Expanding Luck Surface Area and Building a Flywheel in Business

Some people just get stuff done while others get to the end of the day, look back, and wonder what they did all day. On the 386th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Rob's talk with brand builder, prolific content creator, and fractional CMO Amanda Goetz. Amanda revealed her secrets for getting stuff done, creating fly wheels (instead of funnels) to keep moving readers to other parts of her business, and adding a thousand subscribers to her newsletter every month. She calls it realistic productivity—the kind you can do when you're running your own business and have three kids—and you'll want to hear how she does it. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: Life's a Game (Amanda's course) Hypefury Taplio The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Some people seem to have an other worldly ability to get stuff done. While the rest of us struggle through our daily to-do lists and often fail to check off more than one or two items, they post great, well-thought out content several times a day to social media, they create new products, regular emails, launch and promote courses, and maybe even crank out a few pages for the book they’re working on.  Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I sat down with brand builder, creator and fractional CMO Amanda Goetz. Amanda is one of those people who just gets stuff done. She’s running three different content businesses, writing a book, taking on work as a part-time CMO and is launching a course in a couple of days. So how does she get it all done? We talked about the systems she uses to produce her weekly newsletters and daily social media content so that it all gets written in one day a month, plus an hour or two a week to schedule posts. And her system has helped her grow her newsletter by about 1000 new subscribers every month. If you produce content to support or grow your own business, you’re definitely going to want to hear what she has to say. But first, I want to tell you about The Copywriter Underground. You’ve heard about the library of training that will help you build a profitable business. You’ve heard about the monthly coaching, and the almost weekly copy critiques and the helpful group of members ready with support and even the occasional lead. Last week we recorded an exclusive training for Underground members on the diagnostic scorecard that helps you close just about any prospect or project on a sales call. It’s the kind of business secret you don’t read about in free facebook groups or even on most email lists. But right now, you can watch that training and get the diagnostic scorecard to help you close more projects when you go to thecopywriterclub.com/tcu and join as a member.  But hurry, that training disappears in a few days. Now, let’s jump to my discussion with Amanda. Amanda, let's get started with your story. You've done so many things, vice president marketing, CMO, you're building three businesses. How did you get here? Amanda Goetz: Oh, gosh. So where do I start? I grew up on a farm in Central Illinois. I'm a first generation college grad. And for me, my start was I graduated early from college because my accounting T.A. offered me a job at Ernst and Young. And I was still first semester of my senior year. And I was like, OK, I think I can graduate early if I take 18 hours. So I added a course. I graduated early. But my senior year of college, I took 18 hours of classes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I got on a bus every Wednesday night. I went from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, up to Chicago. I worked at Ernst & Young in the Sears Tower in Chicago, Thursdays and Fridays. I studied all day Saturday, went back to my roommates on Sunday and did it all again.  Rob Marsh: Wow, that's nuts.  Amanda Goetz: I definitely have found that just the way that I'm wired and I am open to pushing myself and seeing what I'm capable of. But through those years I also learned what burnout looks like and where my limits are. I worked at Ernst & Young for a few years. That took me from Chicago to New York, where I finally realized I needed to be more consumer-facing. I didn't like the financial services. I went to go work for a celebrity wedding planner, which is kind of a whole funny chapter, but I learned so much about what it meant to have a personal brand.  He had a reality TV show that we worked on. He had books, he had licensing deals. So that was kind of my first real mini CMO role. But also seeing the value of a personal brand up close and personal. So I did that for a few years. That also allowed me to travel the world, which was really cool because my parents have never been on an airplane. So It's a hilarious upbringing. So I was like, I'm headed to Australia to go plan a Major League Baseball player's 30th birthday. I'll be back in two weeks. And it was just funny and a really cool chapter of my life.  From there, I launched a tech startup with a co-founder that I met through some nonprofit work. Did that. That was kind of like my MBA. I was managing engineers. I was learning how to build a tech product. I was understanding what it meant to like, what does VC capital mean? And I did an accelerator program in New York City, where it really taught us, it's called Startup Leadership Program, SLP. It's a global program. And you really learn what it means to be like a founder. And from there, did that for a few years. And that got me to The Knot, where I led marketing. And I was kind of the first consumer marketing hire, because it was an editorial company. For anybody that knows The Knot, it's a magazine. And we made it a two-sided marketplace. I was there for five and a half years, then the pandemic hit.  I decided to launch another startup, which was a consumer facing startup, a CPG wellness company. We had actual physical goods. We had supplements, and sold that two years ago to kind of take a break and focus on stability and family and I took a VP of marketing job to just kind of like reset. I call it my spin cycle. Like everything felt really heavy. I needed to get all the water out. And then from there decided I wanted to write a book and kind of share all of this stuff that I had learned throughout my journey. I'm a single mom. I have three kids. I got divorced a couple of years before the pandemic. And now writing a book. I launched kind of this creator community, helping people really understand what it looks like to build an intentional personal brand with the goal of making money. Rob Marsh: Nice. There's a, there's a lot of here and so much we can ask about before we go any farther, what you're even doing today. I want to go back to the wedding planner days. What is the wildest, craziest experience that you had doing that job? Amanda Goetz: Oh my gosh, that could be its own podcast. I have so many stories that I'm sure NDAs were probably signed at some point. Rob Marsh: We won't name names. Amanda Goetz: Yeah, it was a lot of NFL,  NBA, NASCAR, like I've touched kind of all of them. I had one family who no wedding venue was good enough. So they said, build us one. And so I had to move to a town and build a wedding venue that they would later turn into a commercial wedding venue that they would make money off of. But the mom was such a savvy businesswoman. She was like, no, if I'm going to spend this much money, it's going to be an investment that I will get a return on. And so I built a wedding venue. Rob Marsh: Credit the mom, that's a brilliant idea when you think of all the money that gets wasted on weddings. But yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so you've got all of these experiences adding up to what you're doing today. And if I'm not mistaken, you're building three different businesses at the moment. Tell us a little bit about those. Amanda Goetz: Yeah, so I have kind of my main pillar, which is Life's a Game. It's all about success without burnout. So how do you play the game of life and manage your time and energy efficiently? So that is a newsletter. I don't think of funnels anymore, I think in flywheels, because they should all feed each other. So I have a newsletter. I talk on social media about personal and professional growth. Then that feeds to my newsletter. If somebody wants to go further, I have a course that's coming out in two days that takes you to that next level where it's self-guided. It's seven modules sharing everything I've learned about productivity, but realistic productivity.  I've got three kids. A lot of productivity gurus out there are like a single dude that doesn't have kids that's like, here's how to wake up at 5 a.m. and do these things. You're like, I got a kid. Realistic productivity. and goal setting. So if somebody likes that and they want to go deeper, they can join my community. I do group coaching. We have over 100 people that meet biweekly, and we are in a Slack community, and some of those I even do one-on-one coaching with. So that's kind of one pillar.  Then I've got Break an Egg, which I started with Jack Appleby—a lot of people are not like the people listening to this podcast, right? They don't know how to write on social media. And so we started a very, very inexpensive, it's $5 a month, email list where subscribers get daily prompts to show up on LinkedIn. So it's like, today, talk about a time in your career where you learned X, Y, and Z. And so they get that prompt. And now they know, OK, that's what I'm going to share on social media today. And then they have a community. So that's another business.  And then I've got the book, which is kind of its own business, because it's not necessarily related to the other two. And with the book, I I do speaking engagements and I go around. So that's kind of its own pillar.  And then I would say, like,