Marketing Redefined: Leadership Strategies

Speaker 1: [Music] one of the biggest challenges of marketing is that there's too many things out there too many options and there's too many third parties and you just bleed out if you don't take control of your own situation and focus on what matters to you what is good for your business but also what doesn't feel like work because then it's not work anymore suddenly you're enjoying it and you're accomplishing something I'm Melanie bar welcome back to the Sheil it podcast your go-to place to empower you to live the life and business that you crave I'm here to talk about everything from Having the courage to make life and career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation I'm here to celebrate your wins and navigate through your challenges I live in the city now but I grew up in a town of a thousand people I've navigated major life leaps a senior level corporate career worked in professional sports and now as a successful entrepreneur who loves business business technology family and making meaningful connections with you and the Sheil Community I also love a good workout and dose of self-care magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so turn up the audio open your favorite Notes app grab your favorite drink and here we go welcome back to the Sheila podcast thank you for joining us Kelly share with us your journey that led you to the creation of screws and stilettos and your market like a CMO course I started in marketing and in college I had this idea that I was going to become an editor and cheet of a magazine or newspaper which back in early 2000s it still was on the radar and I wanted to understand the internet I went to live Arts I wasn't able to do marketing advertising and website development so I had a professor let me do some special courses and I taught myself web design graphic design and I learned how to use internet and I worked a lot of alumni and just built them free websites to practice so that was in college right afterwards I worked a Trip Advisor and it's probably one of the best experiences you can have from a fresh out of college or a new into marketing person it was mirrored after AMX it's a marketing rotational program and you're a full marketing associate but you work three months at a time under the VP or leader of each department within marketing so for three months they worked for Content marketing three months they worked for marketing you learn all the different areas I learned what I don't love about marketing what I don't think I'm the best at but then I also learned where I was very skilled and the bridge that I could build between marketing engineering and sales it ended up being my Niche it became the new niches department and I stayed there for years while I built my own business as an entrepreneur and then left and did my own business what I found is there's the middle need to to connect to all the pieces and that's where screws and loves came from where it's not just the pretty things it's the back end it's the core it's Foundation it's the screws that hold all together as well as the marketing if you don't have those two things working in tandem then you're not going to be able to to thrive it's so true and what great training for you out of college to be that is a an incredible training setup to be able to learn all this different areas and so often it's learning what we don't want to do so we can Thrive at what we do want to do so it's interesting that you brought that up it's true and this was in 2008 Soo was known but it was still a new industry and I didn't know what it was and I joined and it was amazing working at the different departments learning all of the methods manness behind sem all M SEO learning that content marketing from a forum and Community perspective is not my cup of tea I needed more of the grit and that was one of the best things is that I then was able to tailor my strength and my passions better by weeding out what it was not what I wanted to do how does your course help Drive market results that leaders can be proud of and want to share what the course's purpose is and what it does for somebody is it clears up the noise it gives them a breath of fresh air where they can suddenly say okay I don't have to worry about all the new latest this I don't have to know everything I need to simplify I need to Define what is going to move my needle and then I need to learn how to do that and whether it's myself or my team it's taking back that control and that Simplicity and that Ease on yourself that you don't need to do everything you don't need to Outsource everything and to stop the bleed one of the biggest challenges marketing is that there's too many things out there too many options and there's too many third parties and you just bleed out if you don't take control of your own situation and focus on what matters to you what is good for your business but also what doesn't feel like work what actually feels more like you're making a difference and you're happy doing it because then it's not work anymore suddenly you're enjoying it and you're accomplishing something that's honestly one of the best things about working with Courtney is I genuinely like working with her and we've talked about having more people are going different directions but we found our Dynamic our Boutique Hands-On holding getting to be part of our customers clients or people who taking our course and helping them makes me feel a lot better that's one of the best things somebody's not a line item on an Excel sheet but we get to know them and I feel like we're making a difference them and when they can say we don't need you anymore you gave us everything we needed and we can go do it ourselves that's one of the best feelings in the world and in a time where we're feeling more and more like we're signing up for a tech platform and there is no human touch that human touch is so appreciated by all clients I know it's appreciated by me when someone says oh you can't figure something out you can have a call with a person and you don't have to throw so many things into chat GPT and YouTube to try to figure out how to do it and then taking that breath of fresh air too because we're inundated with so much marketing and media that you start to feel like if you're not somewhere you should be so I like that advice of going where your clients are living and going to the places that make you happy and where your business can Thrive instead of feeling as a business you have to be everywhere one of the best things is finding those points where you say to somebody you don't need the handcuffs and saying get rid of this stuff and giving them that open door to then move forward in their business in ways that they couldn't get to not because they weren't capable but because they were in a black hole of the overwhelming amount of information and requirements let's be real the world's changed significantly you're no longer an expert in marketing with good ideas you are an expert in listening and you have to listen to what everybody else is telling you and you need to give them what they want instantly or you're going to lose out and that's a hard change what it matters is you hear what your audience and your clients's opinion is and then you can be malleable and adjust to that and that's a very different change in marketing No One's Gonna come up with the next Nike swipe anymore they're going to put things out there and the users are going to come up with the next Nike swipe and they're going to take it and go with it because it's that the world is feeling very instant satisfaction and that from a marketing perspective is a big shift from putting things out there and seeing what resonates versus listening and reacting to what resonating so true and you mentioned Courtney your co-founder I talked to a lot of co-founders on the podcast and it usually works when two co-founders have different strengths and how have you found that you work together in the best way we are screws and stilettos screws and stilettos is the front and the back end and depending on the day one of us is on one side of the other and it's a great thing to say Courtney is better than me at y i could be a B+ a minus and that's yo she is an A+ she is talented and good at it ads I don't know another human who is more successful at at Google ads and can turn anything into a successful quick Roi but on the other hand she knows that I am very good at Building Systems building tools building websites for somebody or strategic development people where it's let's find your needs and then let's find the right solution that works for you not the solution that works for everybody else it's coming up with those strategic outside the box Solutions is where I differentiate myself but where I get a lot of pleasure and joy out of is it's like problem solving and it's nice when you find the piece that works for somebody yeah yeah such a great feeling and I know we talked about talking to you both at the same time but I like to talk to everyone individually because I like to learn where your skills and strength lie because usually with co-founders we can learn two sides in terms of our differences I have no problem with talking a lot so I have no problem with meeting different people and on the Fly coming up with Solutions or problems or just delving into the details Courtney is more methodical and she will get behind the numbers and come back with needle moving statistics and Analysis but both of those sides matter you can strategically come up with the next greatest thing you can get there but then if you don't understand it and learn from it and continue to iterate optimize then what was the point in the beginning you're just right back where you started and it has to be fun to have someone to work with rather than feeling like you're on a ship completely by yourself someone to talk to my sister and we're two of nine kids and since day one we just had a very good teamwork Dynamic and we started when I was working at a sandwich shop Bakery for years and so since we were 14 and 15 we worked together and we've always debated like let's bring in different people one point I started a business and Courtney flew from California to Massachusetts and started working with me and at0 employees $5 million in a few years the top 30 entrepreneurs in the world for the events industry and I was like 20 something and according like we don't do what we started with which was the development the strategy the design because we were managing people and going from 120 employees to Courtney and I deciding daily it's just going to be us with our assistant and that's it and we are the right Dynamic the right Niche we don't want to become admin and supervisors and HR we want to get in there and make a difference for people and staying Boutique and staying Niche allows us to do that and also helps because remember a bad day courney just says Kelly just go do something we'll talk tomorrow and she just knows me and you can't find a partner like that so true and it's so amazing that you made the leap to do what you want to do after building a successful business and saying I want to make a leap and just follow my passions and do the things that I enjoy doing every day cuz so often we can stay stuck somewhere that we don't want to be and the funny thing about the leap is it's crazy to be suddenly no clients no income no real business plan but just a want and an ability and to just not try to run just slowly but surely move the needle and get a very Boutique focused clients and make difference and naturally our business grew but without advertising we was all Word of Mouth this past year we've made a shift where we found if you look at the last five or six years there's a commonality in our clients between business owners and CMO levels where they keep coming to us for essentially the same things and we're helping and teaching the similar things and we feel that it's not necessary for them to have to pay us as consultants or iies when we're not Reinventing the wheel for them and that's what we love to do is reinvent the wheel and come up with a brand new thing so the course's purpose is to give somebody all tools all the foundation everything they need to succeed without bleeding out paying Consultants tens thousands of dollars instead it's yours to do at your disposal and to pick and choose what works for you if you are working on ads go into the ads you're working on email marketing go in email marketing if you're not leave it alone and it's yours for the time that whenever you do need it but don't try to be a jack of all trades because then you'll be successful at none what can someone expect when they sign up for the course there's at least 150 videos broken into sections buckets of the most common needs that small business owners midsize business owners and CMOS of all different scales have so whether it's to be successful online and offline email marketing or lead generation or lead nurturing it's bucketed in the different units and what it focuses on is what matters it doesn't teach every detail it doesn't go through every definition or every tool out there it tells you if you want to do Google ads here's how you want to set yourself up for success and here are the best ways to start testing out and learning and it gives you tamplates and guides and resources to then take on your own and put in your information and gives you the whole skeleton of what you're going to need to succeed to grow to analyze to understand you don't need to be an analyst to understand what's working for you it's giving you the ability to make a difference for yourself and gives you all the resources you need to do it without pretending that every new tool and app is going to matter it's the foundational elements you need and it's so great that you broke it down for clients because all the apps can be very overwhelming and it all changes just like today I opened up zoom and it looked completely different and I what did they change today like yesterday when Google sent an email saying they're officially retiring the traditional UA Google analytics and anybody who has not migrated over is going to lose their data I heard think you just set off a snowball effective panic attacks because the amount of people who don't know what that means they might not know right now but when they go in and they have no data left panic taxs but also moving over to G4 is very overwhelming because it's not intuitive but in the course Courtney breaks down how to set it up for yourself how to be able to see through another example is this year and Yahoo Google all major email platforms said you have to do these three steps in your email domain to remain compliant if you don't you're going to be considered unauthenticated and you're not going to be able to get through people so we've had people come to us last week saying I have 150,000 people in my newsletter subscribers and I am getting bounces of 70,000 I send something what's wrong and what they don't realize is these three little items was a big issue if you didn't make those changes in your system then you're no longer considered valid trustworthy authentic and if you send that email to 5,000 people and 2,000 people are Gmail they're just not even going to send it to that person and if they do they're going to put in the spam the person's never going to see it it's not the your spam it's you didn't do those three steps it's honestly three little line items that take all of 45 seconds and then an hour to update and you're done but it's not understanding what they mean and what needs to happen that becomes overwhelming and shuts down entire business's ability to communicate with their customers when it's a very simple thing so we try to make it clear to people when you get something like that you have to do it and this is the two-minute video on how to do it and then you're done but if you don't do it you are just going to become one day wake up and you can't get through to anybody because you think the data is there but it might not always be no it's not and it's not yours that's a hard thing to understand is it might be your statistics but it's not your information not your data when you use a lot of these platforms my kids use this app called Noggin they have games they have educational things but also play games they've used it forever and I get an email saying Noggin shutting down as a July 2nd no warning I have no control over it it's my kids subscription my kid games it's gone it's not mine and that's a hard thing for people to understand is it might be your information but it's not yours when you use a lot of these systems and that's why it's important to keep whatever you can in your own wheelhouse made a client poor guy he's rebuilding hoses to the Ukraine he is a world renowned expert in building hospitals and they need help last year and one day he woke up and his website and his email were down it was hacked by a company Nigeria and his agency said we can't deal with this he lost everything so he gets recommended through another client to us he has nothing not even his logo and the Ukraine is now pulling out saying he's not trustworthy because they can't verify anything and suddenly his emails hacked he's spent decades building this reputation so now we're urgently building him a new online reputation so he can regain his own clients it's shocking and that's where we try to help people regain the control over their own destiny and own security it's so great that you can give clients and people that peace of mind that's why we' like to stay the size we are and we could bill out as an agency we could have hundreds of clients and then after you sign a dotted line you were going to hand you off to somebody fresh out of college who has no clue what they're doing and we're going to spend an hour a month talking we genuinely don't believe in that mindset with our clients we want to be hands- on every day and know that we made a difference to them magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy we've talked a lot about business today but what is one thing that you do to make sure you're finding and living your joy my seven-year-old has intestinal failure so she's Hospital homebound so she has to stay home and the teacher come to house and spends several months a year in the hospital and the fact that when she's in the hospital not one single time have I had to say I'm not going to be there every time we go in together we leave together and I sit in my back corner and the nurse is there and I get everything done and the dynamic of Courtney is one of the best things ever in our clients when I can say Gabby is an emergency and they say okay no problem we you'll get the job done no matter what and Courtney will pick up if something immediately needed they know I'm G to get it done and I don't have to choose my livelihood my clients and my child's life I can do both very well and without guilt or frustration or harboring ill will or some because they have a website that needs to get launched tomorrow that website is still going to get launched tomorrow but maybe done in this hospital room rather than in my office that's pretty magical yeah it's great you can have that work life balance I never want anybody to have choose their family their self or their business and the fact that our business is able to give me that flexibility and that peace of mind and Courtney's there and our clients are there I was in the hospital at Christmas one of our clients and this isn't the first time sending gifts to Gabby sending me christm at the hospital we make that much of an impact somebody that it's not just about the ROI they care enough to send something when they genuinely didn't even have to so it's a wonderful Magic World makes you remember that there are good people out there and that they deserve the helping hand when they need it and in return they're going to give it back to you when you need a break and that's a testament to your leadership in your business building as well thank you for joining us today and sharing your marketing and system wisdom with us can you please share with us how and where we can find you in your course our main website is screws and sos.com our course is on there as well but you can also access it directly at market like ao.com you don't have to be a CMO so you have the confidence of being the chief of your growth and your business and market like a c provides that thank thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave