeners? I'm reading the book, No Logo, which is maybe a bit ironic for a branding specialist to read. It's Naomi Klein's critique of basically brands occupation of public spaces that happened in the 80s and the 90s. And I feel that it's important for...
Meet Britt Bolnick Britt Bolnick is a successful biz owner and magic maker living a life she loves in Maine. She has traveled a path from financial scarcity to financial independence, building a 6-figure business she loves, as a single mama working less than full-time. Britt mentors women who are 100% committed to building thriving businesses that create visibility and wealth without compromising personal life OR sanity- teaching women to use authentic connections to build success, vs. high ad spend. How do you go about teaching business owners who dislike networking to network comfortably? So one of the things that I do is really pull back from the word networking to really talk about how networking is just about building relationships and just about forming connections. What are some of your networking pet peeves? So my pet peeve is when the focus is taken off of building connections and relationships and more about the hustle. How many cards can hand out or who you can tell about what you're doing. So what are some of your favorite networking tips? So one of my favorite things to do is to walk in with a bunch of questions that I want to ask other people. People love talking about themselves. And it becomes a really easy way to start a conversation that isn't just small talk and can kind of pass into real connection faster. Can you share your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? The networking that I love are smaller groups that are sort of centered around a conversation. Someone will pose a place where she's stuck or a question she has and we will kind of chime in to help. But it's a great way of networking, because it allows you to really be authentic and be of service, which is one of the best ways to get someone to really remember you and your work. How do you stay in front of or best nurture your community and your network? So I do it by doing the things that I love. I really love Facebook for its possibility for connection. I use social media as a way to connect with people. And that's something that I love doing on the day to day but then the other way that I really get in front of people and get visible is in small groups. I might do that by doing an in person workshop or by showing up at the smaller networking events that I really love. What advice would you offer to the business professionals looking to grow their network? So number one is be of service in an authentic way. Think of what your ideal clients needs. And then talk about that by giving tips and tools. Figure out how you can help people to get what they want. Digital networking or traditional networking, which one do you find more value in? Digital Marketing is easiest because I'm in front of my computer all day long. But I really use a mix of digital marketing and in person, live events because there's something that happens when you're in a room with people that cannot be replicated by digital marketing. If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of/less of or differently with regards to your professional career? I definitely would have believed in myself a little sooner. It took me a long time to believe in myself, and I think I could have done so much more. We've all heard of the six degrees of separation. Now who would be the one person that you'd love to connect with. And do you think you can do it within the sixth degree? I also started a nonprofit dog rescue about three years ago. And it's really my heart and soul in so many different ways. It would probably be Tia Torres of Pit Bulls and Parolees, or Jon Stewart, who also does a lot with animal rescue. But someone who could really help us with our mission in terms of getting more eyes and funding. What book are you reading right now? "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" by Simon Sinek. I really love his book but I can't read it without a...
Meet Chris Yoko Driven by an indefatigable determination to make the world a better place, Chris is focused on helping people, and the organizations they belong to, pave the road to a more utopian world. He primarily does this by helping these like-minded organizations build and champion themselves using their most powerful asset, their web presence. When Chris isn’t fearlessly leading, you’ll likely find him playing hockey, reading, or playing and exploring with his incredible wife and two daughters. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? Yeah, so my favorite networking experiences I'm actually a part of, I'm just outside of DC and there's a group here called Qadri DC. Sometimes people have a negative connotation with that word networking and they wanted to flip that on the head. So it's a little bit more what can I do for other people and karmically that comes back around. How do you stay in front of or nurture these relationships that you've built? That's something I think all of us struggle with. Having people join us for other events that are going on has been a really good one. It's a great way just to make sure you stay in touch with people even if they can't make it. The the fact that you want to offer to take them as a guest is I think a huge deal. What advice would you offer the business professional who's looking to grow their network? Nothing seems to replace just getting out there and doing it. And a lot of people think like, oh, I gotta go to the classic like networking events and stuff like that. But just about every really good opportunity I've had has come from me reaching out to a couple people that I didn't know or barely knew and asking, hey, it looks like you've built something really cool, accomplished something really cool or, whatever the case might be and ask if they would be game for me to buy a drink, catch up and maybe learn a little bit more about how you did that and mostly asking questions and listening. Digital networking or traditional networking, which one do you find more value in? I've certainly found value in both. I've met people, especially, it's a weirder time now, especially social media wise just because it's so ubiquitous and so many people have it. I think it's just a little bit more a matter of now do you have to put in the effort on either, whereas before, you could kind of get away with less effort on digital. And now it's such a crowded, noisy place that you've got to put just as much maybe more effort into digital to break through as you do in person because obviously, a face to face interaction lasts longer than a tweet or a Facebook post does. If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of less of or differently with regards to your professional career? The biggest takeaway I could give myself is just think about what you want to accomplish what that end goal is whether it's a purposeful exit strategy or a non-purposeful exit strategy or here's the objective and work backwards from that because a lot of times it's easy to get into something and then follow whatever path opportunity gives you but if you're not in control that path and you don't know where it leads, you can find yourself some some some weird places as a as you go through your journey. We've all heard of the 6 degrees of separation...Now, who would be the one person you'd love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? So the one person I think I would love to connect with is I'm a huge fan of Neil Gaiman's writing so I would love to bump into him and I have to feel like there's probably six degrees that would get me connected to him. Any final word of advice to offer our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? Supporting and growing, the network is just carving out time to go do it. The compound interest on...
Naresh Vissa is the Founder & CEO of Krish Media & Marketing – a full service e-commerce, technology, development, online, and digital media and marketing agency and solutions provider. He has worked with CNN Radio, Clear Channel Communications, J.P. Morgan Chase, EverBank, The Institute for Energy Research, Houston Rockets, Houston Astros, the American Junior Golf Association, Agora Financial, Agora Publishing, Stansberry Research, and TradeStops. He is the #1 bestselling author of FIFTY SHADES OF MARKETING. What do you think the future of freelancing and small business is under this economy? A college graduate they need to really be paying attention to this because the idea of having a job is it's really kind of an older generational idea. And so they should not be thinking, Okay, how do I get a corporate job? How do I get a job? Because those jobs are starting to disappear in the freelance job. It's all about value, or it's all about value creation and skills. Skills are today's currency in the workplace. So it's about building up your skill set so that you can then promote your skills and utilize your skills to help a company's bottom line. What are examples of these skills? Well, it can be anything it could be speaking, it could be the old school soft, soft skills. But I think the most important skills are the technology skills. And by technology skills, I mean, the ability to use a computer, a cell phone, a tablet, proficiently and efficiently, knowing how to use all the different applications and software and technologies within these technologies. You're also very into podcasting, so what drew you into podcasting? And do you have any tips to that novice podcastor? The point of podcasting is building up a listenership and making money. Helping grow your business or selling your product, that's really the point. There are three revenue drivers. The first revenue driver is advertising which is not the primary revenue driver. The second revenue driver, which is the most important revenue driver, is using the podcast as a lead generator or a loss leader. And then the third revenue drivers premium content. So that's like a paid subscription type of podcasts.
Lane Kawaoka currently owns 3,500+ units across the US. He lives in Hawaii and recently quit his day job as a Professional Engineer with a MS in Civil Engineering & Construction Management and a BS in Industrial Engineering. Lane partners with investors who want to build their portfolio, but are too busy to mess with “tenants, toilets, and termites” by curating opportunities in his “Hui Deal Pipeline Club” where his investors have personal access to him and know that Lane is personally putting his money on the line too. The Hui Deal Pipeline Club has acquired over $255 Million dollars of real estate acquired by syndicating over $25 Million Dollars of private equity since 2016. Lane reverse engineers the wealth building strategies that the rich use to the middle class via the Top-50 Investing Podcast SimplePassiveCashflow.com. Lane’s mission is to help hard working professionals out of the rat race, one free strategy call at a time. Can you share with our listeners, your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? My best experience was when I finally actually paid, you know, $25,000 for paid masterminds to get in a realm of qualified people where they were at a point in their business where it wasn't really about them, they didn't really have to worry about putting food on the table to feed their family. So at that point, it was a lot more collaborative, and just being able to collaborate with somebody on the high high level like yourself, and, you know, not in a non competitive manager manner is a great experience, and that's why I continue to go to these masterminds. As you continue to build your network, how do you nurture these relationships that you've created? I have my investor club. And I always tell people, we're a bunch of accredited investors and higher paid professionals. I've kind of curated a group through my investors where if your invest fits me, you get access to my network, and we all know your network is your network. What advice would you offer that business professional who's looking to grow their network? I would say filter. Your net worth is a big indicator of where you are. I do know if somebody doesn't have a net worth of at least $50,000 they need to go figure out how to make money for themselves. So I would say for people like other business professionals trying to look for other business professionals higher net worth, but then again, a lot of business professionals, they're stuck in that paradigm of going to work and, you know, for 40-50 years. Digital networking or traditional networking - which do you find more value in? For me, it's digital networking. I'm an introvert, so I don't really do well in those type of settings. I can do it if it's like talking about rental real estate, because I get energetic and energized by that type of topic matter. If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regards to your professional career? You know, for me, I was an engineer, I kind of did things exactly how I should have. I went to work, I just quit my job earlier this year after working for about 10 years, but that day job allowed me to save money and to build my network up to a certain point where I could continue to buy rental properties one by one and then start to get into apartments later. We've all heard of the six degrees of separation. Now who would be the one person that you'd love to connect with? And do you think you could do it within the sixth degree? I never really had anybody that I had on my list. I think people aspire to that too much. And, quite frankly, a lot of these guys they haven't done the tactical things that are applicable today. Is there any book that you're reading right now or listening to that you want to share with our listeners? I am reading Gary Vaynerchuk's Crushing It! He's got some examples of people who kind of take in a certain social...
My goodness, I am blown away by the response and positive feedback I get from all of the listeners and my guests and the value that this podcast is bringing and has been bringing. It's been three years now since I officially launched this podcast which blows my mind. So today I am going to summarize some of the takeaways and value-add components that I've learned just by interviewing close to 200 professionals on the topic of networking.
About Frank Agin He is the president of AmSpirit Business Connections, which empowers entrepreneurs and professionals to become more successful via networking. In addition, he works with companies and organizations with their professional relationships. He's also the host of Networking Rx Podcast, which has ideas, insights, and interviews on business networking. Finally, Frank is the author of several books, including Foundational Networking: Building Know, Like and Trust to Create a Lifetime of Extraordinary Success. What is the best thing that someone can do to jumpstart their network? “Find someplace to volunteer. It just makes it really easy. Figure out what you're passionate about.” You indicated that you're interested in the science behind networking. What do you mean? “There's a science behind it. We're humans, and much of what happens in human interaction is predictable. It's not perfectly predictable, right? Temperature falls below 32 degrees, water freezes. I mean, that's perfectly predictable. But with human interactions, things aren't necessarily predictable, but they become really likely. For example, when you smile at somebody, they will smile back.” What is one thing that people often overlook in networking? “They're focused in on what's in it for them. And what you need to remember is that what networking is really about is about helping others and just kind of trusting that it'll come back to you.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “Years ago, I got a referral from somebody in a meeting and said, I've got a referral for you, and in one of our AmSpirit meetings, and I was excited. I've got a referral. I don't know what it is. It's like, you know, it's like that present under the tree Christmas morning. I can hardly wait, and so after the meeting, a guy came up to me and he essentially said, you know, I want you to come speak at my group. And in the moment...” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “It's a discipline. You have to have a very disciplined approach to it. And what I mean by having a disciplined approach is, you know, I will systematically reach out to people in my network and just see how they're doing.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Certainly get started…I wouldn't get caught up in trying to make it happen overnight. And I tell people, you can have a big, big network, you’re just not going to do it overnight. Focus on one person at a time.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “Traditional is where the value’s at, but you a lot of times can't have one without the other.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “Well, it certainly has to do with networking. My 20-year-old self, I was in college. I played college football. I lived with my teammates, and that was my world. And I look at my daughter who plays college soccer, and she rooms with other women with other sports. And she is much better networked than I am. She interacts with people who don't play sports. I didn't do a lot of that.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “My wife really likes Jon Bon Jovi. I would love to connect with him for her.” What book are you reading right now? “The one I'm looking at right now is Lewis Howes’ book, The School of Greatness, which is an awesome book. The Go-Giver by Bob Burg is another great book. The Power of Optimism by a psychologist out of Indianapolis, Tim Shurr…so, I've got a series of books that I'm kind of picking through.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Where it really starts with is a mindset. And the mindset is you have to believe in networking, you have to believe...
About Gary Loop Serving as a business consultant, executive coach, and life coach, Gary Loop has been transforming businesses and guiding leaders for over six years as President of Loop Group, LLC. For the last 12 years (of his 20+ year business career), he has been repeatedly entering new organizations facing various challenges. With his unique ability to develop deep levels of trust, from CEO to the front line, he rapidly gains a sense of the company landscape to deliver efficient and transformative results. There are literally hundreds of consultants and executive coaches in the marketplace. What differentiates you from the others? “I spent 14 years at We Energies, and We Energies at one point about a decade ago was last in the Midwest in customer satisfaction. And so, I had the opportunity, it was through the work of hundreds and thousands of employees to get it done. But to be in the front lines of watching an organization go from last in the Midwest, to one of the best in the country was outstanding.” What is your core strategy for your consultant/client relationship? “I'm a big fan of being a historian, rather than me coming in to find out what's going on now in a plan for the future, I spend a great deal of my time finding out what happened in the past. Where have you been? How did you get there? What worked well? What didn't work well?” What do you believe are the top low-cost tactics organizations can employ that will make an instant impact on their business? “The people is the big difference. Most of the payroll is people. And it's also in the planning. You know, if we can go through, one thing that I always say is, I'm not a firefighter. I’m a fire preventer. And so, we can go in and work with people that we have there.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I actually wrote a letter to Jay Leno back about 20 years ago, you know, and pretty much because I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into standup comedy. It was a letter that basically said, Dear Jay, thinking about standup comedy. I have no idea. I'm not even sure if I'm funny. You know, here's the deal. You know, I was commuting to community college, I was living at home with time. And, you know, I'm like, here's our home phone number. And 20 years ago, a phone call came in...” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “Mine is more sense and feel. And it's also based on opportunity. So, when I meet with folks, I want to know what I can do to help them… the other piece I would say is rather than being interesting, be interested.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “It's overcoming that fear. You know, if there's an event that's coming up with a lot of folks and you may not know anybody, it’s just walking in the door. You know, the hardest thing is walking into the door. I call it eating your vegetables. There are things that we don't always enjoy doing. And sometimes we have to eat our vegetables before we get to enjoy the steak.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “it's a mix. We are in five generations, as you know, and everyone has their different flavor and style. And so depending on which industry that I'm in, I will try to mirror where they're at.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “Lots of moisturizer. My wife uses moisturizer, and she looks like she's 20. I look like I'm 90. So that’s number one. And number two is, you know, what's interesting is enjoy the ride.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I think like a Richard Branson kind of thing comes to mind. So, for me, I believe it's, you know, finding the ways to get in the door to reach out to those...
About Thembi Bheka Thembi Bheka is the founder of She Breaks Thru, an agency that trains African women from disadvantaged backgrounds to work as technical virtual assistants. She believes in helping others reignite their passion, gain more clarity, and reconnect with their bigger purpose. She is on a mission to empower 1 million women by 2025. What triggered you to start your business? “I had traveled in Zimbabwe and I read an article on the paper about a girl who has committed suicide because she was tired of trading her body just to put food on the table. And that story just triggered a lot of emotions for me. First of all, it triggered my own history of what I went through getting out of my marriage, and it also triggered what I saw other women go through in Zimbabwe and every other woman who I was talking to about how they were stuck in abusive relationships because of money. And I said, I'm going to change this, I have to find a way to change it.” What is the number 1 thing entrepreneurs can do immediately to scale faster? “You really have to start working on your zone of genius and stop working on little things…and I'm not saying little as in they don't matter. No, but I mean the things that are not in your zone of excellence.” How have the connections you have made helped you as you started your business? “I think networking is the foundation of building a business. That's my opinion. I think just when you really want to build a business, you just have to start networking right away. And I'll just go back to when I first started investing in real estate…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I went to this event, my first ever online marketing event about three years ago, four years now, four years ago, and I had never been to that kind of event before. And I was lost. I was like, drowning in lost and I started talking to people in the lobby, who are sitting in Canada drinking beer…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I basically communicate with them through my email. I have a weekly blog and I have a podcast as well, where I basically share and talk about things in which kind of stays in touch with those people who I connect with. And they can see those in my email list. But in regards to the closer relationships, I try to stay in touch with people at least once a month, kind of just have, I call it my social day.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Get off your butt. And by that, I mean just go to events, and it doesn't have to be events that are one thousand kilometers away from where you live. It could be local events. There are a lot of events in every local city.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “For me, it’s traditional. I call myself ancient, even though I'm working in a digital space. I find traditional more effective because you are meeting people in person and one on one.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would have taken more risks…and as much as I believe that I'm a risk-taker, but I always had those internal doubts within me that said, you know, ‘who do you think you are?’” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I was going to say Oprah...” What book are you reading right now? “I listen to a lot of podcasts, but my favorite one is by Ali Brown. It's called Ambition Radio…But in regards to the books, I'm just reading one called Rocket Fuel. I just finished it, actually, and started a new one called Profit Fest.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Just keep in touch because there's nothing as hard, or I find frustrating, as somebody who emails me once every three months because they're
About Gary Kurtz Gary Kurtz is a sales and marketing professional, father of three, husband to an incredible woman, and a great friend to a lot of great people (not in that order). Gary works each day to be a little bit better in each part of his life and to make life better for those around him. Gary is known for hard work, big laughs, and going all out in everything that he does. Where do sales and marketing meet? “The difference between a salesperson and a marketing person is that a salesperson talks to customers and does more traveling. Other than that, they’re kind of meeting in the middle.” What do you look for when interviewing new employees? “More so than ever, cultural fit, I think is more important. Are they going to be reliable? Is there integrity? Can they stand up to your company's values and also do the job?” What are the trends in the B2B purchasing world? “The biggest trend that we're seeing in in B2B, and probably the same thing with B2C, is that there's a large, very large amount of decisions that are being made prior to anybody picking up a call. You know, people know that as soon as they are clicking on a link on something that they're going to be being followed in the nurturing campaign start.” “You see an iceberg and there's only, you know, an eighth of it that's showing out of the water, and everything underneath it is where people are making decisions now.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I met somebody at a trade show, like seven years ago. And like a half a year later…they called me, and they asked for just a small auxiliary product that costs like $300. And like we got to talk in that time. I was kind of saying them a bunch of headaches because their immediate supplier had ran out of something. If you fast forward, you know, five years now, we've done like $3 million with that company. And it all started with a conversation at a trade show.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “The best thing that you can do for somebody is to reach out and just say hello every once in a while.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Don't stop. I would say even when you're tired, and there's that event that's happening, go to it. When you're out and you're like, ‘okay, well, maybe I'll call it an early night tonight’, go out and do it.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “It's probably traditional, but when you're digitally networking, I think the best way to do it is to be moving towards traditional networking.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would save more, for sure…I would definitely say saving is one of the things that you have to do no matter what, even if you're putting away 3%.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “Shaq is a sales and marketing powerhouse…everything he touches, it turns to gold basically.” What book are you reading right now? “I just started reading Rocket Fuel in the EOS stuff. And that would probably be the second thing that I would tell people if you're a young person, is that you just can't stop reading.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Do something that's going to impact not only your life but other people so that they can find out who you are.” You can get in contact with Gary at: Email: gary@howardcompany.com(link sends e-mail) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garykurtz1/ (Click Here)
About Christina Somerville Christina Somerville is what you’d call a corporate refugee. Last year she decided to walk away from her 20-year sales and marketing career to better utilize her talents for connecting well with people and coaching others to do the same. She launched ConvoConnection - a resource of instruction and encouragement to help people have more genuine and enjoyable social connections. She feels passionate about empowering people to believe in their own social self-worth. Every week through her blog she shares ideas, tips, and best practices for eliminating social awkwardness and self-doubt to make way for projecting social ease and confidence. Because socializing happens all day long, her topics can be easily applied to both personal and professional interactions. Why did you decide to leave the corporate world and start ConvoConnection? “While I was in sales and marketing for 20 years and in my personal life kind of, you know, offline, I would have friends and colleagues come to me and say ‘You know, can you help me with, you know, preparing for this interview?’ or ‘I’ve got to talk to my boss about this topic, what should I say?’ And so that kind of happened very naturally.” You decided to enter the tech industry AND move to a new city. How did you both launch a new career AND find a new personal network? “My husband and I, this is back in 2013, we were living in Cincinnati, Ohio at the time and we both were like, you know, I don't think this is our seed like I think we were ready to move on to something else. We had really kind of scraped our way through the recession of 2008. And we're just ready to kind of move on. So, before we decided to move on geographically, both of us kind of made a pact with one another. And we said…” What one question can you always ask to open up any networking conversation? “I read an article about Terry Gross from NPR. And she says that she always asked this question at the start of her interviews, and I'm like, this is brilliant. And she says all she has to say is ‘so tell me about yourself.’ And what's so brilliant about that question, in my opinion, and she even acknowledges, is that it puts the onus on the interviewee to share what they want to share.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “One of the best outcomes of my work, it wasn't actually to my benefit. It was to my husband's…when you interact with a whole bunch of people, sooner or later you're going to run into super connectors. And these are people who are usually like recruiters. They just know everybody. There's this other gal who I met who she is like, she's the mayor of Portland. She knows everybody…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “What's right in front of you takes your attention. And if you don't keep up on it, time passes on and when time passes on the relationship kind of grow stale. And this is both personal and professional. So, what I do is I kind of set appointments for myself.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Think about just being kind of the outlier and just make the first move. People would really appreciate it, that you go up and introduce yourself.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “It's probably is a hybrid. But yes, I would lean more on in-person networking…it's very efficient to make those initial connections today via LinkedIn or any kind of social media but like, let's go further than that.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Remember that almost everybody wants to connect and you making the first step is it pays dividends and people really do appreciate it so put in a little bit of effort lean in a little bit and you'll be really pleased and surprised about what you find.” You can get in contact with Christina at: Website: http://www.convoconnection.com/...
About Brianna Rooney Brianna Rooney, (AKA the Millionaire Recruiter) is 34 years old, owns Techees, has three houses, a top 100 restaurant www.mouthfuleatery.com, an amazing Chef of a husband and two little kids. Diego Danger (yes that's his real middle name) 5 years old, and a sweet little 2-year-old girl, Lima Ariel. Her very successful recruiting firm is the star of the show, http://www.techees.com.techees/ (www.techees.com.Techees) is a firm that places highly sought-after software professionals with companies in the Bay Area that are high profile, high growth, VC-backed profitable pre-IPO and or public. Brianna takes the matchmaking approach. Hiring is all too similar to dating. If you want to do it right, you have to take the thoughtful road without all the fluff. How did you get the name, the millionaire recruiter? “It was by one of my employees, Ben Markowitz, who has been with me now for six, six and a half years. And he goes, ‘Hey, do you understand like how powerful your training is here and how I don't think anyone else does it like this?’…he's like, ‘yeah, I think we should make an e-course.’ So, he goes ‘and we're going to call you the millionaire recruiter ‘cause that’s what you are.’” What's the best way to work with people that feel threatened by you doing a better job than you do? “It's a topic about, I think, you know, the emotional intelligence. And it’s something I'm actually currently putting my whole team through, actually eight different workshops on this. And I think that this comes from being really self-aware and also realizing that people's intentions are not bad.” How do you build relationships without coming off like a salesperson? “We are more relationship builders. And once you realize that not every head has a dollar sign on it, that we're actually human beings and that, you know, paying it forward is really important. And maybe we're not making money off of this one conversation, but maybe this one conversation is then going to turn these three others because that person enjoyed you and then they'll recommend you. So, if you don't see like the bigger picture, I don't think you can truly be successful.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “one of my most favorite networking things was in person and it was when we went to Women Who Code, it was a meetup group and we actually had a booth and I've never done that before…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I'm a really big believer in notes. Actually, I got it from, randomly, my gynecologist. So, you see this person once a year and she keeps amazing notes. So, every time I see her, even though it's been 365 days, she gets out her notes and she starts asking me about things that we talked about last year that I didn't even realize she wrote down.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “People need to realize that people really enjoy talking about themselves and they don't always get the opportunity. So, if you give them the opportunity, they'll jump on it. So, I think if you're going to start reaching out and start having connections and relationships, then you definitely have to give.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “Digital, absolutely. I'm not saying that it's my favorite, but…it's the fastest. You can do it anywhere. People are always on their phones, which is a good and bad thing. I just think it's the way to go.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would have put myself out there a long time ago. So…I'm not a giant fan of social media because I think a lot of it can be fake or perceived, you know, a lot better than things actually are. So, I was always like under the radar…” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person...
About Lauren Marsicano, Esq. Lauren Marsicano, Esq. is the founder of the Networking Maverick community where she helps her clients turn their networks into net worth. Lauren has been recognized as a “Top 40 under 40 Lawyer in the Nation” by the American Bar Association and has been named “2019 Florida Super Lawyer, Rising Star.” She received her law degree from the University of Miami and has studied at Oxford University. For more helpful tips and motivation, join her mailing list at http://www.networkingmaverick.com/ (www.NetworkingMaverick.com). In the age of social media, do you believe in-person networking is obsolete? “I have always thought that in-person networking is where the magic happens. I think social media and social media networking should always be a subsidiary of it. It should support it and be kind of a subset of what you're doing. Because I think it's undeniable nowadays. If you don't have an online presence, you don't have social capital, right?” For the introverts out there, what advice do you have for them on how to network and make connections? “For introverts, my biggest tips are number one, if you already made the effort to go to an event, just think that you already took that initial step, right? So, your heart is in the right place. Your mindset is in the right place. Maybe you're just failing to plan effectively. So, I did release a Networking Maverick pocket guide that kind of goes through steps and guides you, but I think the biggest things that hold introverts back, is they get overwhelmed.” What is something people always ask you when starting a new business? “People kept asking how are you doing this? How are you making money from it? I feel like this is a drain I should just do online networking. I'm wasting time. And I kept saying it's how you plan it out. It's how you're strategizing that is lacking. Do you actually really know your target market? Do you know your target market’s target market? Because your target market is going to events to target their market. So, why not go to those events?” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I had an event on Monday and it was my first big event in by big event. I mean, more than 100 people, 150 people ended up coming. It was amazing. The turnout, the energy, everything. But it was my first time planning that size event...” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “This is where social media has come in a lot. I think that it really allows you to nurture your audience when you're not able to.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Well, I definitely think social media presence is great, but you need to be getting out there and doing in-person networking. And I can't stress that enough.” “My five steps for it are identifying, researching, planning, showing up and follow up. So, if you're not doing those things, you're not making money from it. You're not making connections from it. You're not turning your network into net worth.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “What I neglected because between my 20s and now I've still moved probably six times. And I did not keep in touch with new addresses as much. And, you know, now it's easier you can get emails and, and that sort of thing. But when I was in my 20s, I wasn't keeping track of it as much as I should. And people have moved and I've lost touch with them.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “The person right now that I'm trying to manifest that I'm going to meet in the next year is Marie Forleo.” What book are you reading right now? “I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I don't read as much hard books anymore,...
About Stacey Chillemi Stacey Chillemi is a popular, recognizable lifestyle reporter, expert, columnist, and health host. Author of The Complete Guide to Natural Healing along with 20 other published books. She is the founder of thecompleteherbalguide.com. Stacey has been on numerous lifestyle and health-related TV and radio programs, and is a recognized health and natural remedies expert, with over 20 years in practice as a Health Coach. Stacey has been a guest on the Dr. Oz Show, local news, and numerous radio shows. Why is reducing stress so important, especially around the holidays? “People don't realize it, but like 60 to 90% of all illnesses are stress-related illnesses. Many people don't realize that a lot of things such as heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cholesterol, depression, many things come from stress.” How do the foods we eat affect our bodies? “When we eat a lot of foods that aren't natural, that are processed or have a lot of artificial ingredients and chemicals that shouldn't be in foods but are in foods to keep the foods fresher longer or looking to make them look more plumper, those ingredients and those processed foods get in our bodies. And it's very hard for our bodies to break those chemicals or those artificial ingredients or those foods in general down. And when they do break it down, a lot of times you feel sluggish.” What are some ways to improve our holiday eating habits? “Know when to listen to your body and to, you know, eat reasonable portion sizes. You know, you could always cheat and have fun and have your cookies and have a little cake here and there, but just don't overdo it.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I had one time written a book on epilepsy and I taught people how to cope with epilepsy in the book and shared a lot of good tips on how to get on with life. And you know, I shared a lot of my own stories and other people’s stories in it. And a person had walked by one day in Barnes and Nobles and they picked up the book and they…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I like to use YouTube and I like to, on my website thecompleteherbalguides.com, I share a lot of articles and I really encourage people to contact me and to ask questions.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “It takes time. I see a lot of people get frustrated. They try to grow their network and they don't see results right away and they get frustrated. It takes time and it also, it takes quality. I tell people it's not quantity. It's quality.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I think our society is going towards more videos and going more digital. You know, as time goes on, people are looking for a quick answer. People don't like to read as much as they did.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I probably would have did things a little bit differently where I would have did more public speaking and I would've did more videos.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “One person I think is really great. I think Dr. Axe did a great job. He started out as a chiropractor and he had his mother (whom) had an illness, I believe it was cancer. And he tried to find a healthy way to, you know, a healthy way to help her overcome her cancer.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Be 100% passionate at what you do and always be very supportive to other people and give encouragement and motivation and inspiration.” You can get in contact with Stacey at: Website: http://www.thecompleteherbalguide.com/ (www.thecompleteherbalguide.com) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceychil/ (Click Here)
About Dave Molenda After almost 30 years of running his own company and growing it to $10 million in annual sales before selling it, Dave realized his passion was helping companies thrive by overcoming their natural tendencies to retreat, not talk about the hard stuff, and spin their wheels on the wrong things. His company, Positive Polarity, acts as the opposing force against the easy way of doing business—the way it’s always been done—with a positive and encouraging approach. You wrote an Amazon #1 Best Selling book called Growing on Purpose, what is it about? “We spent a lot of time on talking about growing a team and then we spent a lot of time talking about improving the customer's experience. There's not a lot of research done that connects the two. So, this book really connects the two.” How can it help a business get ahead in today's business climate? “So many people spend time on strengthening their team. They'll have a great team and then they may struggle with how to have a great experience or they may have a team that's not very solid, but they tried desperately to do great customer experience. So, when you’re able to do both, profit automatically happens.” Let’s talk about engaged employees. How important are they in the workplace today? “Statistics from Gallup show that one in three people show up every day for work and they have two things on their mind. They want to improve themselves and they want to improve their company. So, I was shocked when I found that out. It's only one in three.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I do monthly trainings at the Better Business Bureau Milwaukee. And one of the big reasons that I do it is for networking opportunities. And earlier this year, I had somebody in transition in between jobs. Just, you know, and everybody introduces themselves at the beginning. So, you get to know who's all in the room. There's usually 20 to 30 people in the room and a guy said, I'm in transition. This is what I want to do. And oddly enough, the guy sitting next to him needed that exact thing.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I think once you define your network, then what I started doing is, I'm looking for ways to connect the dots. I want to make sure that I add value first.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “I tell my clients to find out where your ideal clients are. Again, it's another situation where if you're selling something that is primarily, let's say you're a realtor in the Lake Country area, doing something in Racine or Kenosha probably isn't going to be an effective use of that time.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “It depends again on what your network community looks like. Digital is global… If I had to pick one for me, I like face to face way better than digital because, as a business coach, the sandbox that I play in is local.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would tell myself, you know, to be more purposeful. And then I would also, based on those statistics we talked about, definitely set more goals.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “My focus is trying to find people that I can help. So, I don't even have an answer on the six degrees of separation and maybe this is a blind spot of mine. I'd never thought of it. And even when I was preparing for this, thinking about it, I'm like, I don't even know the answer to that. I'm like, I'm focused on the behavior side for people.” What book are you reading right now? “Actually, right now I'm reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and I totally don't even know how I got it. I read about a book a...
About Jacob Carlson & Ian Buchanan Jacob Carlson graduated from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse as a Business Management major with an emphasis in Marketing, along with a minor in Sustainable Business. Jacob specializes in customer life cycle marketing focusing on customer retention and brand loyalty for Concentrix as a Program Coordinator, where he is employed full-time. Jacob is also the co-founder of Helium, which is a new start-up in Milwaukee, dedicated to bringing books to readers. Ian Buchanan learned the necessity of relationship-building to success while part-owner and operator of a budding lawn care business in high school. Now, with his long-time friend and past business partner, Jacob, Ian has launched Helium - a free book delivery service offered in his hometown of Milwaukee. Ian works full-time in a financial consultant role, spending nights and weekends developing Helium, much of his time being spent leveraging connections in an effort to grow the business. What is Helium? Ian: “I noticed a big inefficiency within the system. Libraries have, you know, limited books at each library. But this, the Milwaukee County system works together so they share resources and I realized if I wanted a book in my local library, it might not be there, but it might be at a library a few miles away. So, why not take that step out of it, take my travel out of it and have someone do it for me. So that's where the idea came for Helium where we deliver the books for you. We bring them from the library that they're at within the system to your desired location.” What methods and avenues have you explored while trying to build your network and getting the message out about your company Helium? Jacob: “Recently, it's just been reaching out to a lot of different media outlets and media mediums. I'm really just following up via email and you know, working connections that we've either had from the past, whether it be through school or even family friends, and really just making sure of, hey, this is our idea, this is helium and selling more or less right now the idea of rather than us.” How have you, and how are you tackling this? Especially while you're working full time. Ian: “It's tough. Obviously, you're working from nine to five and you're devoting that time to the job that's generating your income and you have to, and it's the right decision. But you know, it's really taking advantage and leveraging your nights and weekends from our opinion.” Any advice you can offer on still having somewhat a social life and engaging with family and friends as well? Jacob: “I think just setting priorities. And again, even just your note about time management is absolutely huge because you know, you're tied down to so many obligations outside of work just in life with hanging out with friends, family affairs, et cetera, let alone running a business on this side.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? Jacob: “I would say look no further than, you know, our mutual friend and actually a family friend of ours, Martha Kerrigan. And they've just been a huge, huge blessing obviously to my family and me in general outside of Helium. But even Helium in general.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? Ian: “I think we all get inundated, whether it be on LinkedIn, through email with connection requests and you know, pleads for our time and a lot of that. A lot of the time we just let that go by the wayside. We deem it non-important, but for the ones for the main connections that do stick, I think it's important to just go beyond that initial meeting.” Jacob: “we're reaching out to local podcasters like yourself, we're reaching out to different media outlets and really just carving the time…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? Jacob: “Just make a point to reach out. I did read a book a...
About Raj Daniels Since 2001, Raj has been assisting individuals to improve strategy and performance in business and personal lives. Raj helps executives, entrepreneurs and business owners who are struggling to clarify and prioritize their focus so that they can be more intentional and accomplish their goals. He’s been referred to as a guide, educator, and mentor by many in the Dallas business community and startup ecosystem. As of May 2019, Raj has stepped into the role of Director of Strategic Partnerships. Why do you believe networking is important? “I grew up in Southeast London and I didn't have a strong support community. And when I look back in my life and see the trajectory and the route I've taken, I look back and think to myself, what would it look like if I had a network and intentional network if I had started out younger?” What do I think about digital/social media networking? “I think it's a weak substitute, at best. You know, I know there are a lot of platforms out there and…you know, you can connect with friends, connect with people, but connecting with an inanimate device is, you know, it doesn't connect to your soul.” How can networking improve society? “I've made it a practice to lead what I call three new people a week for many, many years now. And I'm agnostic. It doesn't matter what they do, where they're from, demographics, you know, socially. And what I found is that when you sit down with an individual, you realize that you have more in common with them than you don't. Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I met one of the founders of Nexus PMG at a networking meeting that I have been attending for four years, and I met him, it was about two or three years ago. He was relatively new to the community and I essentially opened up my notebook and my Rolodex to him. How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “That's one area where technology has made life easier. It's so much easier today to pick up the phone, to get on a computer, you know, send a text message…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Approach it with a heart of abundance and looking to give. You know, I have a little phrase written on my whiteboard here. It says, "the day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit." And what I mean by that is that sometimes you know, you can just tell where people come into a meeting and it's a very transactional meeting and I'm sure there's a time and place for that, but I think when you're truly networking, you're looking to give, you're looking because you care, you're looking because you want to see the other person succeed.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “Traditional, all day long. If it's digital, then LinkedIn only. But I do feel like that's also sorely lacking.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “Difficult question for me because I am, I'm extremely happy where I'm at. You know, I've got a great personal life. I have a great family life. I've got three beautiful daughters that I absolutely adore. So, I would just go back and if I were telling myself one thing, I'll just say it'll be okay. Everything's going to be fine.” What book are you reading right now? “Currently on Audible, I'm reading, I think it's called 21 Tips for the 21st Century by Yuval Hariri, the gentleman that wrote Sapiens. On my Kindle, I'm reading Creating Climate Wealth by Jigar Shah.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Nike says it best. Just do it and repeat and rinse and repeat. There is no stopping doing it. And I think if you want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, I think networking is almost a social obligation.” You can get in contact with Raj at: Email: raj@rajdaniels.com(link sends...
About Joey Mure & Russ Morgan The wall street mindset separates both families, entrepreneurs, and business owners from their money while others use it for their advantage. The secret to freedom is having your money work for you, not someone else when wealth building. Both Russ and Joey work tirelessly to be the hub for financial insight and education for individuals, business owners and investors nationwide. They believe that taking control over your finances will lead to greater prosperity and a more stress-free way of life. What made you decide to start a podcast? Joey: “Our podcast came initially out of the thought of we want to have a weekly conversation with our clients.” Russ: “It was a way to scale that part of our business because we were growing and growing and growing and realized, okay, we can no longer do this belly to belly, one-on-one. We have to do this one to many. And so, we just use the technology of a podcast.” How has podcasting grown your social network? Joey: “It's put us in a totally different category that we didn't expect. So, I guess the long story of it is that because we started talking to our clients every single week, we didn't realize that other people were listening in on the conversation. So, we've had people from all across the country calling us up, emailing us messages on Facebook…” Russ: “We hit a thousand followers on our Facebook page. And for us, because we're not super social in that way because we, you know, I have four kids, Joey has five. We live in an age where, you know, be more on social media, but we don't spend tons of time there. We've had no strategy to try to gain followers or likes. But all of that has been a direct result of our podcasting and it's amazing that people are following to see or hear the latest episodes.” What are your best practices for building a community within your brand? Russ: “I would say obviously the podcasting has allowed us to have more engaged conversations with our clients to ask them ‘what are those things that you're really interested in?’ And sometimes when you survey your client base about different things, you get crickets. You know, you don't get a whole lot of feedback. But from our standpoint, because now we do have, as you said, kind of a loyal listenership. You can kind of track it.” Joey: “They want more kind of engagement that's more than just a step into listening to a podcast. They want to meet other people like themselves. They want to go deeper into the Q and A with our podcast guests.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? Russ: “A long time ago, Joey and I had had the pleasure of being a part of this group that actually brought this speaker into Birmingham. He wrote a book and it was, it was actually written for real estate agents of all things, which neither Joey nor I were…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? Joey: “I think for us, that's really where the community comes in. So, once we actually interview somebody on the podcast, they come into the community as an expert who's going to be doing a Q and A with our audience. And then they stay in the community and they are accessible almost as easily as like texting them because our community is on its own app platform.” Russ: “Nobody likes to be in an environment where they feel like they're all alone. And I think that sometimes when you go to a traditional networking environment, you feel like ‘I'm on an Island’.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? Joey: “I would say take the leap, and for us, what I will say is this, if we really allowed the fear of getting started to stand in the way, it would've been a big flop and we would have never gotten started. But I think nowadays there are so many services out there that all you have to do is go in record good content and hand it off to somebody.” Russ:...
About Brian T. Shirley Brian T Shirley has performed all across the USA, Canada, the Bahamas, and Japan for over 25 years. Brian has also hosted 2 radio shows (The Triangle Comedy Radio Show, The BTS Radio Show) and currently hosts the BTS Entertainment Corner radio segment. This is a call-in segment featured on the "What's the Story?" radio show which originates out of Reno, NV. Brian can be seen in several short films, web series and the upcoming feature film "Mark of the Butterfly" in March 2020. In your opinion, how has social media helped or hurt Independent Entertainment? “it's helped a great deal because now you have outlets where you didn't before. If you make a short film or music video or even the independent music artists out there that doing a LP or a song, you have a chance to get it out there for the public now. And that's the good news and the bad news because, and I've been a victim of myself on this too, sometimes with Independence, you know, you get excited and you do a project and you get it out there and maybe it wasn't completely edited and put together the best. So, it's a double-edged sword.” As you've evolved and matured, has it been hard to keep up with the latest social media trends? “When we were starting the interview today, I couldn't even figure out how to get the audio working. It took me a few minutes. Because I think Zoom, I've done twice now. But you know, you either keep learning or you start declining and that's with anything.” How important is networking to you and how has social media affected this? “It's important to everybody. If you're in any kind of industry that requires, you know, having relationships with people, social media has allowed that to be sped up to a certain point because now you can meet people that you normally wouldn't, you know, in other states or countries or whatever, and you can bond with them somehow or some way online.” “It's all about building relationships and social media's kind of sped that up a little bit.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I'll share my favorite one, which I've actually worked into the stage act, believe it or not. Years ago, through being a radio, internet radio, a BTS radio show I hosted in ACE and we were in the studio. But it's internet radio. And I started putting together, you know, guests for the show, and one of the gentlemen that I reached out to, I forgot how I found these people to be honest; it was Brian Hayden and he is a heart transplant recipient. So, and he'd written a couple of books…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “It's a learning process that I'm still learning. I don't think anybody, unless they become just an absolute pro, can be 100% perfect. You have to learn what you're posting. You know, what kind of a response it’s getting, you know, you can target your audience. “I think staying positive no matter what you're doing is a big factor because when you start going into those dark areas, you just draw out so many dark, dark people.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “I think just staying visible, staying positive and getting content that, you know, people, if they're in this situation, here's what they're going to need. Making sure that's out there, I think is a good way to grow your business.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I think both are equally important and if you use both to, you know, play on each other, that's the perfect storm because just like what happened with Brian, you know, I met him online, we networked and then we met each other in person.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would say don't party as much. When I started doing comedy particularly, you know, yeah, I had a little fun, but treat the business...
About Molly Dill Molly Dill is the director of gBETA Milwaukee at gener8tor. She joined gener8tor after a nine-year journalism career. Molly most recently served as managing editor of BizTimes Milwaukee, a bi-weekly regional business magazine where she also covered the Milwaukee startups, technology, and financial services beats. Molly previously was a reporter at the Marshfield News-Herald in Marshfield, Wisconsin. An Illinois native, she earned a bachelor's in journalism from Marquette University. Why did you switch from journalism to startups? “I had been covering startups for the last two years at BizTimes and I had been at BizTimes about eight years and rose to managing editor there. I felt that I kind of had plateaued and I needed a new challenge in my career and since I was covering startups and I had developed a lot of contacts in the startup world, it was kind of a natural evolution actually as a result of networking.” What is gBETA Milwaukee? “gBETA Milwaukee is a program of gener8tor. So, just to kind of give you an overview of gener8tor, it's a startup accelerator that was started in 2012. Joe Kirgues and Troy Vosseller are two of the co-founders who are still active today…we do take an ownership stake in return for a hundred-thousand-dollar investment and we only accept five startups per program.” If a startup founder wants to apply to gBETA Milwaukee, what’s the best way to go about that? “They can contact me. My email is molly@gener8tor.com(link sends e-mail) as generator with an eight. And we have a website gbetastartups.com. There's different city pages on there. Our fall program began October 24th and that goes through December 13th and then we'll take a little bit of a winter break and begin again in the spring.” “We're looking for startups that are highly unique and highly scalable, and they must be based in greater Milwaukee for my program. So, it's not so much the main street businesses like a barbershop or a restaurant. It's more really original solutions to problems that others haven't come up with before or that are filling a need or a niche or are uniquely different.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “my first job was at the Marshfield News-Herald in Marshfield, which is in Marshfield, Wisconsin like you mentioned. And then I wanted to get back to Milwaukee. I went to Marquette and I really loved Milwaukee. I wanted to be here and so I had kept in touch with a mentor from that, from my internship during college. And this mentor, Julie, she kept me in mind…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “several times per week, I try to meet various contacts for coffee, for drinks, whatever, just to make sure that we're keeping in touch and I know what's going on with them and they know what's going on with me and how we might be able to help each other or work together. So, I think a good networking interaction is a kind of give and take.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “go to a networking event in your industry that, you know, you'll want to meet people at and then just strike up conversations. It's really hard at first, but the more you go, the more everyone in the room isn't a stranger anymore. And these are some people you've met before and you can just pick up where you left off. So, I would say kind of forcing yourself to get out there and meet new people can help you so much.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I like traditional networking. Digital networking, I think can be kind of a companion, but traditional in person, that's way more memorable than someone connecting with you on LinkedIn.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I think I was a little hesitant at first to ask for help in building my network and advancing...
About Derrick Van Mell Derrick is the CEO of The Center for Management Terms & Practices, the standards body for general management. Founded in 2018 after a successful pilot with the SBA, it is a for-profit association that trains managers at every level from every sector in size. The Center standardize the terminology of management so departments can communicate. It standardized a kit of one-page tools so people can collaborate efficiently. Information about training and events is at theindex.net. What's changed in your world since the last time we chatted/recorded? “Well, my professional world, it's changed quite a bit really; giving up a consulting practice of 25 years, evolved it, evolved it a lot, I think it's fair to say into The Center. And one of the most common problems I saw when I was doing work with people, managers of all organizations at all levels was what I called a dodgeball meeting.” Let's dive deeper into your business. Who do you primarily work with? “We work with people who have general management responsibilities. So, those are people, and we have lots of terminology for this, who connect the dots to see the big picture, who have P and L responsibility, who are on the management track…” What's the value-add they will get by working with you? “The value add is really this fundamental point that if people don't really understand the common language of management, it's really not the words. It's really the concepts. That's what words are really.” How can you be a resource to your network and mine? “it's not just a way to optimize performance, it's a way to break down, you know, fundamental social barriers too. People love to work. It's important to them. And um, you know, you can't really treat people fairly unless you can understand them clearly.” Paying it forward is an overarching theme that we hear and see often in the business world. Please share a recent pay-it-forward experience that you've had... Received or given. “the center has been formally organized for a year and we're starting to develop, and we have developed our core installers and CEO soon, and senior managers from different departments and they've gotten to know each other which is great. So, I gathered them together yesterday to think about ‘how are we going to organize our first chapter’ because we have to build community, personal community, among our membership.” Everyone loves a good tip or tool/resource that will help save them time or make their life easier. Do you have any tips or resources to share with our listeners? “we're proud of The Index. If you want to take a little step further, you're going into a meeting and you know, it's about some management topic, you know, market research, workflow process, writing the employee manual, you know, financial accounting, whatever it is. You know, go to The Index and you'll see the General Managers Index.” If we could remove all barriers and constraints what project would you do or take on? (this could be personal or professional) “my vision of success is an international conference. People from different regions, different languages, literally different languages, people from across difficult, you know, political and cultural borders sharing ideas about management. It's not just a universal language, it's a universal activity.” You can get in contact with Derrick at: Phone: 608-260-9300 Website: http://www.theindex.net/ (www.theindex.net) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrickvanmell
About Brian Lee Brian Lee, APR, is the president of Revelation PR, Advertising & Social Media, as well as a part-time lecturer on social media at Madison Area Technical College. Business Magazine named Brian to its "40 Under 40" list in 2012, and PRSA-Madison named him its 2013 Communicator of the Year. Outside of Revelation, Brian is the editor-in-chief of Madison Startups, an online publication that covers startup news in town, and he runs EatDrinkMadison.com, a Madison, Wisconsin, restaurant and bar guide that is searchable by amenities. Let’s discuss reputation and crisis management. “it has become more important lately, especially with social media speeding up the news cycle that something that you could let sort of hide or fester in the old days gets really exposed very quickly these days. Tell us the difference between reputation and crisis management. “reputation management is everything you do basically before an incident occurs, you are [inaudible] doing reputation management to help maintain and protect your brand, shape, perceptions, and provide crisis resiliency. Meanwhile, crisis management or crisis communications is everything that occurs after an incident happens. So, this is your doing crisis management to help restore your rebuild trust and reestablish a reputation.” Why is having a good reputation important? “when you have a good reputation, people are more likely to forgive you after an incident because it's out of character and the vice versa is true. Then there's the business case. A Deloitte study shows that when an organization's reputation is damaged, there's a decrease in revenue, customer's brand value and/or stock price. In fact, uh, some number, like 87% of CEOs worldwide said reputation risk is the most important strategic risk their organizations are facing.” When talking about reputation management, what are some of the first things, first steps that a business or organization should look at? “think about it like a campaign. And with any campaign, it's important to start with your goals. So, in this case, list your business goals first and then come up with corresponding reputation goals.” Say something happens at your company that's really positioning you in a negative way. How is your organization going to recover from that? “The first thing I tell people in companies is that you need to talk to all your internal audiences first. That might be staff, volunteers, board of directors, et cetera. They need to know what's going on, what the company's doing. It also helps improve morale. And it kills the rumor mill.” Do you have a case study that you could share with us? “it's a little old, but people know it, it's United Airlines, and this occurred back in 2017. And just to remind listeners out there is that United Airlines had a flight that was oversold. They needed to put on their own crew members. So, they asked for volunteers. Finally, they had to actually forcibly remove a passenger…” What's changed in your world since the last time we chatted/recorded? “I launched the corporate event planning business called the revelation events and I was also just named an entrepreneur in residence at Madison area technical college.” Let's dive deeper into your business. Who do you primarily work with? “Revelation: We primarily work with hospitality clients, realtors, developers, associations, tech, and B2B companies. And although our clients do span the state and the country, our main specialty is helping clients win Madison.” How can you be a resource to your network and mine? “one of the things you mentioned in the introductions, I am also the editor in chief of a newspaper here in Madison. We cover all the startups and tech and biotech and so forth going on. It's been interesting because there's been a lot of communities in the Midwest that sort of want to replicate what Madison has in terms of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. So, for example…”
About Deanna Singh Deanna Singh, the author of Purposeful Hustle, wants to live in a world where marginalized communities have power. As an expert social entrepreneur, she is obsessed with making the world a better place and she will build or break systems to create positive change. Deanna is described as a trailblazer and dynamic speaker who is at the forefront of social change. She is an accomplished author, educator, business leader, and social justice champion! Please share more about your book, Purposeful Hustle and why networking is important to Purposeful Hustlers. “the first half of the book, we really talk about purpose. And the idea there, you know, people throw around these words, but when I talk about purpose, I mean what are you uniquely positioned to do in the world? So, what is it that you can accomplish that really nobody else can?” How does a Purposeful Hustler prepare for a meeting? “a lot of times, we have these amazing people in our network and we get a meeting with them and we're so excited and then we get to the meeting and it flops, because we haven't taken the time to prepare in advance and really think through what would be the most effective use of their time…” What are some of the best questions you have been asked when people are trying to network with you? “my all-time favorite question is what should I have asked that I didn't ask? You know, is there anything that you think I should know that might not be on my radar?” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “one of the things I decided to do was have two o'clock tea on Tuesdays. Now I don't think I ever ended up having any of the meetings happen that way where it was actually Tuesday. Sometimes it was Thursday or Wednesday morning or whether, you know, I think probably less than 5% of them ended up to being Tuesday at two o'clock but the idea was I was going to try and reach out to 52 people, so one a week at least minimally that were not part of my network that I thought would be really good and my network.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “one of the things that I've been working on is trying to use the tools that already exist out there to really continue to nurture the relationship. And obviously one of the biggest kinds of tools that we have at our disposal now is social media. So, just making sure that I'm posting content that I think is relevant to my network…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “It really comes down to being strategic. You know, a lot of times I'll have people in, they'll say I'm going to a networking event and I'll say, that's great. Like, who are you hoping to meet? They’re like, I don't know.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I will say what I have found to be incredible, and this has really been over the last year and I think I started as sort of a naysayer with this and now have completely changed my tune, is the ability to be able to use, kind of blend the two, right, through video conferencing.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “One of the things that I would definitely really stress is the ability to collect and keep clean my CRM (customer relationship management system).” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “the one that would be for me super exciting would be Michelle Obama. And I do think that I could probably connect in less than six degrees of separation. But it's one of those things where like where we started this conversation about, well, what would you ask? And you know, what would that mean and what would I be able to bring to the table?” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “When I
About Christie Ruffino Christie Ruffino is a serial entrepreneur who has had a very purposeful journey since she started building her business tribe over 10 years ago. It has all come together in a way that now serves her clients at the highest level. From her first entrepreneurial effort as the Top Girl Scout Cookie Seller to her current business as the President of the Dynamic Professional Women’s Network, Inc., Christie has learned how to guide other entrepreneurs to get groundbreaking results as a business strategy coach. What's changed in your world since the last time we chatted/recorded? “I guess the piece that's changed is because technology is changing so much. We've adapted to create opportunities for people to connect and for our community to build virtually. I remember at first in the beginning years doing a webinar or doing some kind of a conference call. It was difficult, and now it's so easy…” Let's dive deeper into your business. Who do you primarily work with? “We are an industry exclusive leads group. That's kind of what we've been for the last 15 years. It's typically business to consumer type of opportunities, a little bit of business to business…A couple things that make us different is, of course, we're all women. And then a few things about how we work make it a little bit more conducive to working women.” How can you be a resource to your network and mine? “We have the different chapters that meet. So, that's really about supporting them on the ground level. We do events occasionally. It's been hard to do local events, you know, in specific locations. We do a lot of them, but it's not necessarily attractive to everybody based on where they're located. And so, we've been kind of transitioning to do virtual events.” “We have a training library that we've developed and we're continuing to add more teaching into that.” Who is it that you’re looking to network with? “specifically, women who are looking to kind of realize that their business is more than the company that they're with and the products that they sell. It's more about who they are as an individual and the experience that they bring to the table, as well as their story. And so, for the last eight years, I've been helping women position their stories to build a stronger personal brand.” Paying it forward is an overarching theme that we hear and see often in the business world. Please share a recent pay-it-forward experience that you've had... Received or given. “I honestly think when in the networking world, like I'm constantly making connections for people. People are constantly making connections for me. I know a lot of the people I hire are former clients…I mean there's a lot of pay it forward I do in my life...” Everyone loves a good tip or tool/resource that will help save them time or make their life easier. Do you have any tips or resources to share with our listeners? “Grammarly. Oh my gosh. So, if you've not used Grammarly, I never thought I needed Grammarly because, I don’t know, I sent my stuff to an editor. I didn't think I needed it. But you can download Grammarly to your computer and it fixes everything. With a Facebook post, with an email you're sending, with your website updates, like it basically connects to your PC and will suggest whatever you need to do to fix your stuff.” If we could remove all barriers and constraints what project would you do or take on? (this could be personal or professional) “Right now, it's doing my own podcast…people want to consume information. They want to continually, not everybody, but people in the personal development space, we want to keep filling our brains with good information and good direction and good resources from people that remember the resources like they're supposed to.” You can get in contact with Christie at: Website: http://www.christieruffino.com/ (www.christieruffino.com) Website: http://www.ourdpwn.com/ (www.ourdpwn.com)
About Martha Martha Carrigan is the President & CEO of Big Shoes Network (BSN): a family of niche job boards and resources serving the Midwest and Southeast. Big Shoes Network specializes in advertising, digital and traditional communication, graphic and web design, marketing, public relations, and social media industries. Martha is responsible for business development, strategic marketing, and financial management. What's changed in your world since the last time we chatted/recorded? “Well, my world consists of my work personally and then the industry. And so as far as Big Shoes Network goes, what's changed with that is we've added, sort of under the current consulting arm, called Next Steps because we had been doing so much personal branding and some professional branding…” Let's dive deeper into your business. Who do you primarily work with? “one Avenue for our target customer, our folks that are seekers or not seekers, but potentially great employees or talent. Where we generate our money from is from clients posting jobs and adding ads on our site. So that client, we have about 40% of our business is agency, 50% is corporate and 10% is nonprofit and government. And I define that a little differently because although for example, the University of Wisconsin is one of our largest clients and they are nonprofit, but they have more of a corporate sort of feel and size and all of that. So, we lump them in with the corporate. Um, yeah. So, we have about 4,000 clients and we've posted well over 10,000 jobs in our history.” What's the value-add they will get by working with you? “We are very customer service and high touch. That's our culture. We love helping. We will bend over backwards for you.” How can you be a resource to your network and mine? “We really love, like I said, helping people. We get a fair number of clients that will post, and we'll circle back to them and say, perhaps you can modify this a bit in order to get a better response. Additionally, when you are utilizing a larger organization, if you want to do some adjusting, tweaking, extending, that's really not an option. But with us, it really is…” In our initial interview - you had said you'd like to connect with Denzel Washington or Bill Gates. Have you made progress on connecting with them? “I've connected with Denzel in my dreams, and I have not yet connected with Bill Gates. I'm working my way up the ladder. I just had a conversation with Michael Moni, UWM’s Chancellor. And the CEO of Microsoft now is a UWM grad.” Paying it forward is an overarching theme that we hear and see often in the business world. Please share a recent pay-it-forward experience that you've had... Received or given. (Discussing a recent experience at a grocery store) “You can only pay with credit card. And I've seen that more and more and I get it. It's fast, it's reliable. But this woman didn't have a credit card and a lot of people don't, or they opt not to use it for various reasons. So, she got back in line into the line next to mine, got to the front of the line and the woman said it was for credit card only. We're talking an hour later. So, she got in line behind me and I just, I could hardly talk. I was so upset. She was fine with it. I'm like, this is not fair. So, she and I struck up a conversation and then as I was leaving, I'm like, no. So, I went back, and I swiped my card and I was like, this is for her and whatever she's buying.” Everyone loves a good tip or tool/resource that will help save them time or make their life easier. Do you have any tips or resources to share with our listeners? “one of those is we have a business directory. So, if a client comes to us and says, Hey, I need a website built. I don't want to hire an employee necessarily to do that. It's just a project or it's a, you know, a one-year thing. I'll send them to our business directory and say, go look on the web developer site, and Keystone click is in there…”
About Paul M. Neuberger Paul M. Neuberger believes in making the impossible possible. A masterful speaker and trainer, he challenges people to dig deep and discover talents they never knew they had. Whether it’s working hands-on with small teams or presenting in front of hundreds of people, Paul is adept at truly connecting with his audience and getting to the heart of important issues. He has worked with leading organizations around the world to help improve effectiveness, performance and cultivate a stronger sense of passion in the workplace. A sales expert, Paul is known to many organizations as The Cold Call Coach. He has taught thousands of students in more than a hundred countries through his Cold Call University program, helping sales professionals in a range of industries close more business in less time than ever before. Paul serves as President of The Starr Group, a trusted leader in the insurance field and is one of the largest family-owned, independent insurance agencies in Wisconsin. He is also the Chairman of the 2019 American Heart Association Milwaukee Heart Walk. Lastly, Paul is the Founder of C-Suite for Christ; a group of business executives who share stories of how including Christ in our daily lives has positively affected our work environment. What drives you? Where do you find the motivation to do what you do? “I'm just drawn to the slogan ‘making the impossible possible’ because it's only impossible until somebody does it for the very first time. If you want to get the most out of me, if you want to get me to dig deep and accomplish something that never has been done before by anybody, just tell me it can't be done and then watch me.” What is your #1 secret to cold call success? “I would say the number one tip that I can give for cold calling success is it's all about value. And how I define value is something that you can offer.” You've accomplished so much as an entrepreneur in your young career. What's next for you? “I look at life as a bicycle. I am peddling as fast as I can. I am providing the horsepower to make sure that that bike can go from point A to point B, but God's got the handlebars. So, I don't know what direction I'm heading unnecessarily.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I would say probably when I was a financial advisor with Thrivent Financial, one of the things that I teach, this in my keynotes, I teach this in my cold call training, you have to be incredibly strategic when you sell. Cold calling is not a numbers game. It is quality over quantity…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “It's really about two things, calendar and delegation. If I'm not on top of my calendar and delegation, I'm in big trouble.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Value. I’ve got to keep coming back to it. I believe in life, you reap what you sow, and I believe in life, before you can get, you have to give.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “That's like asking me to pick peanut butter or jelly. What a tough question. Well, I know where you're going, but I would have to say both.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I would say the first person that comes to my mind is Simon Sinek. And the reason I talk about Simon Sinek is I owe Simon Sinek a tremendous debt of gratitude. When I was a financial advisor, just getting started in that career…” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “You only live once. Make it happen, and if you fall short of the mark, get back up and try it again. But don't live with regrets…” You can get in contact with Paul at: Website: http://www.paulmneuberger.com/ (www.paulmneuberger.com) Email: paul@paulmneuberger.com(link sends e-mail)
About Veronica Hinke Veronica Hinke has been researching the Titanic for as long as she can remember. She has interviewed hundreds of experts on lifestyles, foods, and drinks for Tribune Media and maintains close working relationships with leading chefs and mixologists around the world. Her report, “Titanic Cocktails,” appeared in Wine Enthusiast magazine, honoring the hundredth anniversary of the Titanic, and was blogged by the Village Voice. Ms. Hinke currently resides just outside of Chicago, Illinois. Why did you write your book "The Last Night on the Titanic: Unsinkable Drinking, Dining & Style"? “I really wanted to honor the 100th anniversary year of the sinking of the Titanic, which was in 2012. The anniversary year was in 2012 and so I spent pretty much the whole year prior, 2011, really researching to find a hook.” What do you hope readers will take away from reading your book? “I want people to be inspired by these people. Every story that I told had a purpose, kept me going, and it really kept me going through some of the darkest days in my life.” Is it a cookbook? What is a culinary narrative? “pretty much it's a narrative with some recipes sprinkled throughout. And I really curated those recipes to be purposeful where they were located. I strategically put them in spots.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I organized a party for the book, and I didn't want to just have a book party. I want to do something really special. And this was specifically for the press.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “Social media really has helped. And as even though I mentioned earlier that it's so much nicer to get together in person, I think that's still important, but I'm a huge fan of Facebook and Instagram.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Why not share your network? You know, I mean, some people might be concerned about duplication. Hey, if it's duplicated, they'll get the message twice or maybe three times. I think that's a lot less of a problem than someone being isolated from, you know, being able to work towards their goals.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I love in person. It's my own personal preference. I would rather be sitting with you right now talking face to face obviously. But then, I love that this opportunity is there because of the technology.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “Well, I would say I wouldn't change a thing. I'm so happy about what I did because that's the secret I think is you have to believe that. And I think the one thing I would say is make the most of every minute and still have that balance that you need to have to live a decent life. But I think the older you get, the more people you lose, and you start to realize the fragility of life and you think you have forever and you don't, you really don't. We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “Well, and I'm glad you mentioned someone that's no longer here because the person that I would love to sit down and have lunch with or have a cup of coffee with or tea is Julia Child.” What book are you reading right now? “right now, I'm reading a lovely little book and it's by John Steinbeck and it's Of Mice and Men.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “one piece of advice I try to remember is that it takes 30 days to make a habit. And that's not that long, Lori. You know, it's like if you really stick your nose to the grindstone, you can come up with a new habit in 30 days and so think of a new habit that you would like to instill in your life and make it happen.” You can get in contact with Veronica at: LinkedIn:
About Kay Edwards Kay Edwards is the founder of Outsight Network an association of senior-level consultants that serve mission-driven organizations. The mission of Outsight is to build lasting relationships and be relentlessly helpful. Kay helps her clients ask better questions so they can understand their organizations, their customers, and their marketplace, and turn that understanding into strategies that create life-long customers. How do you define great business relationships? “I think a business relationship really puts the other person at the center without losing sight of what you want and need from the relationship.” What is the greatest barrier to building great business relationships? “I think there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who really instinctively know how to build relationships and they do it really well but don't often understand the process. And then there are people like me who don't do it instinctively and there's a little bit of fear.” What can leaders do to overcome barriers in building relationships? “one of the things is to be really intentional about it and even if it comes naturally to you to understand who are you building relationships with? Why? What do you want from the relationships? How do you make that work?” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “actually, a client located in Europe. We were helping them build relationships in the U.S. It was a nonprofit organization, so they had as their cause helping emerging democracies around the world. And through some networking connections, I found myself having breakfast with the owner of the San Francisco Giants.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “always make sure we schedule the next connection. Always make sure I know what I'm going to talk with next about someone, and always understand how am I adding value to this relationship.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Well again, be intentional. But the other thing that I've learned that works really well when I first started my firm about 20 years ago, there was a rule that I created that said, ‘I never walk out of a meeting without asking for someone else I should meet’.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I really like face to face, but I understand that digital has its role as well. I look at them as tools and in some situations digital is more appropriate and in some situations, face-to-face is more appropriate.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I had to write down every single word I was going to say on the phone because I was so introverted and so scared of picking up the phone and so afraid of what the person on the other end would say…” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “So, when I was doing my MBA, this actually was a project of ours, we were assigned the task of identifying a leader that we admired and reaching out to them and interviewing them and writing a paper on it. Well, this was the time when right after Mel Gibson had produced…” What book are you reading right now? “I am rereading the book, The Dip by Seth Godin. who's one of my favorite authors. Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Just do it. Just make time on your calendar.” You can get in contact with Kay at: Website: http://www.outsightnetwork.com/ (www.outsightnetwork.com) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kay-edwards-77a501
About John Waid John is the founder and CEO of C3 corporate culture consulting, a firm specializing in aligning an organization's culture with its strategic goals. John has worked in sales and marketing at Pfizer, Pepsi Company, Nestle and Chateau St. Michelle winery. During these experiences, he developed a heightened awareness of the indispensable role people's attitudes play in implementing effective processes and procedures. John is an author, speaker, facilitator, and thought leader in the area of corporate culture and its positive impact on people and companies. He was born in Mexico City, has lived in five countries and speaks fluent Spanish, Portuguese and English. He is an author, keynote speaker, blogger, soccer fan, wine enthusiast, and proud dad. He currently makes his home in Atlanta. Why does culture matter and what is the definition of corporate culture? “Culture is basically some values and some behaviors that you stand for. Most companies have made an effort to define their culture through selecting some values and then also some behaviors to go with those values…” How easy or hard is it to implement great company culture? “The biggest barrier to implementing culture is self-awareness. And self-awareness is a topic that’s uh…90% of people think they're self-aware, only about 10% of people are.” How much does company culture contribute to results, profits, and all other variables? “How much more do you think that Chick-fil-A sells versus a Kentucky Fried Chicken?... 500% more. Yes. Because of the experience, because of the people.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I met a person who wrote a book called The Platinum Rule and he was from New York, he lives in San Diego, and what he found out is that the golden rule ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, wasn't working for him…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Don't be shy. Get out there. Say hello and start with hello. Care about the other person. Use the platinum rule. And you know, build a relationship to the point where they want to buy from you. Because at the end of the day, we don't sell anything, people buy.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “Digital's a good way to get to see how people remember you that you've met before. I often find when I send out things digitally that people that I haven't talked to in a while, will reach back around and say, ‘Hey John, haven't heard from you. I got this email from you; I got this material from you…” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would've gone to Wharton and studied international business because I've could've gotten in there as an MBA. I would have found my calling, you know, which is training and development and the area of culture earlier in life so that I could have devoted more time to it.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Be good to people. Figure out what your calling is.” You can get in contact with John at: Phone: 404-915-3051 Email: jwaid@corporatecultureconsulting.com(link sends e-mail) Website: http://www.c3culture.com/ (www.c3culture.com) LinkedIn: Click Here
About Anna Koeck Born in communist Russia, Dr. Anna Koeck emigrated to the US at the age of 10 with her single mom Rimma. With hard work and perseverance, Dr. Koeck received a triple business degree from UW Madison, managed multi-million-dollar software projects at Epic Systems and graduated Magna Cum Laude from ICO with her Doctor of Optometry Degree. To help the entire world see clearly at a transparent price, she opened Theia Vision Care and within the first year was voted the top doctor in Lake Country, WI. Why do you do what you do? “I come from a very different country. I'm an immigrant and I watched my mom work really hard to bring me to this country and to get me where I'm at. And my mom is definitely an inspiration. She's a role model.” When should your child get a first eye exam? “6 to 18 months should be their first eye exam. And that tends to surprise people.” What is Direct Medical Care and Theia Concierge Care, and why is it right for me? “In a nutshell, the direct care is the idea of I'm directly seeing you and there's not an intermediary third party involved, be it insurance, vision plan, or other pieces. By eliminating steps, I'm eliminating time and money spent on that so I can now spend the time in my chair with you and ask you extra questions and get your kids in. And because I save money, I pass that on to you as well in the product and services.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “Just a random event running off a couple of years ago to a vision expo in New York. And I was flying out of Milwaukee right here. And typically there's not a long line to get into the airport, but that particular morning, for whatever reason, I don't know if it was spring break or what was going on, this long, long line…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “Continuing to put yourself out there and making the time. So, there's always a conversation about time management, and how do you do everything? You don't. You put things on your schedule and you make something a priority. And if you do that, it’ll happen.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Put yourself out there. So, it's always, you know, some of these cliches, but they're kind of cliche for a reason, right? You get growth out of being uncomfortable.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I'm still thinking about that question as well. I mean, a little bit of a balance.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “That's really interesting to kind of go back in time. What if I could change anything? And the more I thought about it, the more I kind of embraced the overall, ‘you're exactly where you're supposed to be’. And I firmly believe that.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “The professional answer would probably be Oprah and there are ways to, you know, reach out on her. There's an email account. You know, I went to graduate school in Chicago, her studios were down there. So, I think it's possible.” What book are you reading right now? “I just finished I am Malala. And she is a huge activist for education, children's education and particularly girl’s education, grew up in Pakistan and through a variety of things that have happened, I think she now lives in England.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “There's a code that says, ‘there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way’ and replace happiness with anything else. So, you just do it, you find an event and you go to it or…you just kind of continue to do the things that you're looking to achieve and hopefully eventually you get there.” You can get in contact with Dr. Anna Koeck at:...
About Lisa Danforth Lisa Danforth is a business strategist and firm believer that business doesn’t have to be so hard. She helps women navigate obstacles & struggles that are specific to women in business so they can create the impact & income they desire with less overwhelm & more joy. How important are boundaries in business? “I think of boundaries as the bridge to whatever success that it is that you're looking for. And if we don't have boundaries in place…” What is the double-bind for women and how does it get in the way of their success, personally and professionally? “The double-bind for women is a well-known phenomenon that women are either perceived as warm or competent but rarely both.” What’s the best way to achieve work-life balance? “I actually don't believe in work-life balance. I'm going to be totally honest with you. I don't think that we want everything in our lives to be weighed out evenly.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I would have to say it is with a woman that I met online, sort of peripheral. There was a group of people that I spent time with, but there was a woman on the periphery, two layers out, right, and we kept sort of bumping into each other and talking, talking, talking, you know, just sort of bumping into the groups. And she finally reached, she reached out because she is in social media. We set up a conversation to chat and we have over the years become best friends…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “There's a couple of things that really come to mind and the first one is being intentional. I think we need to be more intentional in anything that we do and who we are in order to be more effective…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Be very intentional about what you're looking for. What will support you? How can you support other people?” Digital networking or traditional networking? “For me, it's hand down traditional. I don't know if it's just because of my age. I'm 54. I can jump into a conversation and not rudely like ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Really just sort of ease into a conversation.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would say two things. One, relax. Rubbing a square peg in a round hole is not going to work, right? I mean, I refer to it as the white-knuckled grip. It's just ‘push, push, push, push’. Which, may I say, was how I was trained in business. It's a very masculine, dominant push energy, ‘go, go, go’. The more I have relaxed and leaned into my feminine energy and how I do business, my businesses have flourished.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “One of the women that I've been following, and I adore her because she is strong, confident, brilliant, puts herself out there and takes no bull from anyone. But is all of service in the work that she does. The name is Nilofer Merchant. She wrote a book called, um, what is it...The Power of Onlyness.” What book are you reading right now? “It’s called Psycho-Cybernetics. It is all about the mind and focusing on what is working for us and not re-living our past, moving into the future through our thoughts and behaviors of the past. Not allowing them to control what we do in the future.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Just be very intentional on the business that you want, the life that you want, the relationships that you're looking to build.” You can get in contact with Lisa at: Email: lisa@lisadanforth.com(link sends e-mail) Website: Click Here LinkedIn: Click Here
About Neille Hoffman: Neille Hoffman is a creative innovator and entrepreneur dedicated to the craft of design. With over 20 years of branding expertise, she has created integrated communication solutions for long term clients across a spectrum of industries including; healthcare, education, entertainment, luxury goods, and real estate. As a coach, consultant, speaker, and recovering perfectionist, she has the unique ability to recognize the gifts others don’t see in themselves and empower them to follow their dreams. Why is branding more important than ever? “I believe branding is more important than ever because our world is so connected with our whole digital age. We can know people down the block, but we can also know people across the world. And we really need to have some differentiation.” What is the difference between branding and personal branding? “There's a fine line, I think. I think that personal branding is really who your genuine self is. So I don't really think you can manufacture a personal brand. Some people think that they can change the way they dress or they can talk different or you know, they can kind of create who they want people to see them as…” Where do you begin when you are creating a brand? “I always like to dive deep with questions and research. I think a lot of, at least for personal branding and for business branding as well, we have to take a look at our mindset and our limited beliefs…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? How was the connection made? What was the outcome of the connection? “My favorite networking experience that I have had here in Milwaukee was meeting Sara Meaney, Sara Meaney and I both had our own businesses at the time. Hers was Comet Branding and mine was Aurum Design and we were both moving into a new building actually across the street from here in the Third Ward. And we just happened to be throwing our open house parties on the same night.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I make a very pointed effort to reach out to friends and check in on them, see what is going on with their lives, get updates from people, schedule coffees, and really have a genuine interest in the people that I have met.” What advice would you offer to the business professional who is looking to grow their network? “The number one thing I would say is take action. I think for far too long I stayed on the sidelines.” Digital networking or traditional networking- which do you find more value in? Please explain. “Right now, I don't want to say I want to find more value in it, but I want to say I'm stepping into it. So again, outside of my comfort zone is the digital networking. So I have recently become part of an entrepreneurial networking group online and it's people from all over the world. And what I like about that is you're actually connecting with people who think like you do and are so supportive. It's crazy.” If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of/less of/differently with regards to your professional career? “I would tell myself to trust my instincts more. I think I in the past have deferred to other people's opinions.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? How would you start that journey? “So, I think I have a little bit of a different answer for this one. I could think of, you know, a handful of people that I would like to say, but this is going to be a little out there. I would like to connect with my future self. And I would hope that there are at least six people I have yet to meet who are going to help me grow into that future self. What book are you reading right now? “So, every year, and I think you've probably got this answer before, I read the...
About Jen Garrett Jennifer Garrett is a dynamic internationally recognized speaker, author of the book Move the Ball and high-performance expert who is widely known for pushing boundaries, inspiring others, and driving individuals, businesses, and organizations out of their comfort zones to play at higher levels. Today, Jennifer, together with her organization, Feel the Push provides lessons on how to play for success and how to step up the game in order to drive results and cross the goal line. Her organization also works with collegiate and professional athletes as they transition off the field to be all-star players in life beyond the game. Jennifer draws upon her experience from her 20-year career in fortune 50 companies where she had a proven track record of delivering results, boosting organizational efficiency, driving cultural transformation, closing large-scale negotiations and exceeding targets. Her seven college degrees coupled with her extensive corporate executive leadership and military experience as an Army judge advocate officer gives Jennifer a diverse skill set that is well suited to connect with audiences around the world and help individuals and organizations to move the ball and achieve long term excellence. You have a book about football and how it relates to business and life. Why football and how can it help us and our listeners? “There's a lot that sports can teach us, such as the teamwork, the resiliency, but I found that there was a lot more that football had taught as well as those other concepts that I really just resonated with.” You have seven degrees and that's fascinating. Why so many and how has it helped your career? “How it's helped me is I really think it's important to find out what unique differentiated value you can bring to any conversation or…” Any specific projects that you're working on that you would like to share with our listeners? “One of the things that I've been working on is I'm launching a program in September called inside the huddle. And what it is designed to be is a community where people will support you, champion you, hold you accountable…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I have been able to connect through these social channels with a number of professional athletes for example. And one of them, who I've become really great friends with, he played on the 1985 Chicago bears Superbowl championship team.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “First and foremost, I think it's important to A. remain your authentic self and so own who you are and be true to that.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “You have to be the quarterback. As I mentioned in my book, you are the quarterback and it's really up to you to take action to move that ball forward.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “What I will say, it's being strategic with both of them. So there is something to be said about having in-person connections and oftentimes I will connect with people digitally and if there's an opportunity to follow up in person, either because we're in the same geographical area or because we are traveling to a geography that we're going to be.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “What I would say to my 20-year-old self is don't ever think that you can't do something.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I would really like to connect with Elon Musk because…I'm a Tesla owner, so I love the product…I just like his way of thinking, his visionary mentality…” What book are you reading right now? “The book is called extreme teams…and basically it looks at why these seven companies, Pixar, Netflix,...
About Haris Reis Haris is a 2-time national award-winning entrepreneur, 2-time national best-selling author, keynote speaker, and a digital marketer. He previously co-founded a media company that helped authors, speakers, and coaches build their brands online. He took the company to a 6-figure business in 10 months. Haris was also previously a growth hacker at Vaynermedia, building Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal brand. He’s built SYNCSUMO, a SAAS Solution with customers in 30+ countries and now runs a consultancy that has generated millions of dollars for clients. Why does health matter in business? “You think clear, you have more energy. The people with the most energy throughout the day win.” What was the biggest change in the food side of things that that you made in your life? “Everybody's different, but you just have to test different things.” How has travel helped with business in general? “Travel is huge because it lets you unplug because if you're always working, working, working and you're always doing the same thing…” How do you eliminate scarcity mindset? “A lot of business owners, including myself, before I used to think, let's say you make 10 bucks…and then most business owners want to keep 10 bucks in their own pockets, want to use it for their own experiences or whatever, because they're scared because they don't know where the next $10 is going to come from…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “To your point of networking in today's world, a lot and networking parties or after parties or whatever you want to call them, come with an open bar, which a little bit of liquid courage helps…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “Typically, I just give a lot. Gary’s (Vaynerchuk) book, Jab, Jab, Right Hook should be retitled to Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Because typically, I just give as much as I can and then when I give something to someone, they typically stay in front of me asking, how can I help you?” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “You’ve got to get out there. There's no easy way about it. You’ve got to go to networking events. You’ve got to go to speaking seminars. You’ve got to get out there somehow, someway.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “You're complete stranger online. In-person, people feel you. I don't know how to describe it. They feel your vibrations and they feel how good of a person you are and your energy levels. I mean, there's definitely a different sting to that because you can't get that online.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “Definitely be more patient. Before I had always used to, you know, if something didn’t go my way, I would get sad or depressed or ‘oh my goodness, the world is against me.’ Uh, now I just rely on myself. Whatever happens, it's my fault.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I mean, I'm connected to everyone I really want to be. There's no one I really can't get to or haven't gotten to that I want to talk to.” What book are you reading right now? “The Fourth Agreement is one of my favorite books ever. It's changed the way I think, the way I approach life.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Never settle. And especially, momentum is huge in business. That's probably the biggest thing. Once you have momentum, you don't want to stop.” You can get in contact with Haris at: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haris_reis/ (Click Here) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisreis (Click Here)
About Adam Connors Adam Connors is a sought-after speaker, social architect, podcast host and super-connector who has transformed lives and accelerated careers. He’s the Founder & CEO of NetWorkWise, a business platform that expedites outcomes for people through training in the art and science of personal and professional networking. An entrepreneur at heart, Adam has spent over 20 years starting & building companies across a variety of industries. His sole focus these days is teaching people how to NetWorkWise. Where do you feel most people go wrong when it comes to networking? “the majority of people just don't understand what networking is and that's where they go wrong because a lot of people feel that it's dirty or they don't feel comfortable with it…” What is it that you look for in your podcast guests? “So, my podcast, it's called Conversations with Connors and there's three criteria to being on my show. Number one, it's kind of like the foundation of networking, that I know, like, and trust you with a little caveat and/or admire you, you know, maybe something that you've done or accomplished.” How has your podcast benefited you? “it turned out that this thing is really a really trendy thing to be doing and, you get enough listeners, it really benefits your business.” How much time goes into your podcast? “A significant amount of reading…I didn't realize what I was getting into.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I'm going to take this back over 20 years with my friend Ernie, who I met over 20 years ago…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I think it really all starts with active listening. When I get to know people, I try to skip over the superficial stuff, the conversation and kind of dig in to, you know, kind of who they are and what fires them up…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Know their why. You know, why are they doing this? You know, their intent needs to be genuine, otherwise, it'll look dirty and it won't generate the kind of results that they might desire.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “Oh, it's a no brainer. I mean, traditional in-person relationship building is just standard. You know, they say gold standard, I say platinum.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I'd probably cut toxic people out of my life quicker. There was some kind of statistic, it's like 5% of the negative people in your life are responsible for 95% of the bad things that happened to you.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Start. They say the old Buddhist term is, you know, best time to have started something was 20 years ago. And the second-best time to start is today.” You can get in contact with Adam at: Website: http://www.networkwise.com/ (www.networkwise.com)
About Tim Manion & Kyle Baldwin Tim Manion - Director of Business Development With a team of Account Executives, Tim curates, develops and manages relationships with potential clients, influencers and stakeholders. In his tenure he has had the opportunity to strategize across a diverse scope of industry and business models, ranging from fortune 50 companies to crowdsourced startups. Prior to joining the Catalyst team, Tim worked in medical sales and operations management. Kyle Baldwin - Director of Design As the Director of Design at Catalyst, Kyle is responsible for creating meaningful engagements between people, brands, and places. He employs multi-disciplinary design methods to focus on the intersection of communication design and the built environment. Since joining in 2012, he has led some of the agency’s most unique, engaging, and interactive experiences for national brands such as RSA, FN America, GungHo Entertainment, Intel, CDW, and the Chicago Department of Aviation. What is Catalyst Exhibits and what do you do? Tim: “We work with various clients in every industry too, um, in its simplest form, bring them to a trade show.” Trade shows are built around networking, what kind of thought goes into designing exhibits to foster the most comfortable environment to network within? Kyle: “So, it's obviously becoming a much younger generation. The millennials are kind of driving a lot of different, uh, ways of selling and engaging with brands. And they're much better, much more educated about their products they're interested in because of the Internet.” How do networking and social media affect business development and design, and what platforms do you see as the most influential? Tim: “It's interesting to watch how people use LinkedIn in my day today. Um, I use it as an opportunity to figure out who I'm talking to. A lot of people use it for networking to get in touch with people, but when I step into a room to pitch any sort of deal, I'm looking at who's in the room…” Kyle:” It’s an opportunity to have a more natural conversation with a company, with a person, with a brand…” Trade shows are chaotic, what do you do to balance that stress? Tim: “We get the opportunity to work with a lot of cool clients and they pulled back the curtain. Um, so half of it is just enjoying what you do and the natural curiosity to just figure out…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? Tim: “I mean, the benefit of a trade show is the entire room is networking. Um, and I think the best experiences I've had is when a plan goes right, um, we put together pre-post-show marketing for any given client, um, and a client that's willing to listen…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? Tim: “It's one thing at its very core on our end, you have to get, uh, a lot of trust from people. We're selling a picture really. Um, so it's being honest, upfront and sincere. Um, and then the follow-through, I'm on the show floor, sleeves rolled up, making sure everything happens…” Kyle: “I'd say we, we kind of keep up with just what's happening in the organization through obviously the, you know, Internet and social media and things like that. So, we're always…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? Tim: “You should value the people you bring into your fold. It shouldn't just be this person linked with me. You don't know what they do. You don't know who they like. If you're going to if I'm going to reach out to someone…” Kyle: “I would say really like define what you want and what you would like to do. Right. And like find people doing that and kind of echo that career path in some way.” Digital networking or traditional networking? Tim: “I'll say that the folks I hire right out of college are the best-suited people in the world at getting a hold of people. Everything is done...
About Lisa Attonito Lisa Attonito was named the Executive Director of the Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee in November of 2016. Committed to activating philanthropy to advance equity for women in our community, the focus is on economic empowerment, leadership skills, and education. The Women’s Fund is working to change attitudes, behaviors, and culture so Greater Milwaukee is an inclusive world-class community where women and girls realize their full potential, and everyone thrives. Attonito has extensive experience in organizational management, board governance, staff development, budget creation and oversight, along with brand development and engagement. Her career includes senior positions with several well-known, best in class nonprofit organizations. She has always had a growth mindset and believes strongly in building brand experiences that reflect the culture and mission of the entity while supporting the strategic goals. Her track record of sales includes consistent success and a dynamic network that is fueled by sound project management and good communication. What is your vision for the Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee? What is one of your proudest accomplishments? “I am hoping to, um, establish or re-introduce the women's fund as a thought leader and community creator. As executives, we're terming off the board. We were able to add new directors to the group that are enthusiastic, that are excited, that have new networks and new ideas.” What are you working on now? “We are in the midst of planning our annual educational event. We use a title of women's Fund presents and then each year there's a different theme. And so, this year the theme is the future and we're focusing on the year 2030.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? How was the connection made? What was the outcome of the connection? “I met a friend, Lela Owner, Carrie Airway for an annual sort of social gathering in December for years in a row and taking advantage of social media Carrie posted among her friends…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “One of the things I'm really committed to is keeping my LinkedIn profile current and not only current about my work experiences, but even my contact information.” What advice would you offer to the business professional who is looking to grow their network? “Be curious. Cause if you are curious, you don't have to work at being social. It just comes so naturally. And I think the more curious people are, the easier it is for them to talk to people that they don't know.” Digital networking or traditional networking- which do you find more value in? Please explain. “I really think the best answer is a blend…whether you meet someone in person or online, eventually you have to do the other, right? If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of/less of/differently with regards to your professional career? “I think being vulnerable throughout life is really important, not only in interpersonal relationships and family relationships, but then I just think in general in building business relationships…” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? How would you start that journey? “I really love to meet everybody. I can be walking down the street and someone's walking towards me and there's something about them. Either I like the shoes they're wearing…” What book are you reading right now? “Terry Gross does a fantastic job interviewing so many people that I often am listening to her interviews. Sometimes they're historic, you know, and archived and some are in the moment.” Any final word of advice to offer our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? “Be sure to keep relationships
About Mervyn Byrd Mervyn has over 15 years in the banking industry, eventually opening his own commercial loan brokerage business. Today, he specializes in sales and leadership development for the Business Alliance. Two things remain constant with every position Mervyn has held—a love for people and passion to see others achieve their goals. He recently discovered another powerful outlet to harness his passion for helping others after being recruited by Vistage (top corporate peer advisory org) to lead high performing groups. What is Vistage? “Vistage is 23,000 CEOs in 20 countries worldwide and key business leaders taking a step back from their businesses one day a month to reflect, get other input from other their peers.” How are you ultimately recruited by Vistage? “A good friend who is a Vistage Chair, and it was about a year and a half process where we had a conversation one day, we're sitting out for coffee and he says, Mervin, you really ought to consider this. You know, this is your passion. You love helping people, you love seeing people grow and you will be amazing.” What prompted you to write the workshop “The Art of Networking”? “The mission was to address what I saw, in my opinion, that was really going wrong out there. When I see people networking some of the a faux paux that they are making and wondering why networking is tough…” Can you share with our listeners your most successful or favorite networking experience that you've had? “I was in a job transition now seven, eight years ago after I closed down my commercial loan brokerage and I was out networking and someone who, who I'd met said, Hey, I think you need to talk to John about something…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I have a built-in process with the business alliance. We are a membership organization. We host events and programs, right? So, we do 75 plus of these a year. So, I'm constantly in front of my network in that capacity.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “Be a giver. Don't be in a rush to try to get. Just be a giver.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “For me, I'm a people person. Nothing beats a face to face conversation, sit down looking into another person's eyes and checking out their body language and all of that.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would just say break out of your shell. People aren't concerned about you, they're concerned about them.” What book are you reading right now? “I'm kind of a junkie when it comes to reading. Currently, I'm juggling only two…I just finished one, finished a third, Can't Hurt Me recently. And so, I'm reading The Power of Peers…” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Get out there and get active. We see so many folks who get excited about being part of a new network and then they let their business or life get in the way.” You can get in contact with Mervyn at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mervynbyrd (Click Here)
About Mary Beth Klatt Mary Beth Klatt is a writer with a specialty in writing about real estate, design, and historic preservation. She has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and other publications. She is also the host of the Mid-Century Modern Show, a podcast that focuses on all aspects of modernism as it relates to design, residential and commercial real estate and fashion. She's also using a typewriter for the second draft of her murder mystery novel. What’s the appeal of typing thank you notes to your podcast guests? “…I really hit the keys and that's what you want to do is to really connect with your keys. And I don’t know, I think it just makes the whole experience of writing just more three-dimensional. Why are typewriters so popular now? Is it the “Tom Hanks” effect? “Tom Hanks is hugely passionate about typewriters. He collects them all over the world. He, um, yeah, he's very vocal and he shares about all these typewriters and that has had the, uh, the rollover effect of actually affecting the sales…” How can business professionals incorporate more use of typewriters in their work-life besides typing thank you notes? “When you're having a writing freeze as something you're writing on your laptop, take a break, get on your typewriter and just write whatever you were trying to do on the laptop and just, you know, see if that kind of breaks through you're writing’s dry spell.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “But then maybe a couple months later I got a handwritten note from my nephew's wife and I almost burst into tears. I mean, it was so thoughtful and she kind of quoted back the card and I just felt so touched. Like I made a difference in the world.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I think those thank you notes are important. And you know what, I talked about typing but it doesn't have to be typed. I just think it needs to be personal.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “…focus on one thing and then do it.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “…at the end of the day, we're still human beings with a need to connect with other human beings, face to face talking. And, um, I, I think you need both.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more, or less, of regarding your career? “I think my younger self would really say focus on the result. You know, what do you want to say, you know, you've done at the end of your life…” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I've been talking about Tom Hanks the whole show. Actually, I have had this idea that I want to, and he's very good about this apparently, you can send Tom Hanks a note…” What book are you reading right now? “You know, you've got to read your genre, the murder mystery genre. But I'm also because I, uh, my, my protagonist is a nun, I'm also reading a lot of books that have religious elements right now…” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Just focus on one way to really connect with people and go for it. And the payoff may not occur right away. You know, it may be weeks, months, years, but just go for it. Make your mark and just um, you know, personalize it.” You can get in contact with Mary Beth Klatt at: Apple Podcasts: Click Here Instagram: Click Here LinkedIn: Click Here
About Nick Myers Nick Myers is the Founder and CEO of RedFox Creative in Madison, WI. RedFox Creative is a technology-driven marketing and consulting company that helps brands give themselves a voice through the power of AI and voice assistant technology. Nick is a TEDx speaker and has spoken across the U.S and soon internationally on topics ranging from the future of AI in the workplace, 360 video, AI and social media, and how brands can begin leveraging the power of Voice-First today to help tell their story. How did you get involved in the AI and Voice-First space and why do you view it as being so valuable? “So, my story is a bit interesting in how I got involved. You know truth be told, my background is actually in marketing and communications…” How do you think AI and voice technology is going to impact marketing; specifically, social media? “I think ultimately marketers are going to be the key decision-makers to actually, you know, moving the hand of C-level folks within large organizations to actually invest in it. But I think the one thing that's going to change above all else is just…” Why is it important for brands to begin thinking about how they can leverage voice assistants in their marketing strategy? “…But I'm trying to educate people saying that that's, that's fine and dandy, but you need to have a, a reason that you're doing it. You need to be solving some type of pain with their customers or from within your organization that voice can help solve.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “So, couple months ago, actually back in September, October of last year, um, I was following, her name is Marie Ryan on Linkedin and I'm, I'm very, very active on Linkedin by the way…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “So, it's become harder definitely over the past couple of years because I've been able to meet so many people and it's really hard to message and just interact with everybody. And it's almost like I have, you know, it’s actually on my to-do list every week, I have a follow up with, like a bunch of people.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “A first piece of advice as if you're not on LinkedIn. Get on LinkedIn because like I said, most of my success over the past couple of years since starting…” Digital networking or traditional networking? “Actually, I'm going to go ahead and say a combination of both because I would say a lot of the really strong relationships, I've met actually have been in person more so than online…” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “Learn Code, Learn Code, get more involved in computer science. I mean, that is definitely the first thing I would tell myself, especially being in the space…’ We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I would go and head right now and say somebody that I really would like to connect with. Truth be told, and this'll never happen is Jeff Bezos of Amazon just because I guess I've been working so much in the voice space…” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “So, one thing I'm telling people is if you really want to pull the trigger now is the time, while we are still kind of in the early stages here…” You can get in contact with Nick at: LinkedIn: Click Here Email: nickm@redfoxcreate.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/therednickm?lang=en (Click Here)
About Theresa Wilmot Theresa is the brand stylist, graphic designer and creative problem solver of Wilmot Designs, LLC. She works with business owners to help them give a voice to their message and mission through creative and effective design. Her background includes working for a global consumer goods company in their art department, a theater playbill publication and a hat company where she had her first experience with textile design. Theresa is taking her business to the next level with fun, new clients! What does a graphic designer do? “…Someone in business for themselves probably does a wider variety of things than a person who works for a larger agency. And those things can span the, both the print and digital world.” How did you decide to start your own design business? “So, after working in the areas that I worked in professionally, um, I say professionally, but for someone else, I, decided to go out on my own because we were living in Bentonville, Arkansas at the time…” How does a well-developed brand communicate the message and mission of a business effectively? “So, a well-developed brand like I was saying before, is more than just your logo. It is your presence when you are not there. So, what a well-developed brand should do is communicate…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “I belong to a women network and my favorite story out of that group so far is having volunteered to help with a promotional booklet that they were going to put together for a women's entrepreneurship week here in Milwaukee.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I'm actually just getting to know the people themselves because to me, part of networking is not only what I could do for them, but what they could do maybe for someone that I know or even for myself.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “I would say to not be afraid of it, be open to the idea of it as being something that could be very natural and not canned or fake…” Digital networking or traditional networking? “I think about this a lot lately just because of the business I'm in. And I think right now I'd have to say the traditional sense just because it's newer to me and I'm typically, I'm pretty good at making connect genuine connections with people.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “To trust that I am enough, that I am talented enough that I am skinny enough that I am funny enough that I, I feel like back in my twenties I doubted myself a lot.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “Aaron Draplin, the graphic designer, um, who I've been following… I would love to connect with him because he is a designer without, um, he seems very approachable. I think that's a good way to put it.” What book are you reading right now? “I love yours because it's, you interview a wide range of guests in a wide variety of businesses, um, about networking but also about their business journeys.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “I would just say to be patient with yourself. Um, don't go into networking thinking that you have to, you know, make so many contacts right away or I know some people do that, some people have goals, you know, they want to make so many contacts at this event or that event.” You can get in contact with Theresa at: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WilmotDesigns/ (Click Here) LinkedIn: Click Here https://www.wilmotdesigns.com/ (https://www.wilmotdesigns.com/)
About Lisa Dregne Lisa Dregne founded Yorkshire Insurance Advisors, LLC after being in the industry for seven years and she saw a need to provide individuals, couples and small businesses with comprehensive insurance planning either directly, or preferably in collaboration with their financial advisor, CPA or attorney. Although all areas of insurance are equally important to Lisa, her passion has been working with individuals/families on their long-term care planning. Has the ability to purchase insurance online replaced the need for an independent professional? “Definitely not. Um, and that's a common misconception is that insurance is a commodity, that it's the same no matter where you get it.” Do business cards still have a place in marketing yourself? “Absolutely. And the reason I say that as I've gotten a lot of feedback from, individuals that I've been working with, colleagues that they really like my business card, they actually remembered me.” Have you used LinkedIn to help you network? “It's actually been my number one resource for networking past those initial people that you already knew.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “My favorite one, it was actually about a month ago is how it initiated with somebody. I had used to work with an advisor, and we got together for coffee at Starbucks, my favorite place to get together…” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “So, as I build my network, I am looking to try and at least keep in touch with the prospects, the best prospects once a month on with a personal touch, whether it's a phone call or an email, just with some tidbit of information I think would be helpful.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “I guess leverage the relationships you have and don't be afraid to ask for those names and referrals primarily because if you are passionate about what you do and you believe in what you do, other people will help you.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “Definitely the traditional networking in my particular space, insurance planning is a very personal thing. I'm also a certified financial planner, meaning that I've got that financial background.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “That was an easy one. Now that I've found my passion, I really wish I had looked for my passion sooner. I ended up coming back to the state of Wisconsin…” What book are you reading right now? “I primarily read. There's a journal for long term care insurance specifically in it. It gives a lot of wonderful stories and helpful tips on how to present long term care to clients in a way that doesn't make it sound like you're selling something. Just pure education.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Never stop. Don't be afraid of it. I was in the beginning and now it's just so much fun. I have loved meeting so many different individuals and just networking. It's, it's funny, it ends up being a pretty small world the more you do it.” You can get in contact with Lisa at: LinkedIn: Click Here Phone: (262) 366-2702 Email: Lisa@yorkshireinsurance.com
About Kim Stezala Kim Stezala is Senior Partner at Design Group International, a group of consultants that help leaders, businesses and nonprofit organizations navigate transformative change. Primarily working in higher education and philanthropy, Kim uses the power of process consulting to help organizations design effective programs and innovate, evaluate and improve what they do. Recently named CEO of the Society for Process Consulting, she is also building standards, courses, and credentials for the field. What is process consulting and how is it different from traditional consulting? “So, process consulting was really created quite a while ago by Edgar Schein who's a professor out of MIT. Okay. And it takes basically a very humble and iterative approach to consulting where even though we might have expertise in a certain area, we work with clients to really pull out their expertise.” Why did you start the Society for Process Consulting? “So, it really came from many of us who were doing process consulting, looking for place, if you will, looking for community and wanting to work together to put these standards and ethics in place to provide…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “Well I happen to work with a lot of scholarship providers and the attending their national conference not only as a regular participant but as a speaker is really successful in terms of networking because I have a really niche market with some of the clients that I work with.” How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network community? “I would like to say I used to be better at it. I'm, I'm kind of circling back, I had a huge growth spurt in my business and kind of trying to keep up. Um, but in terms of staying in front of people, I really prefer the personal touch.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “I would say, um, get out of your own pond or your own pool. Okay. And so sometimes I will go to events where I don't know a single person there. And the reason is to just understand how other industries work and operate.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “For my particular type of work, it's definitely the traditional. Okay. Because it's so relationship-based. Probably 90% of my business comes through referral and…” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I really thought about this, you know, and for me, I think I would tell my younger self to listen more. I was a kid who on the report card in school would always say talks too much in class…” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “Okay, you're probably going to laugh. My husband told me that this is crazy. I have a celebrity crush on Jackie Chan…” What book are you reading right now? “Well, um, two books. One is about building communities of practice by Emily Weber. I think she's a British author and I, I go back to it. I've read it before. It's so simple. It's like 70 pages, but it helps me learn and understand that because our business is structured as a community of practice…” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “I think the biggest thing, just listening over the last half hour is really that thing about getting out of your comfort zone.” You can get in contact with Kim at: Email: kims@designgroupintl.com
About Cheryl Litvin Cheryl Litvin is a master question asker and problem solver for Mangen-Kloth Insurance in Brookfield, WI. After graduation from St Norbert College in 1996, she started her cross country living while learning the ropes of OSHA and federal contracting. After 22 years and 6 states, she and her family moved back to Wisconsin to become the 4th generation owner of MKI. She is a proud member of the Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce, eWomen Network and the Brewer’s Association. What is the difference between 1-800 and .com insurance companies and working with an independent agent like yourself? “Probably the biggest difference is I work for you. I have your back. If you were to have a claim, you deal directly with someone local here in your area. Me, you know, you have cell phone numbers. You don't have to always go back and go to the 800 and re-explain your story 15,000 times…” What has been a hurdle you had to overcome which has helped you today in your business? “…and then having to go back and try to find the person to fix all of those problems and you could never talk to the same person, uh, was really, really, really trying…” What are some common myths in your industry? “A lot of people think that they, that you can just get insurance from anywhere, which I guess you can. It's not always in particular in my case. I wasn't insured correctly, which made me have to fight as a consumer to fight to get what we were entitled to have. So, it's not a one stop fits all. It's a very unique…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “So I started getting into these networking groups and what I found with that, I was actually finding women who really wanted to move, do something better, um, and change this community that they were in.” How do you stay in front of, or best nurture your network community? “I'm not a spotlight kind of person. If I can push that onto you, if I can help you in any way, I know that in my past experiences that it will somehow benefit me down the road. Whether you see it, or you don't see it. So that's serving others. Yeah. Serving others is a huge benefit I think to those that are successful…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “I think that you have to find your unique niche and I know that's an overused term. Um, yeah, I was in a networking group and it just didn't feel right. Went to a few others and I knew right away that these were the same likeminded people that I was looking for.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “…I just have to be me, and I have to be transparent. Um, and I found that it's easier on social media to kind of bust through some of the myths that, are either out there about my industry…” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “…I didn't think I needed personal or professional development. Um, and when I started doing that, probably just five to, yeah, probably five years ago, it changed a lot. Changed how I interacted with people, um, how I viewed myself.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “I would love to meet JJ Watt. Okay. Not because I'm a football fan. Sorry… He grew up and went to the same high school that I did. And so, Pewaukee Wisconsin, super small. Like tiny… But more importantly, he's, he's him…” What book are you reading right now? “I am currently reading sales differentiation. Of course, the author is like escaping me, but again, it's about being different. Um, and I also am rereading actually relistening to, cause it's not a book, it's an audible, Mel Robbins take action or take control of your life.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “Do what makes you feel uncomfortable. That's...
About Traci Scherck Traci is a dynamic, thoughtful and innovative HR professional that is committed to putting humans first while achieving customer engagement and profitability goals through authentic and concise HR solutions. Her experience includes non-profits, union and non-union organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, education, retail, and construction. She has built an HR department from the ground up, created strategic talent pathways, implemented compensation and benefits programs along with consulting with small business in an outsourced HR model. How does networking help you find your next position/job? “It's gold. Let's just start there. Right? You know, most often we are more likely to look at and hire individuals that we know something about, and we know that our best referrals into our organization come from our employees. Therefore, networking with individuals and being really crystal clear about what you want in a position…” How as a business owner can you use networking to further your business? “Absolutely. So as a business owner to further your business, you know, when you're networking, you're not only looking for that next top talent in your organization, you're also looking for the tools to improve your processes so that your employees have exactly what they need to be successful in their role.” How can networking be detrimental to your business? “Yeah. And there are several ways that marketing can be detrimental to your business. And one of them is, you know, not putting yourself out with that best foot forward.” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “Oh, my goodness. There's so many. And I would say my favorite networking has really come through. You want me to network? Um, and the reason why I love you women network and those networking experiences because of the mastermind that happens…” How do you stay in front of, or best nurture your network community? “Yeah, this is a key piece of networking, right? I and I'm going to circle back around to that question, but so often I find individuals or networking, networking, networking, but they're not doing the follow-up. The gold is in the follow up of the networking…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “what I would say is be very specific about who you're looking to grow your network with. Okay. You can go to a, you know, a hundred different networking events and it might not be the right event for what you're looking to grow your network for.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “so, I am human resources, right? So, I love putting the people behind that. So, you know, I personally love the in-person networking events and at the same time I have gotten so much out of like zoom meetings as well as zoom networking events where I can still see the body language of individuals.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “I would say trust and enjoy the journey. Um, they're so often where I've been so focused on getting to an outcome that I haven't enjoyed the process and haven't enjoyed that journey.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? “You know, I'm really struggling with that question because so often I think we look for, and I've struggled with this question since I first read it and I hadn't come up with a good answer. But the reason why I struggle with that is so often I think we're looking so far in the future that we've missed the things that are right in front of us.” What book are you reading right now? “so, from a podcast perspective, Brooke Castillo and the life coach school, um, is Oh, juicy golden nuggets all the way through. Um, so if you've not heard of her, listen to her podcast, she...
About Mark Schanen Mark is the owner of Supporting Strategies Milwaukee, his franchise provides bookkeeping and controller-level services to small and middle market businesses as well as nonprofits. He is a former CFO for a division of GE and he held senior finance roles at JPMorgan. Mark has experience with mergers/divestitures, international financial management, pricing, comp planning, strategic planning, new product development, cash/treasury management, and dealing with large, matrixed organizations. Can you tell the audience a bit about the Business Fundamentals Bootcamp and why you do it? “every year, in every market that Supporting Strategies works in, we try to have an event where we try to give back to the local business community. Both to our clients as well as some of the strategic partners we have…” What’s a controller, a comptroller, and a CFO? How are their jobs different? “…your controller is kind of like your chief accountant. So, they’ll help you with making sure your recognizing revenue the right way. So, if you are in certain industries there are certain ways you should be accruing for revenue.” What are some of the key things to look for from an accounting resource in your business? “…people try to do everything. And you’re not going to necessarily get the best level of service if you are going to somebody that does taxes, they’re also doing all of your accounting and bookkeeping…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “so, I’m a member of a BNI chapter. And I took a look at a couple of different networking groups. One of the big things in my franchise that they preach from the get-go is were big on what we call an angelist development or center of influence development…” How do you stay in front of, or best nurture your network community? “so, one of the things is the event I just talked about in the start of the show which is the Business Fundamentals Bootcamp. Another thing I try and make sure of is I tend to make a cursory appearance to every single networking group that I’m in.” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “I would encourage you to take a look at Eventbrite and take a look at things like BNI or any of the chambers of commerce.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “so, I do both. I think digital is more to keep me top of mind. As opposed to developing a huge section of potential clients or partners.” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “don’t worry so much about the hours, worry about your on the job education.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? How would you start that journey? “I think one thing that would help my business is getting to know franchisors and talking to them a little bit about what they’re doing for franchises when it comes to accounting and bookkeeping…” What book are you reading right now? “I’m reading the Trusted Advisor, by Richard Wagner…” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “It’s not about net-taking, that’s one of the things I always try to caution people about. If you are in a networking situation and the first thing you do is hand somebody your card, you’re probably doing it wrong.” You can get in contact with Mark at: Website: https://www.supportingstrategies.com/milwaukee Email: mschanen@supportingstrategies.com
About Jason Treu Jason Treu (Troy) is a leadership and performance coach. His programs help individuals, teams, and organizations achieve their most ambitious goals by skyrocketing their skills, abilities, and teamwork. He spent 15+ years in leadership positions in Silicon Valley working with leaders such as Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings (CEO at Netflix) and Mark Cuban. Jason is the author of Social Wealth, a how-to-guide on building extraordinary relationships. His team building game is being used by 12000+ employees. How do you build the highest performing and most engaged teams? “well I think one of the challenges today is teamwork, is the most misunderstood and most important soft skill that is out there. Because 75% of work is done collaboratively.” What do 99% of organizations leave out of their people strategy that causes them to underperform? “well, I just don’t think they know where to start and how to go about doing it. I think that’s the challenge right. I think when people think about sharing information and getting to know people…” What’s the secret to building trust quickly? “I think the key is to get them together and one of the research studies that I came across a few years ago that really changed my perspective on building relationships and what’s possible…” What’s the role of psychological safety? “well, Google back in 2012, you can literally google the study, Project Aristotle, and what they were trying to understand globally, was what’s the makeup of our highest performing teams. Because they found that they were bringing in more revenue they were becoming in…” Can you share with me your most successful or favorite networking story/experience that you’ve had? “we went to the TEDx conference in Vancouver. And so, we created some opportunities to meet people and he hosted an event with someone else, he had never been there before… and so we set up a cocktail hour we invited enough people to come…” How do you stay in front of, or best nurture your network community? “you got to get people together in groups, that’s probably the easiest thing to do ultimately because you can only stay in contact with so many people at once. I think you just got to think ahead…” What advice do you have for the professional on growing their network? “well, I think you need to find those groups that you really enjoy going to. And I think a part of that is like dating, you got to go and find them. And start to just get out there.” Digital networking or traditional networking? “…I mean digital is just keeping the pot warm until you can actually access it. So, if that’s all you are doing it's not really real, I mean that person is only going to do so much for you…” If you could go back 20 years, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of regarding your career? “you know I think it would be to really understand how to build trust with people a lot faster and really. And id say probably to network more and build more relationships with people.” We’ve all heard of the 6 degrees of separation… Now, who would be the one person you’d love to connect with, and do you think you could do it within the 6th degree? How would you start that journey? “it would probably be either Oprah or Brene Brown…” What book are you reading right now? “…The Body Keeps Score, by Travis Van Kessle, it’s about PTSD and self-awareness. And a book called, The Fearless Organization, by Amy Edmondson. Brene Browns book, Dare to Lead.” Any final words of advice for our listeners? “I think you just got to do it. You have to start somewhere. And you have to make it a priority.” You can get in contact with Jason at: Website: jasontreu.com
Trina Martin shares her personal experiences networking including an invitation to visit the De Beers diamond mine in Africa.
Jonathan Stark shares valuable insights into maximizing your income by transitioning out of the hourly billing model.
Kelley Budinoff shares her passion for owning a business that was inspired by her parents.
Susan Thomson of Action COACH of Madison shares valuable insights into how to make more money with your business while leveraging your networking time investment.
Ashby Fiser of the National Democratic Training Committee shares how being yourself can bring successes and opportunities.
Kevin Davenport shares his transformation story about embracing communication to maximize his relationships.
Diane Mader discusses the importance of being an empathetic, compassionate, plus healing with relationships.
Lisa Raebel of Rebel Girl Marketing shares insights into infusing humor into your marketing strategy.
Patty Jackson of Clear Inner Focus shares the four things you can control in personal leadership.
Ronda Arndorfer shares her knowledge on the connection between gut health and your brain, as well as her networking journey.
Jennifer Buchholz shares great advice for networking as an introvert, and how she networks while she travels.
Jennifer Rash, owner of Rash Designs shares valuable insight on how design is used for strategic visual communication.
Stacy Jones of Hollywood Branded shares lots of powerful details around establishing an influencer marketing relationship.
Terri Rundell of Dezign2Think shares great perspective on brainstorming and unleashing creativity.
Rachel Hawken shares her awesome story of how Drift started and how networking plays into her day to day business operations.
LinkedIn is an amazing tool for building your network and ultimately generating leads. Listen in as Elisa Bennett offers great advice on how to maximize this tool.
Reed Felton shares negotiation tips, maximum learning conditions, and answers the question - what is righteous impatience?
Josh Hoffman shares valuable insight on time management and how it can help your networking efforts.
Scott Smith shares valuable insight on protecting your business from lawsuits and networking with authenticity.
Karen Yankovich shares valuable insights on networking, and how your personal brand starts with mastering your profile.
Ayla Annac of Invivo Sciences shares her experience as a TEDx speaker and insights on networking.
Kerrie Hoffman talks about the digital age and how we are in the middle of a huge shift.
Jeff McClellan shares valuable insights into finding a way to make a difference in the things you do professionally.
Rob Kochanski, host of the Local First podcast shares insight on how networking has helped him grow his business.
Dr. Ivan Misner the 'Father of Modern Networking' shares valuable insights into starting his popular BNI organization and best practices for networking.
Amy Franko shares valuable insights into today's trends related to the selling and buying process.
James Millar shares the difference between a network and networking along with insightful tips from his past experience as a network builder.
The analogy queen Jill Manty shares insight from her transition from theater to running a website development business.
Melissa Blettner covers all of the hot topics for female entrepreneurs and what they need to do to focus on their business growth.
Listen in as Marty Gilbert, founder of a 4000+ person networking group shares insights on networking and the job search.
Christian Ambrose shares why he treats his professional and social relationships as one, focusing on the depth of the relationship.
Attitudinal Segmentation makes you think beyond your typical demographics. Listen in as Susan Baier shares her insights.
The Vintage Gypsy was started by Marie Hoese. Hear her story about becoming an accidental entrepreneur and how she dislikes the word networking.
Dave Rebro, technology therapist, shares insightful tips and tools as he dives into his networking processes.
Rahil, a personal stylist, fashion stylist, and image consultant talks about stepping outside your comfort zone to grow your business.
Sarah Schwab shares how she ties her professional and personal passions together to build the connections.
Alex Mootz, founder of 143 Diamonds saw a problem in his industry and decided to solve it.
Paul Hoenecke shares his journey from professional sports to inventor and entrepreneur.
Kelli Sample, sales and business coach, shares her amazing experience of obtaining her first internship overseas.
Sean Tepper shares his story of how he transitioned from a software developer to an investor.
Amy Westrup, professional ComedySportz player and executive director of Corporate Council of Wisconsin shares the importance of the phrase "Yes, and..."
Lori Highby celebrates her 100th episode of Social Capital by recapping some of the most profound answers and advice to three of her favorite questions on the show.
Tamalyn Powell of BVK shares how opening up your story and sharing will make it easier to connect with others.
Sara Steever of Paulsen Ag shares the importance of simply being friendly with those around you.
With years of experience in business development, Dave Wallace shares his wisdom on the complexity of sales.
Krysti Turznik shares her tips and gives you what you need to get your mindset in the right direction.
Mark Boeder, recruiter, branding and coaching expert shares tons of actionable tips and resources for all professionals, especially those that might be looking for that next big opportunity.
Sharing the power of engaging with your network online, Allison Harpole of Harp & Oaks leaves us with actionable steps to achieve visibility.
Founder of RDM Business solutions, Ryan Mehaffey, shares his ultimate experiences around strategy and networking.
Drawing on her skills and unique perspective, Rachel LaMantia, of Masterpiece Bookkeeping shares how the numbers leading your business are more important than just filing taxes.
Founder of Movement Threads, Patrick Sturm, shares his journey to grow his business and the lesson he has learned along the way.
Utilizing her experience abroad and at home, Dr. Laci Coppins Robbins shares practical tools and tips for empowering and inspiring female leaders.
Using her own experience running a business, Jackie Zach, shares how she got started helping other businesses thrive.
Certified brand strategist, Christine Tieri, shares how employees should live and breathe the brand of the company.
Tamara Burkett, a customer loyalty architect, shares her wisdom on client retention and relationship building.
Pulling from her experiences, Kiley Peters, shares her look on Chicago networking and what Milwaukee can see to build.
Taking his experience teaching middle school science, Kyle LaFond, shares and discusses the ingredients in personal hygiene products - ultimately resulting in starting his own company.
Jim Temmer, President/CEO of the Better Business Bureau serving Wisconsin, talks about the impact of reputation management.
Voice coach Pam Johnson shares the importance of knowing how to control your voice in order to obtain a specific response.
Ian Abston shares his experience on connecting millennials with the more seasoned professionals.
You never know who will connect you to someone important, Nancy Marshall discusses attracting versus repelling individuals to your brand.
Cultivate and curate your network with the methodology of Mike Going as he energetically takes us through the story his career.
Your brand is how people perceive you in the world and online. Stacy Kaat and Min Carpenter provide valuable insight into taking control of your brand and delivering the message you want to.
Watching her grandparents hustle as entrepreneurs gave Tammy Flynn the motivation to start her career at the age of 15.
From baseball college athelete to construction engineer to co-founder of Karben4 Brwering. Zak Koga shares intellectual insights into his networking philosophy.
Your resume is your story and it can have a huge impact on your job hunt. Hear how to share your story on your resume with match-maker, Erica Conway.
Stage swapping, community building, and being vulnerable are just the beginning in this international high enery episode with guest Sahar Nafal.
There are many who share your same ideas and mentality, our guest Jonathon Cooper, gives us insight on identifying those individuals and how to grow with them.
Learning the strategic role that pictures play in our upbringing and how something as simple as that picture can make such a large impact.
Most of the relationships we focus on are positive, but what happens when those relationships are not so positive?
With experience in advising senior executives in multiple industries, Paul Stelter leaves us with his best advice for the problems that business are experiencing today.
In this episode, we're doing things a bit differently. Because of Lori's devotion to lifelong learning, we're connecting you with students in this 3 part mini-series.
In this episode, we're doing things a bit differently. Because of Lori's devotion to lifelong learning, we're connecting you with students in this 3 part mini-series.
In this episode, we're doing things a bit differently. Because of Lori's devotion to lifelong learning, we're connecting you with students in this 3 part mini-series.
Modeling his company after a family passion of supporting entrepreneurs, Peter Giersch provides insights into the financial management side of business.
From HoneyComb Productions to SRH Marketing, local producer, director, and entrepreneur Kurt Raether takes us through most influential times in his career.
Jill Borsos realized early on that her greatest joy in work was helping her staff reach their highest potential. She shares how this relates to networking and has impacted her life
Patti Bartsch relocated and went from having no network to a thriving six figure business owner with zero debt. She shares her tips to grow your network efficiently in no time at all!
From humble beginnings designing album covers to founding the Milwaukee staple, 'Too Much Metal' Fred Gillich invents his goals and realizes his path to achieving them
Bert Stitt has made a career out of servicing and building communities through his consultation practice and today he shares his tips with you
As a proud Milwaukee native, Joaquin Altoro takes pride in serving the diverse communities built up around the city and in his life.
Craig drives home to the idea of adding value and removing the 'ME ME ME' mentality from your networking game.
From building the only not-for-profit, all volunteer advertising agency in the nation to starring as a guest in magazines like PR Daily, Milwaukee Business Journal, and more Laura Gainor has used networking every step of the way
Tim Cigelske has made the most out of his love of social media in his position with Marquette University and by networking to grow his consulting business
Through her work coaching high achieving introverts and leaders in multiplying their impact Katie Rasoul has learned to make the most out of networking every time
From Emmy award winning consumer reporter to TV host, Katrina Cravy has become a trusted and well known name. Listen as she shares her networking secrets with you
Through her work in government and not-for-profit organizations, Nikiya Dodd has been working with her network to help improve the safety and well being of children in the Milwaukee area
From YouTube to his full time job, Eduardo Diaz has found success growing his career in soccer through networking both online and in person
By getting inside the minds of top business owners on his own podcast, Onward Nation, Stephen Woessner has learned the ins and outs of fixing the most common mistakes
Jamie Shibley shares how she has made a career out of connecting with others on a personal level and the steps she took to get there
Stacey Brown has been helping her clients improve their businesses by building the quality and strength of referrals and now she shares with you
From tea consultant to non-profit founder that has served over 8,000 people, Adam Sherlip has used his network to achieve powerful results
From tea consultant to non-profit founder that has served over 8,000 people, Adam Sherlip has used his network to achieve powerful results
Professional speaker and avid networker Bill Wagner shares how finding hubs of interest and engaging with them helps build a lasting network
From years of working with marketers, salespeople, and leaders; Phil has learned important lessons in networking that he shares with you
Independent filmmaker Erik Ljung shares his story on how he went from employee to full time freelancer with the help of networking.
Kim Dandrea shares how slowing down to take the time to really learn about your network has positively impacted her career and can help yours.
From traveling the world to conquering the stage in stand up comedy, Diane Darling has built a powerful network and learned some great tips along the way!
LinkedIn expert and acclaimed author Wayne Breitbarth shares his formula for using LinkedIn to build success for you and your network!
Steph Salvia grew her favorite day trip with her family into one of her personal passions and careers as Director of Business Improvement for Brady Street and Downer Avenue!
What if you had 5 powerful partners who could sell you just good as you can? Learn how Derrick Van Mell started his Inner Circle Group to help strengthen his networking while moving into a new market.
Asking "WHY" 21 times is an impactful way to get to the heart of what you are doing shares, Cortney Ihde.
Building a small business takes skill, teamwork, and lots of networking; Kristen Wilson would know!
From zero to 1 Million dollars in sales, Heather Ann Havenwood has thrived on the support of her network the whole way
From corporate America to her passion of helping young adults find great careers through her business, College Recruiter, Faith Rothberg has used great networking for success.
Joe Konop makes his living by learning about others, one of the most essential pieces of a good networking strategy
From economics and education to co-owning both a deli and a catering company in Alaska, networking has helped Megan Schaafsma the entire way
From 25 years in the printing industry, Steve Kohlmann has learned a lot about both technical and networking skills.
Learn how a man commited to inspiring, encouraging, and motivating others to do what they want has made the most out of networking with Frank Walter
As a professional writer, Amy Anderson has made a career out of meeting people and understanding them and their businesses.
After 6 years of professional coaching, Jason Mueller has mastered the art of networking and he's here to share how it's impacted himself and his business.
PR professional, Mary Brophy, talks about the changes digital networking have had on the physical networking that we have all grown accustomed to!
As president and CEO of a major membership organization, Cheryl Grohman is no stranger to networking. Join us as she shares her favorite tips and insights.
Owner of TEKTON Engineers, Jeremy Baer, sheds some light on how networking has helped him build his company from the ground up.
The acclaimed PR and business strategist, Pattie Simone breaks down her thoughts on networking from the top down!
Our guest, Christie Ruffino, has used networking to kick start her serial entrepreneurship!
Learn how networking has helped Mandie Mutchie be succesful at "changing lives and playing dress up" for a living.
Doing good for the environment is just one way that Joe Walsh has put networking to good use!
As the president of a PR agency and a part time lecturer on social media, Brian Lee lives and breathes networking, find out his best tips on this weeks episode.
From nuclear medicine technologist to CEO of a family owned business, Melissa Remis has applied networking in just about every setting!
This expert educator has strengths on technically complex subjects in addition to networking. Learn how Bill Spohn uses webinars to nurture his network!
Bill has designed, marketed and sold a wide array of test and measurement products in the last twenty-five years. Bill was design-engineering manager at Bacharach, Inc. and HVAC Product Marketing Manager at Testo, Inc. Since 2009, he has managed and is now President, CEO and majority owner of TruTech Tools, LTD. He regularly educates on technically complex topics to a wide range of audiences on the applications of testing and measurement instrumentation in HVACR, building science, and weatherization and is the majority owner of www.TruTechTools.com and sole proprietor of William P. Spohn, LLC (www.BillSpohn.com) – specializing in technical and business training and consulting.
What do investing and networking have in common? Tune in to find out from Gina Cocking, a boutique investment bank owner.
Gina Cocking is a Managing Director and Partner at Colonnade Advisors LLC, a boutique investment bank specializing in sell-side mergers, acquisitions, and capital raising in the financial and business services sectors. Colonnade’s clients are large corporate entities typically selling a non-strategic business, private equity firms and founder/family owned companies. After college at the University of Chicago, Gina joined the investment banking industry at Kidder, Peabody and later JP Morgan where she advised companies on M&A, debt, and equity offerings. She has been with Colonnade for over six years. Gina also spent a year with the private equity firm, Madison Dearborn Partners. Gina has operating experience as the CFO of a specialty finance company, Director of HR of a private equity-backed manufacturer, and as the CFO of consumer banking businesses within Discover Financial Services. Gina received her MBA from the Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.
Personal branding expert Stacy Kaat shares her story on how she started her personal network through a simple breakfast event.
Stacy Kaat is the owner of Stacy Kaat Photography. She helps business owners and entrepreneurs create personal brand photographs that express their unique personality and style so that they can attract their ideal customers! Stacy acquired her BFA at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and has been photographing people for over twenty years. Besides her ability to find fun in almost anything, she loves the outdoors, likes to grow food, walk her dog, kayak, converse over a good food, coffee or wine, read, collaborate and be creative anytime she gets the opportunity.
Our guest this week is the mastermind behind some of the biggest events in Milwaukee and he credits much of it to networking!
By day, Jeremy is a high school teacher, by night he’s a powerful networker and mastermind behind a number of fantastic events in the Milwaukee area including: The Riverwest 24, The Milwaukee Community Hockey League, the Flat out Friday Motorcycle Show.
This week, we look at Jordon Meyer who went from introverted networker to a fast moving agency owner.
Jordon has over 10 years of online marketing experience, and has managed over $40 million in paid search spend. Jordon has managed digital marketing for over 75 companies, ranging from start-up to Fortune 50 companies throughout the US, Canada and UK.