Engineering Calmer Agencies & Consulting Firms: Calm is the New KPI

Are you an entrepreneur who thinks marketing is prosaic, a series of boxes that need to be checked off in a certain order? Are you too scared to break the ceiling with your own brand of personal marketing because it’s not something that you’ve been told to do? Then you should listen to Margo Aaron on today’s podcast, because she is someone you need in your life. Margo Aaron is the cohost of #HAMYAW and the author behind That Seems Important. She accidentally ended up in marketing and today she talks and writes about how to connect authentically with customers, and how to use ethical marketing to sell better, and more, online. “People really don't understand marketing, in part because marketers do a really bad job of explaining it. And they very very unethically sell it.”On today’s podcast:People don’t pay for strategy, they pay for outcomes and resultsWhy Margo was so nervous about launching ‘That Seems Important’You don't have a marketing problem, what you have is a self-doubt problemYou need to find the intersection between your business model and your personal dispositionWhy you shouldn’t measure your worth based on other people's benchmark successThe importance of playing and seeing where a business goes rather than sticking rigidly to a planPart of entrepreneurship is making things up - you are bringing something into the world that didn't exist beforeLinks:Hillary and Margo Yell at WebsitesThat Seems ImportantScalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Welcome to this first episode of Break the Ceiling, the podcast where we'll talk about how you might structure your business, or even why you're in the business you're in in the first place. We're going to talk about financial decisions, hiring decisions as well as technology decisions, and give you some ideas to consider. But mostly, I just want you to start asking yourself, ‘why did I make this choice and does it still serve my business?’My first guest in the series is Tara McMullin. Tara is a podcaster, writer, and a small business community leader. With over a decade of experience helping thousands of small business owners grow their business. She's on a mission to change the dialogue about what's really working and she believes that no one person has the answer to “what works” in small business.Tara is the host of the What Works podcast, a top small business podcast that's been recommended by Forbes and Entrepreneur. And she's also the founder of the What Works network, a community hub for small business owners. She is also incidentally the person who came up with the name for this podcast.On today’s podcast:Why the default decisions you make at the beginning of your business may actually be causing the problems that are limiting your ability to growNot every framework or management tool works the same for each businessWhy ‘What Works’ is pretty much an entire business based around the concept of fighting default decisionsChallenges associated with switching between different types of business modelsHow to know when you’ve hit the ceilingKnow where your skills lie and focus on doing that well - outsource the other stuffWhy Tara’s personal growth will help her business break through the ceilingLinks:What Works - the podcastScalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here