The Soloist Life

You’ve been thinking about starting a podcast (or are just not happy with how yours is converting into leads and revenue). Prolific podcaster, author and coach Alastair McDermott shares how he created and runs multiple ongoing and evergreen podcasts:Why you’ll need to start before you’re ready (and the advantages of failing faster).How you might use an evergreen limited run podcast to fill a hole in your existing content or warm up your prospects.Why the podcast you start may not be the one you end up with (hint: it’s normal to shift as you gain experience with the medium and your message).Podcasting as a way to scale your business—what traction looks like and how long it takes to get it.LINKSAlastair McDermott LinkedIn | Amazon | Twitter | Instagram | YouTubeRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOAlastair McDermott helps independent experts & consultants to earn more by rapidly building authority and visibility so that you can command premium fees, work less hours, and never have to suffer a bad-fit client again!Alastair is an author, consultant & business coach. He hosts The Recognized Authority podcast, and has written a number of practical guides to building authority through content creation.His most recent book is “33 Ways Not to Screw Up Your Business Podcast“ and he is currently working on his next book: “Recognized: How to Win & Retain High-Ticket Clients by Becoming the Prominent Authority in Your Field“.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:17Alastair McDermott: I strongly believe in not waiting too long before you start. Like don't wait till you feel ready. You know, start before you feel ready because you'll never truly feel ready. So there's a bit of that to it. But ultimately, I figured if I could make something that would interest somebody like me, then I would get people listening to it or watching it.00:22 - 01:00Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, formerly known as Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm here with my pal Alistair McDermott who helps experts to become known as the recognized authority in your field so you can command premium fees, work less hours, and never have to suffer a bad fit client again. Now he hosts the Recognize Authority podcast and he's written a number of practical guides to building authority, including 33 Ways Not to Screw Up Your Business podcast, which by the way, I'm01:00 - 01:14Rochelle Moulton: proud to have written the forward for and he is currently working on his next book Recognized how to win and retain high ticket clients by becoming the prominent authority in your field Love that title Alastair welcome.01:15 - 01:19Alastair McDermott: Well Rochelle. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's great to be chatting with you again.01:19 - 01:50Rochelle Moulton: Yes, I'm so excited. It's been a while. It's been a while since we've talked. So 1 of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about, well, a little bit about how you're birthing your newest podcast. But what folks may not realize is that you went from no podcast in, I think, 2021 to once this newest gets off the ground, I started to say 5, but then we talked in the green room, maybe it's 7. You have a lot of audio options. So let's start there. I mean, when did you01:50 - 01:52Rochelle Moulton: start your first podcast?01:53 - 02:21Alastair McDermott: Well, I first started planning it in July of 2014. And this goes back to the kind of the origin story of all of this. Back in July of 2014, I went quite a long way down the route of planning a podcast to the point of having written intro scripts, outro scripts, and having hired a voiceover artist to record the audio for those. I had this fairly far down the road of planning. And then I realized that I had a business problem in that I wasn't niched down enough and that the podcast that I was planning was02:21 - 02:51Alastair McDermott: going to be garbage because it was going to be so bland, because it was going to be trying to address everybody. So I realized then that I had a business problem that I wasn't niched down enough or niched down enough and I needed to specialize. And so that took me down the rabbit hole of doing that which probably took me another 6 years or so to execute and so I finally started planning in earnest in 20 20 launch in 20 21 so I think I begin this world record for 7 years and 77 years to launch02:51 - 02:52Alastair McDermott: a podcast.02:54 - 03:04Rochelle Moulton: Well, and when you say that it took you that long to niche down, is it really that you were experimenting and trying to make sure that you had a viable business model? Was that like the 6 years, how you spent that?03:04 - 03:31Alastair McDermott: Yeah, that was a lot of it. So I hate to admit this, but it took me 2 or 3 years to fully comprehend what the problem really was. And then once I understood that, it took me another probably 3 years to execute on it. There's a lot of fears associated with niching down. I talked about this on 1 of my podcasts, the specialization podcast, and there's a lot of fears that hold you back from doing it, being afraid of picking the wrong thing, you know, and so I didn't do it for a long time and then03:31 - 03:37Alastair McDermott: I said okay I've got to do this, you know, so I eventually did but yeah I wish that I'd been able to execute that a bit quicker.03:38 - 04:05Rochelle Moulton: Well, you know, it's 1 of those things that it's really hard to do for yourself. It takes what it takes sometimes. You know, sometimes we can get lucky and find the right person to help us along the path. But it does take a while for the record. I think you were really smart to wait until you figured out kind of who you wanted to be before you poured all the energy into, into this podcast. But so once you decided you were going to do it, Like what was your strategy for the podcast? How did you see04:05 - 04:07Rochelle Moulton: it adding to your authority and growing your business?04:08 - 04:15Alastair McDermott: Well, my initial strategy was I like podcasts and I want to create a podcast. And that was about as far as it went.04:17 - 04:18Rochelle Moulton: I like it and I'm going to do it.04:19 - 04:49Alastair McDermott: That's pretty much it. It was, I like this topic. I would like to talk to people about this topic and I want to make it for people like me. That's kind of what I wanted to do. And that's a fairly basic strategy, but it was good enough to get started. And I strongly believe, ironically, I strongly believe in not waiting too long before you start. Like, don't wait till you feel ready. You know, start before you feel ready because you'll never truly feel ready. Yeah, so there's a bit of that to it. But ultimately, I figured04:49 - 04:54Alastair McDermott: if I could make something that would interest somebody like me, then I would get people listening to it or watching it.04:54 - 05:21Rochelle Moulton: Okay. Okay, that makes sense to me. So I just want to reiterate, you know, start before you're ready, because it does feel like a big leap. And then after a while, you're like, what did I wait for? This is way easier than I thought. So walk us through how you actually got that first podcast off the ground. I remember that's around the time that I met you, because I think you'd asked me to guest on that 1, if I remember rightly. So how did you get there? How did you get it off the ground?05:21 - 05:49Alastair McDermott: Yeah, that's right. You and Jonathan were some of the first guests I brought on. So I had been listening to a lot of podcasts. I think that actually helps. I think the people who listen to a lot of podcasts make for good podcasts just naturally because we know what we like to listen to. So I think that helped a lot. I had some pretty strong ideas about what I wanted to do and didn't want to do. So I laid out a plan for the first, I think, 15 or 20 episodes. And I created a pretty full05:50 - 06:18Alastair McDermott: FAQ page for guests and planning that out actually helped me to like, I try to figure out what are all of the questions that a guest might have for me about the podcast. And that allowed me to plan the podcast. I didn't have a lot of external resources, but I think that I had listened to so many podcasts at that point that I knew roughly what I was doing. Then I created a spreadsheet because I use spreadsheets for everything. I have a planning spreadsheet that has tons of stuff in there. I created like a workflow, what06:18 - 06:33Alastair McDermott: the workflow of recording and editing might look like. And I put in a bunch of guests who I would want to have on. And then I started reaching out to them like you and Jonathan. So I asked Jonathan for an introduction to you, for example, because I had worked with him as a coach.06:33 - 06:35Rochelle Moulton: That's right. I remember that now.06:36 - 06:59Alastair McDermott: In fact, now that I say that, I had a coaching call with him specifically about planning a podcast. So he was 1 of those people who I talked to. I also spoke with some other folks who were podcast experts. I just did coaching calls. 1 of the great things about there's a lot of coaches out there where you can just do a one-off call with them, pay for an hour of their time and you know soak in their expertise and I did that with I think 2 or 3 different people so that probably helped a lot.06:59 - 07:08Alastair McDermott: I did have a lot of the planning done and it was more about getting their feedback on the plan that I had in place and just kind of shaping it up a bit, but that really helped.07:08 - 07:18Rochelle Moulton: Well, and of course, 1 of the questions that non-techies always ask is, you know, how am I going to get this edited? Did you, When you first started, did you do it yourself or did you outsource it immediately?07:19 - 07:48Alastair McDermott: So at the very start I did it myself and I had enough skills to do that. It's not something I'd really recommend to people because I think that it's not a good use of your time if you're an expert, if you're a business leader. Your time is probably more valuable than you shouldn't really be doing the editing. And then later on, for season 2 of the podcast, season 1 of the podcast was the first 100 episodes, season 2 was from 100 on, I decided to go to a live stream model, so where I do all of07:48 - 08:15Alastair McDermott: the interviews live and I don't do any editing so I kind of took the editing step out of the workflow altogether. But I did that for a different reason. The reason I did that was because I was procrastinating about doing video because I recorded loads of video. I had videos from almost every interview I've done, but I wasn't publishing it. And I realized that I was missing a trick because I didn't have the video. I wasn't able to do all the social media clips that you see people doing and not having video, I think. So I08:15 - 08:34Alastair McDermott: said, okay, how do I do the video? Well, I'm procrastinating about this So if I do the interviews live and everybody knows it's a it's being live streamed So there's no editing it is what it is. Then I just removed that editing step altogether So that was how I did that later, But that was only after I'd done a lot. So I think I had that confidence from earlier.08:34 - 08:45Rochelle Moulton: But what I love about your solution is, okay, I've got this block. I know I'm not going to get over this easily, so I'm going to pivot and I'm just going to publish them live.08:45 - 08:45Alastair McDermott: Yeah.08:45 - 09:01Rochelle Moulton: I love it. In fact, I remember now, somebody in my circle that I'd introduced you to was recording on your show, and she didn't know it was going to be live streamed. It was really funny. She loved it though. She absolutely loved it. So, I think it's a great solution.09:01 - 09:04Alastair McDermott: Yeah, and she didn't read the FAQ page.09:04 - 09:06Rochelle Moulton: Probably, yeah, probably. That's right.09:06 - 09:32Alastair McDermott: Like I have the recording, the live recording. I have that process down after doing it so many times. Like the recognized authority is at episode 163, and then there's all of the other episodes. So I've done this quite a bit now at this point, but you can, on a live stream, you can actually do all of the things that you can do when you're editing a podcast. So I have a cold open now where it's a cold open on the live stream, and then I play the intro, and then I introduce the guests, and then I09:32 - 09:40Alastair McDermott: have the guests join me. And I can do, I can replicate all of that on a live stream now so it gives a very similar experience that if it was actually edited.09:40 - 09:49Rochelle Moulton: Well I also I'm just you know interpreting from what you're saying is that you've got a process that you follow I'm imagining since you're a spreadsheet guy, you have a checklist.09:50 - 10:01Alastair McDermott: I'm like Jonathan, I'm a former software engineer. So I'm very process driven. Yes. So I have workflows and you know what, like I have a documented workflow.10:01 - 10:01Rochelle Moulton: Yes.10:01 - 10:25Alastair McDermott: And I have SOPs. I also have a full-time assistant as she's been working with me for 3 years now So that that helps as well. It means that I'm I'm not doing a lot of the grunt work I'm able to to hand off a lot of that stuff as well, which really helps with you know with the publishing of the episodes and things like that. Yeah, I think having a solid workflow, figuring it out, I mean, you don't have that at the start. You have to experiment a little bit and figure out what works for you,10:25 - 10:38Alastair McDermott: what doesn't work for you. That's where I think it goes back to start before you're ready, because you will have to make mistakes and figure things out as you go. And if you wait until you feel ready, you're still probably going to go through that learning process anyway. So you might as well just get started with that now.10:39 - 11:12Rochelle Moulton: Oh, yeah. I mean, the kind of SOP that I wrote for the first few episodes, I think I changed probably 25% of it after maybe 5 episodes. And I'm still tweaking it. You know, it just takes a while to get into this sort of dance of doing it where it's comfortable. So, Alistair, how long did it take you to get traction? And by traction, I mean, you know, building a listener base, getting people to review you, getting the guests that you wanted. Like, do you remember how long that kind of took you?11:12 - 11:42Alastair McDermott: I'd say it took to get traction to the point where I was happy with it. I'd say it took me about 30 episodes, 40 episodes. And at that point, like I was able to bring on some pretty high profile people in my world. Like I was able to get Alan Weiss to come on, for example, David C. Baker, Chris Doe, you, people like that. So, and so I was able, like, for example, I put this in the book, I was able to invite Chris Doe on by saying, Hey, Chris, you know, do you know what you11:42 - 12:14Alastair McDermott: don't have in common with Alan Weiss, David C. Baker, Ron Baker, and all these other people. I said, you haven't been on my podcast yet. And he replied in 5 minutes and said, sure, let me book in. And that was because it's because when you start to get some people on, you can then name drop those people to get the next people on and kind of hopscotch your way up the food chain, as it were. So you get higher and higher profile people. So yeah, really, I've had Bob Burg on, people like that. And by the12:14 - 12:36Alastair McDermott: way, those super high profile people don't necessarily get the most podcast listens or downloads or even share it sometimes. So there is that aspect of it. It's not just about getting high profile people to access their audience. Sometimes it's the smaller people who don't have as big an audience, but who want to help share the episode as much as possible because they're not doing a podcast interview every week.12:36 - 13:07Rochelle Moulton: Oh, exactly. I've seen that in both of our podcasts. There's certain ones where it's incredible, the attraction you can get. And then the ones with this big name, you think everybody's gonna be listening and it's kind of like, and they didn't share it with their audience because they do so many. Yeah, it's

Moving from a job in big corporate to building a soloist expertise business is a bit of an adjustment. Consultant Mike Ryan turned his sweet spot into a thriving business and last year doubled his already significant revenue—he shares his story:The transition from being a buyer to becoming the seller—and how he built his referral “machine” (hint: cold calling didn’t work).Why he ignored advice to grow by hiring employees—and what he did instead.The two things that first accelerated and then doubled his revenue.Why understanding the relationship between fees and value for his clients was a major turning point in his business.How to resist the temptation to dial back after a 230% growth year and keep thinking bigger.LINKSMike Ryan Website | LinkedInRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOMike Ryan is an expert in solving supply chain and inventory challenges for middle-market manufacturers. He quickly analyzes complex issues, generates cash, and improves EBITDA to deliver repeatable results.With over 20 years of experience working for companies like GE and Goodyear, he tailors blue-chip best practices to help manufacturers achieve their goals.WORK WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 – 00:29Mike Ryan: There were 2 things at play. 1 was figuring out how to work in parallel, work with multiple clients at the same time, which was definitely a mindset shift. And the second 1 was being confident and having the confidence to be able to look at a client and say, hey, here’s the value we are going to unlock in your business. The beautiful thing about the work that I do is it’s all measurable. Here’s the value we expect to unlock.00:34 – 01:17Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, formerly known as Soloist Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m here with Mike Ryan, who is an expert in solving supply chain and inventory challenges for middle market manufacturers. He quickly analyzes complex issues, generates cash, and improves EBITDA to deliver repeatable results. With over 20 years of experience working for companies like GE and Goodyear, he tailors blue chip best practices to help manufacturers achieve their goals. He is also a super smart and generous guy, so I’m delighted to01:17 – 01:18Rochelle Moulton: have him on the show. Mike, welcome.01:19 – 01:21Mike Ryan: Thank you, Rachelle. Thank you for having me.01:21 – 01:31Rochelle Moulton: Oh, I’m delighted. I’m delighted. So you and I have been in each other’s orbit for a few years through my other podcast, The Business of Authority, and we’ve had some rather eye-opening discussions over the01:31 – 01:33Mike Ryan: years. We01:33 – 01:56Rochelle Moulton: have. But our last chat made me realize that I had to have you on this show because you broke a significant revenue barrier that many ex-corporados struggle with when they go solo. So I thought we could start there. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So how did you come to create your business? Was it always intended to be solo, or did you flirt with hiring employees? What was your plan?01:57 – 02:42Mike Ryan: So the plan for my business and really kind of the genesis was I realized that through consulting, instead of being tethered or obligated to 1 business, I could help multiple businesses. So that was the thought process behind it. And when it came to figuring out my niche, really where I started was I looked back through 20 years of resumes through all the supply chain and operations experience. And what I realized was I had a knack for freeing up cash by fixing supply chains. So that’s how I decided to focus in on helping middle market manufacturers solve02:42 – 02:44Mike Ryan: supply chain inventory problems.02:44 – 02:52Rochelle Moulton: I love that You targeted your genius zone, right? And how long did it take you to hit your first $100, 000 a year?02:53 – 03:37Mike Ryan: Ooh, that’s a great question. So I hit it year 1. Part of it was had a relationship, got into a business that was being cleaned up for sale. So I hit it the first year, but I missed it the second year. And it’s been said the lessons you pay for the ones you remember. And with that, I mean, it was a 9 month engagement. I was fat dumb and happy ringing the bell, getting paid, making great money. And when that engagement wrapped, What I realized was, oh, sugar, I haven’t had a single business development conversation in03:37 – 03:48Mike Ryan: 6 months. So that second year, I did not crack $100, 000 and then got back up years 3 and 4 back over that first hurdle.03:48 – 04:03Rochelle Moulton: Was there a panic in year 2? Because what you describe is not that uncommon, right? The first year you find a good whale client and it’s so easy not to do all the spade work of business development because, as you said, fat, dumb, and04:03 – 04:19Mike Ryan: happy. For me, it was the realization that no matter how engaged I am with a client, I have to set aside time to keep conversations going and keep relationships moving.04:19 – 04:25Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, so when you started your business, did you already have all the contacts you needed from04:25 – 05:01Mike Ryan: your corporate jobs, or were you going out and finding new contacts? New contacts, cold. I mean, I had been corporate for 20 years, GE and Goodyear. And it’s interesting because it’s kind of a bubble. So once I got outside of the corporate role, my first client, they were private equity owned, was able to get to know the operating partner, sort of the bridge between the PE and the business. And it was the operating partner who exposed me to the PE. And that’s where I realized private equity is going to be a huge source of referrals for05:01 – 05:27Mike Ryan: me. So it was figuring out where to fish and 2, then ended up creating a middle market networking group in Northeast Ohio. And the spirit of the group was really just helping good people connect. And it was through that combination of doing work with and for the private equity and the middle market networking group that helped me expand my sphere.05:28 – 05:33Rochelle Moulton: So, can I take that to mean that you did both the in-person piece in Ohio, but also virtual?05:33 – 05:35Mike Ryan: Yes, absolutely.05:35 – 05:45Rochelle Moulton: Okay, I love that because we almost never hear about people doing like actually in-person local networking anymore, but it sounds like you were able to use that to kind05:45 – 06:26Mike Ryan: of worm your way into the middle market space? Absolutely. I mean, pre-COVID, our last event before COVID, we had something like 65 people. And the list at that point was maybe 250 people, and we would rotate the list. And what we found was 65 people was too many to have a conversation with any meeting. So through COVID, that forced us really to be much more intentional about who we invited to the events. And what we found was 25 to 30 people really became the sweet spot where you’re gonna meet somebody new there’s gonna be a few06:26 – 06:34Mike Ryan: familiar faces but everybody can have a decent conversation without feeling like they had you know a football field to cover.06:34 – 06:59Rochelle Moulton: Yeah yeah I can see how that would evolve. Well, you kind of glossed over something that I sort of imagine our listeners saying, what, cold calls? Cold calls? Talk a little bit about, especially since you didn’t think of yourself as being a sales person. So how did you do those cold calls? Did you literally pick up the phone and call them or did you have a different process?07:00 – 07:41Mike Ryan: No. I think I tried 3 cold calls. I’m like, this is not who I am. What I learned was, I guess, first is refining that fishing line of, I help X with Y, being very, very concise about it. As I met people, whether it was just, you know, Northeast Ohio or through the private equity and their portfolio companies, it was asking them, Hey, you know, is there somebody else I should talk to? Or is there somebody else interesting that you know?” And wherever possible, I try to make it a warm introduction or a warm connection because07:41 – 07:59Mike Ryan: to me, I’m always open. I don’t have a call with anybody. I’m happy to help. But at some point, it’s, hey, I need to make sure I’m fishing where the fish are and really focus my time on people that either I could help or potentially they could make introductions for me.08:00 – 08:18Rochelle Moulton: I like that. I just want to point that out to listeners, this idea that when you have a conversation and you’re providing value to the person on the other end, and then when you’re done, you say, is there somebody else that you think I should talk to, is a very low key way to expand your network because they can just say, no, can’t think of anybody.08:18 – 08:20Mike Ryan: Yep, which is okay, yeah.08:20 – 08:24Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, but most times people will come up with somebody that they think you should meet.08:24 – 08:24Mike Ryan: Agreed,08:24 – 08:33Rochelle Moulton: yes. So Mike, as long as we’ve been connected, you’ve been pretty active on LinkedIn. Is that where you generate your leads now?08:34 – 09:16Mike Ryan: LinkedIn is a way for me to stay engaged and stay visible. At this point, most of my leads come through referrals. So it either comes through primarily through private equity channels where, hey, Mike, I heard you helped company XYZ, we’re having a similar problem, can we have a conversation? So a good portion of my work now is either referrals or repeat client work, where I’ve got a client from 3 years ago that said, hey, we need your help again. Can you help us? So it’s, I would say it leans heavily towards referrals And LinkedIn is a09:16 – 09:26Mike Ryan: way to stay visible. And as I work with clients who are active on LinkedIn, it’s another way for me to engage with them and help support them.09:26 – 09:54Rochelle Moulton: Got it, got it. And you know, it’s funny because People have a love-hate relationship with referrals, but when you’re doing a high-end service for corporate or in this case, private equity, and you build a reputation, you literally can get ongoing work from referrals and not have to spend a lot of time on business development once you’ve created the machine. And of course, I’m sure your second year, you were scratching your head trying to figure out how09:54 – 10:29Mike Ryan: you were ever going to create the machine. Yes. Right? And it is. I mean, Rochelle, you’re absolutely right. Creating that machine, nurturing the machine. I don’t know if I’m stretching the analogy too far, but keeping it fed and oiled, that’s the thing. Because if the machine stops running, there’s a lag. It could be 3 months, it could be 6 months, but all of a sudden the phone stops ringing. So keeping that machine going, even if it’s low key, just maintaining that momentum, right, that helps me 6 months a year and further down the road.10:29 – 10:46Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, there’s always a point where like we could just stop feeding the machine. But to your point, at some point it runs out. If we’re really good and really lucky, it can go quite a while. But it takes so little to nurture it on an ongoing basis. Like why would you stop?10:46 – 10:47Mike Ryan: Yeah, I agree.10:47 – 11:18Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. So it was an experience you told me about I would just love for you to share with listeners. And it was a while back and you told me about this experience from your mastermind. And I think it’s instructive for people who are trying to figure out their ultimate end game, whether that’s the sale of a business or retirement or just paying for a whole lot of college tuitions. If I remember the story correctly, you told your group that you wanted to have $3 million in your pocket in 10 years. And11:18 – 12:00Mike Ryan: their advice was? Go hire a whole bunch of people. That for me, the way I look at it, I’ve got blessed with a wife and 4 children. I am happy with that responsibility, right? Keeping my family fed and a roof over our head. For me, hiring an employee is a huge responsibility because not only am I responsible for my family, now I’m potentially responsible for somebody else’s family. So what I’ve done and how I’ve helped with bandwidth and capacity is I have a network of trusted advisors where if somebody needs help with the voice of a12:00 – 12:33Mike Ryan: customer, I’m going to call Dave Loomis. EOS, I’m going to call Kimberly Dyer. So I’ve got different areas that are adjacent. In most cases, they have solo businesses themselves, so they’re not dependent on necessarily revenue from me and they understand, hey, I absolutely will call you when the opportunity arises. And having that flexibility by hiring other contractors or other soloists has worked very, very well. Well, the responsibility is12:33 – 13:09Rochelle Moulton: so different. So if you don’t call them in 2024 and give them an assignment, they’re not gonna starve. You’re not gonna feel guilty that you haven’t created opportunities for them. It’s that, I think it’s that psychological or emotional component that people with integrity realize when not always right away but once you actually have people on the payroll you’re like oh I’m responsible and so yes I have to lead these employees they have to create the conditions for them to be successful and for us to be successful together. It’s just a whole different ball of wax. But13:09 – 13:42Rochelle Moulton: what I remembered at the time was that the idea was, okay, hire a bunch of people, build up your business, and then sell it at the end of 10 years for $3 million. And the other part of that, that’s really the fallacy is that the market will be ready to buy that at that price when you get to that point. I mean, 1, you might not get there to the market might have changed dramatically. I think when I sold my company 6 months later, the deals were a lot smaller. It was literally like half, some of13:42 – 14:02Rochelle Moulton: the deals were half the size of ours for the same kind of situation. So yeah, it’s difficult and it’s more dicey versus, okay, well, so if I wanna have $300, 000 or $3 million in 10 years, then if I make $600, 000 and keep half of it, I’m there.14:02 – 14:20Mike Ryan: Right. Yeah. And that’s right. There’s there’s multiple ways to get to that destination. You know, I’ve kept that bogey in mind year over year over year and figuring out, you know, how do I break through the next revenue hurdle and in what ways can I continue to be successful?14:21 – 14:25Rochelle Moulton: Well you just led me right into the next thing I want to talk about. Thank you.14:25 – 14:27Mike Ryan: That was very smooth. You’re welcome.14:27 – 14:50Rochelle Moulton: Well, whenever we talk, you’ve often attributed your success to your willingness to raise prices and tie them to the value that you create and I was hoping you could talk some more about that because you more than doubled your income which was already Substantial in a single year And so I really love for to kind of tease out how you did that.14:50 – 15:04Mike Ryan: Yep, sure. Yeah. So looking back at 2023, the revenue for 2023 was 230%. So just over double of 2022. So15:05 – 15:08Rochelle Moulton: a fantastic year. Yeah, by any stretch.15:09 – 15:48Mike Ryan: And there were 2 things at play there. 1 was figuring out how to work in parallel. So work with multiple clients at the same time, which was definitely a mindset shift. And the second 1 was being confident and having the confidence to be able to look at a client and say, hey, here’s the value we are going to unlock in your business, right? The beautiful thing about the work that I do is it’s all measurable. So here’s the value we expect to unlock. And if I’m asking for a 10th of that, you’re gonna get the payback.15:48 – 16:25Mike Ryan: The payback is going to be there. Having that confidence, knowing the value that we can unlock made it easier for me to say, hey, I want to be of service. I like your business. I like the people. Here’s what the investment is going to look like.” And I found that starting from, hey, here’s the value we anticipate creating and walking back to the investment for an engagement, I want to make it as much of a, oh my God, yeah. So I get to put $9 in my pocket and I give you $1. Okay. Right? I’m good16:25 – 17:05Mike Ryan: with that. And really the other thing that helps with that Rochelle is private equity understands that every dollar that we can put to the bottom line, there’s a multiple associated with it. If it’s a manufacturing business that has an EBITDA multiple of 6, every dollar we put to the bottom line, when the PE sells that business, each single dollar is worth $6. So if I’m asking for 10 cents of that $1, when it falls to the bottom line, there really is, there’s no math involved. It’s like, cause they know they’re gonna get a multiple of whatever17:05 – 17:10Mike Ryan: we can kick to the bottom line. So again, it just, it helps to bring it all back17:10 – 17:16Rochelle Moulton: to value. Well, plus speed, I would think. I’m thinking most PE companies want to be able to turn their companies around faster.17:17 – 17:44Mike Ryan: Yeah, Absolutely. So this is, you know, hey, there’s a three-year payback. No, that’s not going to fly. Right? We’re typically looking inside of a 12-month window to realize whether it’s freeing up working capital, unfreezing cash that’s frozen in inventory, or making the...

Can you build a six-figure advisory business working only 15 hours a week? CPA Erica Goode has—and she describes exactly how she did it (think serious boundaries):The lessons corporate burn-out can teach you about how to construct your own business.How setting rigid boundaries on her time allows her to meet all her work + life commitments.The value of time blocking (and another way to look at productivity).Why defining her version of “enough” allows her to stay focused and avoid chasing shiny objects.Introducing a potential new KPI for soloists—and why it needs your “happiness” factor to be complete.LINKSErica Goode | LinkedInRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOErica Goode has been a Certified Public Accountant for 15 years. She runs a virtual accounting firm supporting coaches and consultants with bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services and also hosts the Coaches, Consultants, and Money podcast.She’s a former Director of Finance at a Fortune 50 company and started her career as an auditor at a Big 4 public accounting firm. Erica is also the mom of 2 and the wife of a fellow CPA. She lives with her family in the mountains of Idaho.WORK WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Soloist Women community: a place to connect with like-minded women (and join a channel dedicated to your revenue level).The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPTTRANSCRIPT 00:00 – 00:26Erica Goode: We fall back into this idea of like always being disappointed. Like we didn’t set an expectation for ourselves, so we don’t know if we hit it, so we kind of feel melancholy about it. But when you set an expectation and you can kind of see if you were close or if you exceeded it, well, then you get to give yourself a pat on the back and acknowledge that what you’re doing is a good thing. And I think we tend to be pretty hard on ourselves. There’s more often than not, there’s time to give ourselves a pat00:26 – 00:27Erica Goode: on the back.00:32 – 01:12Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, formerly known as Soloist Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m here with Erica Goode, who’s been a CPA for 15 years. She runs a virtual accounting firm supporting coaches and consultants with bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services, and also hosts the Coaches Consultants and Money podcast, which is terrific. If you’re not already a listener, sign up. She’s a former director of finance at a Fortune 50 company and started her career as an auditor at a big 4 public accounting01:12 – 01:41Rochelle Moulton: firm. Erika is also the mom of 2 and the wife of a fellow CPA. She lives with her family in the mountains of Idaho. Erica, welcome. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Well, you are our first guest repeat, which I honestly didn’t think we’d do until at least 50 or so episodes. But after reading the LinkedIn conversation about your work schedule and all those really interesting responses, I just had to have you back on to talk about this.01:41 – 01:49Erica Goode: Oh, thanks so much. Yeah, I’ve been interested in that as well. The reactions are not necessarily what I’ve expected.01:50 – 02:11Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. So the post that I’m talking about was when you explained how you put in the 15 hours a week that you usually spend on your business. And by the way, That’s a 6 figure CFO business. And some of the comments were so illuminating, but let’s start with what your typical work week looks like. Yeah. So like02:11 – 02:47Erica Goode: you said, I work a 15 hour a week schedule on average, and I stick to that pretty well every week on Friday or on Mondays I work 9 to 3, Tuesdays 9 to 3, I don’t work at all on Wednesdays, Thursdays are 9 to 3 again and then Fridays I’m off with the rest of my family who also does four-day school and work weeks in our town. So that totals up to 15 hours when you consider a one-hour lunch in there which I forced myself to take away from my desk. But I, that is all I02:47 – 03:00Erica Goode: work. I have a 3 day weekend every week and I have time off for myself on Wednesdays as a buffer day or as an alone day or whatever needs to be done that day.03:00 – 03:19Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I really, I like that concept too of the flux day and when I looked at your schedule the first time I thought well That’s what allows you to really stick with your 15 is to know that you have this day That’s not Friday when everybody else is with you if you need to flex to work more or to do something personally more?03:20 – 03:56Erica Goode: Yeah, absolutely. Especially my kids are 12 and 8 and you cannot predict when somebody is gonna get sick or have to stay home from school. And so when I have that day, that keeps me within the whole week whole. Because if somebody shows up sick on Tuesday or Thursday, I know that I have a day to make it up, either this week or the following week, and it allows me to be present in the moment for whoever needs me in that moment that I can focus on them and without in the back of my mind worrying03:56 – 04:03Erica Goode: about gosh I was supposed to do this today and when will I get this done I know exactly well I’ll get it done It’ll be on that flex today.04:03 – 04:31Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that’s the insanity that comes when we’re in these kinds of professions where we do our best to create boundaries, but there are things beyond our control that we just have to flex with from time to time. And so I think the way you’ve done it is really interesting. It’s kind of, it’s in a little bit, in 1 sense, it’s like saying in order to work 15 hours a week, I have to create the conditions that I have more hours available if I need them. And then most of the time I don’t need them, because you’re04:31 – 04:37Rochelle Moulton: not going into that time. You’re not burrowing in to do more work presumably on Wednesdays if you don’t need to.04:38 – 05:08Erica Goode: Yeah, absolutely. I’m very good at time blocking my schedule, so I know what I’m going to do on every day that I’m working, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. And so if something comes up, I just know what I need to shift. And then I always, it’s like I’m being true to myself. I’m not always feeling like I’m behind. I also don’t feel like I’m ahead a lot of the time because I just have expectations of what’s going to happen that week. And I so rarely need that flex day. I need it when I need it. I can’t not05:08 – 05:45Erica Goode: schedule it. But what that allows for is, the world is my oyster at that point. For me, that looks like I love grocery shopping by myself at 7 a.m. When nobody else is in the store. So I do grocery shopping on Wednesday. I volunteer on Wednesdays. I might go for a hike. I might just get things done around the house that make our weekends better. We don’t ever do laundry or grocery shopping on the weekends because it gets done outside of that time. So really on the weekends is true family fun time where we could go05:45 – 05:47Erica Goode: out and adventure in the mountains of Idaho.05:48 – 05:52Rochelle Moulton: And you’re not wondering how the toilets are going to get cleaned. Absolutely not.05:52 – 05:57Erica Goode: Well, the kids get to do some chores too. So that’s who cleans the toilets in our house. All05:57 – 06:30Rochelle Moulton: right. Well, they’re the right ages to be doing chores. I love that. They are. So Erica, I know that you’ve been a hundred percent committed to working this kind of flex schedule at least as long as I’ve known you and I can almost hear the sighs as other consultants and especially CPAs during tax season, right? Imagine that schedule. Like talk to us about how you got to where you are now. How deliberate were your choices? I mean, obviously they’re very deliberate right now, but did you start out that way or was this like a path of06:30 – 06:32Rochelle Moulton: experimentation? Yeah, that’s06:32 – 07:04Erica Goode: a good question. I think a lot of people assume when you build a business that you work your tail off 60-hour weeks to build a business. And then if you’re lucky and you do it right, you can take your foot off the gas and relax in a hammock and work 15-hour weeks after that, or the four-hour work week, as we all know it. And mine was actually, that’s actually not true at all of what happened to me. I did it the opposite, where I grew into 15 hours. I had come from a background personally where I07:04 – 07:41Erica Goode: was in corporate finance. I had hit a season of burnout in my life and it was very traumatizing and it was very telling. And it actually, I’m so grateful for it because it forced me to have a reckoning with myself and what I wanted my life and my career and everything to become. What was I really going after? And because I had that experience, I wound up leaving my corporate career and staying home, quote, just to be a stay at home mom, which is a job in itself, but I wasn’t working for a couple years. And07:41 – 08:21Erica Goode: I just so desperately missed finance work. I so desperately missed accounting that I wanted to come back and do something, but I was so truly traumatized from this burnout experience that I put up the fiercest boundaries that wouldn’t allow me to go back to that place because if you’ve ever been in a terrible place and you don’t want to go back, you do everything in your life to not get back to that place. And so I had honestly accidentally created a business, accidentally picked up a client number 1. And at that point, our kids were 608:21 – 08:56Erica Goode: and 2. And I was committed to only work when they were not around when they were at school. They must have been 3 because a three-year-old went to three-year-old preschool. If you ever had a three-year-old in preschool, they’re barely out of the house. Three-year-old preschool is a cute stepping stone into other things. Our little guy was out of the house max 3 to 4 hours a week. Between drive time, that only allowed me to really work for 2 hours a week max. And I didn’t tell anybody that I had started a business except for this 108:56 – 09:29Erica Goode: client. I didn’t market, I didn’t have a website, I had nothing. So there was no fear of picking up another client because nobody knew about me. And I just committed to this 1 client for 2 hours a week. And I did my work and I told myself that as the kids grew, my business would grow. And it could only grow as fast as the kids grew because that would allow more time to open up for myself and so it started off at 2 hours a week eventually it went to 6 hours a week then it went09:29 – 09:59Erica Goode: to 10 hours a week and here I am at 15 hours a week. I actually thought that eventually I’d keep going into 20 hours a week, but it kind of fit it. Found a happy medium at 15 hours where the profit is good, The work schedule is good. It’s very holistically healthy. And I don’t feel a need to add on more hours at this point, though I could probably carve some out of that flex day if I really wanted to.10:00 – 10:04Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, it’s kind of like you find that sweet spot and you don’t want to mess with it.10:04 – 10:30Erica Goode: Definitely. Yeah, what more would I be going for if I wanted to do that? And I got to be careful what I’m chasing. And I’ve chased the wrong things in the past. I’ve been in places where I’ve chased salary and I chase title and I’m very good at chasing things and getting them. It doesn’t always feel good when you get them. And so I’m very conscious of what future Erica will feel like if we chase the wrong thing.10:30 – 11:01Rochelle Moulton: Well, the other thing I love about this is some moms have told me that they actually scaled back when their kids were teenagers because they felt like the kids needed them more in the teenage years than they had when they were younger, which is the opposite of what most people would expect. But the other thing is that then you’ve got the ability to flex back up once they’re off to college or living their lives or keep it the same and just take on a hobby or work for a cause you care about. I mean, the flexibility11:01 – 11:04Rochelle Moulton: of what you’ve created is really the bomb.11:05 – 11:20Erica Goode: It’s the benefit of being a solopreneur. You’re accountable to yourself and your clients, and you get to create what you’d like to create. And there are not many people in professions that allow you to do that. It’s a blessing for sure.11:20 – 11:37Rochelle Moulton: Well, you’ve worked hard to do it. So how important are automation and people leverage with sustaining both your schedule and your revenue? I mean, how much of either of those 2 are you using?11:37 – 12:14Erica Goode: Yeah, that’s a really great question. And I find that because I haven’t historically spent time growing very fast, I’ve grown very thoughtfully. So as my business has grown, albeit slowly, it’s given me the extra time to think through the automations and to think through what’s the tech stack in my business and in my industry that if it’s just going to be me and if it has to be 15 hours, because in my mind, everything I do has to fit in 15 hours. So if I can’t fit it in in the way I’m doing it now, there12:14 – 12:53Erica Goode: is not an option to add hours in my mind. I have to find a system to help me do it faster. And so that’s been really, really instrumental in making sure that I’m not being inefficient as I grow because I can only grow through efficiencies if I’m forcing my time to be capped. Now, and in my industry, there is no limit to tech stack options out there along every step of the way. For me, that looks like I use 1 bookkeeping system. I am 00I always say a one-trick pony I don’t want to learn multiple systems12:53 – 13:20Erica Goode: I want to live in 1 system and know it really well And if you want to be a client of mine, I’m gonna be the best person to work in For me, it’s QuickBooks Online. I’m gonna be the best person who does QuickBooks Online for you. But if you’re on 0, then I’m not the right person for you because it won’t fit in my system to learn a new system to help 1 client in a different tech stack app.13:20 – 13:44Rochelle Moulton: Oh, I mean, I could tell you so many stories about consultants who have veered out of what has been working for them with the idea that, Oh, I’ll just do it this 1 time for this client, only to be really surprised by what a challenge it can be to learn a new system. And it’s not that learning is hard, it’s how it impacts everything else that you do. Yeah, absolutely.13:45 – 14:19Erica Goode: I actually just in the past few months, let go of a beloved client of mine because they were outside of the niche that I had committed to and I had built all of our systems and processes around coaches and consultants and small agencies and everything I do works really well in that. And I had a client who I loved and I’m still friends with outside of work who didn’t fit into that system well. And I actually let them go kindly with lots of notice and I sent them off well, but they didn’t fit in my system,14:19 – 14:22Erica Goode: and that was gonna really start to impact my efficiencies.14:24 – 15:02Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I mean, there’s a, and I mean this in the best way, there’s a rigidity about the way you’re describing these boundaries, right? There’s a boundary around how many hours, there’s a boundary around efficiency, around tech efficiency, on streamlining processes in your day that is, I think a lot of people when they go hang out their own shingle, don’t realize that they have the ability to create these kinds of boundaries. Yeah. Right? Because we think, oh yeah, I’m on my own, so I have to do whatever the client wants versus really understanding yourself, understanding your offerings,15:02 – 15:08Rochelle Moulton: and how you want to live the soloist life, to coin a phrase, right?15:09 – 15:38Erica Goode: Absolutely. Somebody listening to this, lots of people listening to this are going to roll their eyes when I say it like this, but it’s actually very hard to work 15 hours a week because you have to create these boundaries and you have to say no and it’s actually extremely difficult to stick to what you committed to because I wanna help everybody and sometimes a lot of weeks I wanna work more but if I work more than it means I’m pulling away from something else, and that’s going to feel an impact too. And so it’s actually really,15:38 – 16:05Erica Goode: you’re kind of holding yourself back in a lot of ways. You’re not able to help everybody you would if you had a 50-hour week ahead of you. You’re not able to, I don’t know, to just to reach out to people or to do a project that’s on your list. I know I could get this project done if I had an extra 10 hours, but I know that it’s not going to feel good in the long run. So I’m going to commit to that 15 hours. And that’s, it’s hard work limiting yourself almost.16:06 – 16:42Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Well, you’re choosing. You’re making choices. It’s like you’re a concentrated version. That’s how I’m thinking about it, right? Because it’s so down to the essence that there’s no extra, there’s no fluff, it’s the essence. Yeah. So I want to go back to the LinkedIn post for a second because there was an observation by someone on there and he was just starting out and he said, I couldn’t possibly work so few hours because there was so much to do starting a business. Do you remember what you told him?16:42 – 16:44Erica Goode: No, I don’t. Will you remind me?16:45 – 17:14Rochelle Moulton: Well,...

Failure can be an excellent teacher—if we’ll only let it! In this solo episode, I walk you through the lessons from a recent failed launch to answer that all-important question: Is it time to quit?Why continuing to pursue a passion project can sometimes masquerade as (business) madness.The dirty little secret almost no one who does public launches talks about.The top questions to ask yourself when an offering isn’t performing.TL;DR at minute 12.08, I make an announcement about my future services and this podcast 😉.LINKSRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

Dr Amanda Crowell, author of “Great Work: Do What Matters Most Without Sacrificing Everything Else”, tells us how to get to the work we were most meant to do:How to get off the “productivity roller coaster of doom” to make the time for your Great Work.Why your health and happiness make your Great Work flow easier—and how to optimize for them.A few questions to consider if you haven’t quite figured out your Great Work (hint: the threads are already there).A framework to catalyze your Great Work from simply a motivating vision to specific day-to-day actions.The role of identity in keeping you from—or rushing you to—your Great Work.LINKSDr. Amanda Crowell Website | Book | LinkedIn | InstagramRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIODr. Amanda Crowell is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, podcaster, author of Great Work, and the creator of the Great Work Journals.Amanda's TEDx talk: Three Reasons You Aren’t Doing What You Say You Will Do has received more than a million views and has been featured on TED's Ideas blog and TED Shorts. Her ideas have also been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Wall Street Journal, Quartz, and Thrive Global.Amanda lives in New Jersey with her husband, two adorable kids, and a remarkable newfiepoo named Ruthie. She spends her days educating future teachers, coaching accidental entrepreneurs, and speaking about how to make progress on Great Work to colleges and corporate teams.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:26Amanda Crowell: If I showed up unprepared for a consulting meeting, they should fire me. I did it wrong. I picked the wrong thing. But you can't allow that truth to be the fear that keeps you racing against the clock to do every single thing perfectly, because you cannot allow yourself to ever do perfectly passable work because in your heart of hearts you knew it could be better. That is a prison of your own making.00:30 - 01:10Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton and today I'm here with Dr. Amanda Kroll, who is the author of Great Work, Do what matters most without sacrificing everything else. She is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, podcaster, and creator of the great work journals. Amanda's TEDx Talk, 3 Reasons You Aren't Doing What You Say You Will Do, has received more than a million views and has been featured on Ted's Ideas blog and Ted shorts. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, 2 adorable kids, and01:10 - 01:27Rochelle Moulton: a remarkable new fee poo named Ruthie and we're all about the pets here. And she spends her days educating future teachers, coaching accidental entrepreneurs, and speaking about how to make progress on great work to colleges and corporate teams. Amanda, welcome.01:28 - 01:30Amanda Crowell: Thank you for having me.01:31 - 01:32Rochelle Moulton: We finally made it happen.01:33 - 01:36Amanda Crowell: I know. It's just like that these days.01:36 - 01:56Rochelle Moulton: I hear you. Well, I discovered your book, Great Work, and I knew you had to come on the show, so thank you for joining us. It is so full of great wisdom for soloists in the expertise space, I almost didn't know where to start. So how about with a definition? So Amanda, when you say we want to do our great work, what do you mean exactly?01:57 - 02:32Amanda Crowell: That's such a good question. So great work, most simply described, is the work that matters the most to you, which almost sounds like a cop out. It's like, yeah, but what is it? But it really is the definition. It is my experience of people that everybody has something inside of them that has been brewing since birth, some issue that they care about, some industry that they're drawn to, some big idea that has sparked light in them. And it's not that it's 1 true love, but it's more like a way of being in the world that can02:32 - 03:06Amanda Crowell: shift and change. Like you write this book and then you start that podcast and then you do this job and then you start that team and it can shift and grow with you as you grow. But there's a golden thread almost that ties it all the way through that marks it out as your great work. What's interesting about your great work is that it's often the thing, tragically, that we don't get to. It's the thing that in a world of commitments and expectations, we often spend time saying, oh, I will write my book when I'm retired,03:06 - 03:38Amanda Crowell: or I'll get there later when the kids are grown. And we never really prioritize it because we continue to prioritize the expectations, the external demands over our great work. And so the book and my work is to help people figure out how to do that great work now without, make, because 1 thing that will happen is people will be like, how, okay, I'm going to add my great work to my life and I'll change nothing else. And then you get on what I like to call the productivity roller coaster of doom, which is where you're just03:38 - 03:51Amanda Crowell: very burned out and you're doing too much and you're stretched too thin and you think I never should have done my great work. But there's just skills and strategies to make it possible to do your great work without sacrificing your health and happiness03:52 - 04:26Rochelle Moulton: Well, I now have a new phrase the productivity roller coaster of doom Yeah, I think a lot of people can relate to that kind of on that topic So in the opening of the book, you tell a series of stories about your own health challenges that forced you down this path of managing your work and your life and your stress better. And I was struck by how after you went through all the time management tools, including David Allen's getting things done, which I also like, you realized that you were productive but not, and I quote, more04:26 - 04:34Rochelle Moulton: relaxed, grounded, and joyful. So, Will you talk some more about how we can let our happiness matter?04:35 - 05:11Amanda Crowell: Oh wow, what a great question. And I want to give a lot of props to productivity tips and tricks, you know, like you can get this. The story goes that I totally maxed myself out and then was able to create a semblance of work-life balance by using, getting things down and other like productivity tools and tricks. And it was a really great learning experience for me. I learned a ton. I was able to do, as they say, a lot more without getting burned out. But there was this missing undertone, this current of, I was still mostly05:11 - 05:50Amanda Crowell: beholden to the external expectations of deadlines, multiple clients. I've always had multiple jobs. And there was this feeling of like Now I'm doing so much more But I didn't make any space for my great work. I just did more of what was expected of what was default I wasn't necessarily exerting a lot of influence on my own life. And that just felt like it was this impossible game where the more I gave to these expectations, the more I was doing and I was getting accolades and I was doing well and I was making more money, but05:50 - 06:24Amanda Crowell: like my life, my feeling of my life wasn't changing. And what happened to me very specifically was that I actually got everything I wanted. I got this book deal that I really was like a lifelong dream of mine. I was totally booked with coaching clients. I was you know really enjoying my work at the School of Education where I teach. You know everything was going great but I was so at capacity all the time that I ended up, there's a thing that happens in very stressed out people, which I think describes most of us. If you06:24 - 06:57Amanda Crowell: have an injury, like a traumatic, but that's a more dramatic word than I really mean, like I fell hard on my foot. Sometimes if you really will fall hard, it triggers all the inflammation in your body. And I had this massive, just because I hurt my foot, I had a massive full body autoimmune flare up. No 1 really knows why. It wasn't diagnosed as like rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia is the other 1 that they thought it might be. It wasn't those things. And yet every single joint in my body was inflamed and it was hard to06:57 - 07:31Amanda Crowell: climb the stairs. It was quite the wake-up call actually. And I was like, Why did I do this? Why did getting what I want trigger my body's most complete shutdown? And it was just a moment where I was like, Okay, Amanda, what are you doing here on this planet? Are you gonna achieve and strive and drive yourself and just collect accolades that you don't have any time to enjoy? Or are you going to not do that? And you know, it felt like a choice. But really, at the end of the day, I couldn't survive what I07:31 - 08:05Amanda Crowell: was doing to myself. I was making my own body attack itself. And I had this pivotal moment where I was like, okay, I guess that's it for me. I'm just not gonna do, I didn't have the term great work yet, but I'm just not gonna do my great work. I'm just gonna give up and I'm gonna like, just reach my classes and just try to enjoy the way things are. And what shocked me, it was truly shocking, was the minute that I took the steps necessary. I said no to the extra things I was doing. I08:05 - 08:37Amanda Crowell: closed down some clients that I was working with. I was still working with a consulting company that I had, we used to be full time with, and now it was just like a part time consultant. I stopped doing that. And I added things to my life that made me more relaxed and happy. I started riding my bike again and healed what had become a somewhat strained relationship with my husband and just really kind of became a relaxed and more, I don't know, joyful version of myself. And what truly shocked me was that was when my great08:37 - 09:14Amanda Crowell: work took off. As a recovery project, I designed these great work journals that have become like a foundation of the work that I do with clients and I really love it. My own sort of whole person time management system. I wrote the book, Great Work, I launched the podcast. And I found that people are more interested and willing to work with me. And Everything just exploded into the space that I had created by not doing everything all the time for everyone anymore, but instead doing what really matters and making sure that I never got. I now09:14 - 09:46Amanda Crowell: think of my resilience or my like bounce back ability. That's something that I manage almost the way people manage their budgets. I watch it, I keep track of it, I make sure that if I'm doing something really heavy loaded early in the week, I don't do it later in the week. If I start to get sight, you know, noticing my own triggers, then I build more resilience into my life again, because I just now realize that great work, the work that really matters, not like checking boxes off on a list, but The work that really matters,09:46 - 10:14Amanda Crowell: it happens because of your resilience and despite hustle. That's what I really learned. That if you wanna do great work, you stop hustling and you actually build your resilience and you create space for creativity and communication and critical thinking and collaboration, which are the things that create amazing world-changing art and ideas and products and whatever else it is that you're doing speeches, books, blog posts, podcasts.10:16 - 10:50Rochelle Moulton: In sort of an odd way, the gift of your health experience is that you learned that you now manage your bounce back ability, your resilience. And I love to think that we don't all have to go that far. I know. I mean, sometimes we do. But if we can, you know, start to dial that back and really recognize, there's a quote from the book that kind of gets to this point, great work flows better when we are healthier and happier. Yeah. Yeah. And I just love that because I think sometimes we think it's supposed to be10:50 - 11:05Rochelle Moulton: a grind. This is mostly an anti hustle crowd that's listening to this. It's kind of an anti bro hustle. Yeah, it is about being healthy and happy and then having more capacity to do the things that are really meaningful to you.11:05 - 11:10Amanda Crowell: Yeah and doing them faster and more creatively and with more success really, which is the best part.11:11 - 11:27Rochelle Moulton: Yeah so of course the big question that lots of us ask ourselves is what is our purpose, What is our great work? I mean, if a listener hasn't quite figured it out yet, like where do you suggest they start with the 4 essential pillars that you talk about?11:27 - 11:56Amanda Crowell: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that, you know, for people who are book readers, I think chapter 2 of the book is a great exploration of that piece by piece. But the top level of it is that your great work has always been with you. So a lot of times we think we don't know what our great work is, but the truth is we're just not believing what we're hearing from inside of ourselves. So there are questions that you can ask yourself like in the book there's like a little list of them it's like11:56 - 12:26Amanda Crowell: what what has always been true like ever since you were a small person like what has always interested you what has always captivated your interest what makes you think could I possibly do that, like let that be the first spark of it, but then there's also questions like you can find it through the opposite of that, which is like what isn't working in your life right now. Like that can point the way out of the things that maybe would be great work for other people but aren't for you. And like what feels missing. I think the12:26 - 13:04Amanda Crowell: most interesting question actually that helps you discover what your great work is, is when you have an experience of like full body jealousy. And when somebody has an accomplishment and you just think to yourself, why isn't that me? Why didn't I do that? Why haven't I set myself up for that too? Like I could do that and it doesn't mean that you're begrudging somebody their accomplishment, but instead it just points the way towards something that we feel deep inside ourselves would bring us a great amount of joy that we could be great at that could be13:04 - 13:32Amanda Crowell: part of our contribution to the world. There's lots of different tips and tricks and stuff like that you can do an audit of the work that you have done. This is a great 1 that people can do without any more information which is like write down each and every place that you've either worked or projects that you've worked on depending on the kind of work that you do and Write down the parts about each job that you really enjoyed and loved and what you enjoyed and loved about it And then look across your history and you13:32 - 14:03Amanda Crowell: once you make your great work visible to you, it'll pop out like a neon sign. Like, here I am. This is what I am. And it's there. I've never met anyone. I have a lot of people who tell me, I understand that some people have great work, Amanda, but I just don't. I just really don't. And I just don't believe it. I don't believe it because I've had hundreds of conversations with people and it all it really this the vast majority of people just don't believe that what they are hearing inside themselves is like good enough14:03 - 14:36Amanda Crowell: for great work or like that they have the education or the expertise or the connections possible to do to get involved in what it is they're hoping to do. They're hoping to do. And so it's more a question of learning how to believe in what you're hearing and then giving yourself the tools and the time and the patience to figure out how to do it piece by piece, which is the other half of the book. First half of it's like, what is great work? And the second half is like, how do we actually do it? Well,14:36 - 14:46Amanda Crowell: it's that question of value, too, because I think a lot of times what comes naturally to us, we discount. Because we think it comes like this to everyone.14:47 - 15:24Rochelle Moulton: But I don't have enough fingers and toes to count all of the people I've met in my life who have a unique skill that I just revere. And they don't see it because it's there inside the bottle, right? They just can't see it. So it's sometimes I think what's helpful too is, is when you listen to yourself, but you also listen to things other people who you respect, say, when it's good, ignore the bad stuff. But when it's good, there are some clues in there into the things that you do that really Impact and matter to15:24 - 15:27Rochelle Moulton: other people that I think we can pay attention to sometimes.15:27 - 15:56Amanda Crowell: Yes. That's a really great point You can actually go on a you can tell them I was listening to a podcast and the author of the book said that I had to, so now I have to. You know, go to 3 or 5 people that you just really value and say like, what are the 3 skills that you would say are my...

LinkedIn Jedi Master (and Founder of the B2B Writing Institute) Sarah Greesonbach shares how she uses LinkedIn to grow her business and relationships--and how you can too.How Sarah managed to build two soloist businesses—one with clients and the other with students—with one LinkedIn presence.Using LinkedIn as a way to develop your point of view and practice your voice with your ideal people.Why it’s time to step up and be heard even if you don’t look or sound like whatever popular culture says is “in”.How to rev up your LinkedIn machine without having to prove how smart you are (or spend every waking hour working at it).A few sample prompts to re-think how to humanize your LinkedIn posts.LINKSSarah Greesonbach Website | LinkedInRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramA FEW OF SARAH’S PLAYFUL SOCIAL PROMPTS1.  What event or milestone can you celebrate that very few others can celebrate?2.   What do you wish you knew about your craft or profession 6 months ago? What about 10 years ago?3.   What’s a special geographic/physical location to you, and why?4.   What’s surprised you about parenting in a good way?5.   What’s surprised you about business or work in a good way? BIOSarah Greesonbach is the founder of the B2B Writing Institute, a rigorous training program that prepares writers for a vibrant career in B2B marketing.Since 2013, Sarah has operated B2B Content Studio and invoiced more than $1 million as a freelance writer. Writing for agencies and Fortune 500 technology companies in the HR, retail/e-com, and higher education space, Sarah develops B2B content marketing assets like original research, white papers, and more.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 – 00:24Sarah Greesonbach: People don’t care what you’re talking about. They care how you feel about it and how you make them feel about it. And so people don’t care what information we’re posting, but if we can share it in a way that finally lets it connect or lets them connect emotionally with themselves, like some kind of in there communication-wise, that’s what makes people actually stop and pay attention and maybe even look forward to the next thing you’re going to share.00:28 – 01:12Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rachelle Moulton, and today I’m here with my pal Sarah Greesonbach, who is the founder of the B2B Writing Institute, which is a rigorous training program that prepares writers for a vibrant career in B2B marketing. And since 2013, Sarah has operated B2B content studio and invoice more than a million dollars as a freelance writer. Writing for agencies and Fortune 500 technology companies in the HR, retail, e-comm, and higher education space, Sarah develops B2B content marketing assets like original research, white01:12 – 01:28Rochelle Moulton: papers, and more. Sarah, welcome. Hello, Thank you so much for having me. And I’ve been such a fan of your stuff for so long that this is quite literally the fanciest I’ve ever felt in my life. So thank you. Well that’s our goal is to make everybody here feel fancy.01:29 – 01:32Sarah Greesonbach: I do if I had to check the mirror to make sure I wasn’t wearing a top hat.01:32 – 02:04Rochelle Moulton: Well, I had to say your hair looked fabulous today. I just say that. Okay. So I just had to have you on the show to talk about your LinkedIn presence. And I realized that you have the very distinct advantage of being a writer and a very, very witty one. Truly. Thank you. Yeah. But your LinkedIn posts always draw me in because of their humanity. I feel like they show you as a real professional and a real person. And of course, we’re going to talk about your business too. You know I’m going to want to do that.02:04 – 02:19Rochelle Moulton: But maybe I should say your 2 businesses, right? Since you write for clients and you teach other writers through your B2B writing institute. So let’s start with kind of your overall business. How long did it take you to hit your first 100, 000?02:21 – 02:41Sarah Greesonbach: Ooh, that would have been maybe 2 and a half years in. And I was actually boosted by my first maternity leave because that was my real motivation. I had gone through that first year of just replacing my salary and that second year of almost hitting 100K. And then suddenly I was pregnant and it was like, this is the year this is going to happen.02:41 – 02:44Rochelle Moulton: Oh, I have no choice, right?02:44 – 02:48Sarah Greesonbach: Yeah, it really was just up against the wall. You have to make it happen.02:48 – 03:10Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, yeah. So talk to us about when and why you started the B2B Institute, because if I understand your career arc correctly, you’ve done this B2B writing, you’ve done it successfully, You figured out how to make 100k plus. You figured out how to take actually 2 maternity leaves. So where in all this did you start the B2B Institute?03:11 – 03:42Sarah Greesonbach: The seed or the disgusting little worm actually began when I was a high school English teacher and that’s how I got my start with careers in general and it was just such a bad experience that it really put me off teaching and it made me question what my purpose was and if I had maybe gotten that wrong And I’m sure we can all imagine like when you crash and burn with a career choice Suddenly you’re questioning all of your intuition and all of the decisions you’ve ever made which is really pleasant So when I bounced back03:42 – 04:13Sarah Greesonbach: and kind of returned to like maybe I’m a writer maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do I got into government contracting and then marketing and was suddenly laid off and so that’s what threw me into freelancing. So eventually it took about 5 years for the teacher in me to heal and for me to remember like how important it is for me to help other people achieve something or transform something or learn a new skill. And so once I started doing some webinars, some teaching, it just really felt like the right thing to do. And that that04:13 – 04:19Sarah Greesonbach: showed me that my path could be teaching and not getting rocks thrown at me in high school lunchrooms.04:20 – 04:23Rochelle Moulton: Oh, I don’t even want to, I try to forget high school myself.04:23 – 04:24Sarah Greesonbach: True story.04:26 – 04:43Rochelle Moulton: So it’s challenging serving 2 audiences, right? Because you, you’ve got the clients that you’re trying to attract with your writing and you have writers that you want to teach how to become better B2B writers. So how did you serve 2 audiences and are you still doing that now?04:44 – 05:18Sarah Greesonbach: I am and I was actually really sneaky about it because what I did was learn from people like you and Jonathan Stark and the book, Book Solid, Michael Port, just all of that stuff. And I was really intentional about building a client base that was recurring so that I don’t actually have to prospect all that much to keep the writing side of my business going. It’s truly like 90% recurring clients and clients I’ve had for 3 to 5 years. And so I did have a lot of inner emotional turmoil of, am I allowed to talk about05:18 – 05:26Sarah Greesonbach: freelancing? Will that put off my old clients and stuff? But surprisingly, no 1 really cares and it hasn’t affected the writing work that I’ve been able to do.05:27 – 05:43Rochelle Moulton: Well, you know, what’s also interesting is I think we also over index on what we think our clients care about what we do. Cause I’m like a lot of them, they never go to our website, right? They, they may or may not read the stuff that we send out to our email list. They may not even be on our email list.05:43 – 05:50Sarah Greesonbach: Yeah. It’s kind of like your family. They don’t know what you’re doing. They care about you, but they don’t necessarily care what you’re saying on LinkedIn.05:51 – 05:55Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, well they just don’t get it. That happens too.05:55 – 05:56Sarah Greesonbach: Yeah.05:56 – 06:29Rochelle Moulton: So I saw that you said, and I’m gonna quote, successful social media was about giving myself intentional time, space, and permission. Love that permission. To say what I want to say and to put thought and time and intention into how I phrase what I think. So I like that you see using social as an opportunity, but what made you start down the path to conquering social, specifically with LinkedIn? Was there like a single event or a situation that made you decide to go all in?06:29 – 07:04Sarah Greesonbach: Yeah, For me, I’ve always tried to follow the path of where my customers were going to go for information. And since I had some early work in career transition to help people jump from basically being Smeez in their line of work to writing as Smeez. And just everybody heads to LinkedIn once they start thinking about jobs. So it always really stood out as a place where everybody else is kind of boring for the most part. So you could stand out just by being funny or sharing something obvious, almost like improv or stand up. And then it’s07:04 – 07:19Sarah Greesonbach: where people go when they start thinking about businessy, worky kind of stuff. And so it just seemed really obvious if I can use that network effect and show people what I’m thinking or what goes on behind the scenes, that that would be a way to build trust over the long term.07:20 – 07:24Rochelle Moulton: Okay. And when did you really go all in? How long ago is that?07:24 – 07:27Sarah Greesonbach: I’d say it’d be 3 to 5 years.07:27 – 07:29Rochelle Moulton: Oh, it’s not that long in the scheme of things.07:30 – 07:58Sarah Greesonbach: Yeah, I had a lot of hangups when I first started. Man, it just seems like it’s all hangups at this point. But 1 I remember really clearly was the sense that if I want to be an authority in the space, then I need to be very neutral and very formal and very authoritative, like all the boring things that have come before. And so right before COVID, I went to a retreat in New York. And 1 of the things was doing some mindset exercises and writing out how we’ve been approaching things and how we’re going to change07:58 – 08:12Sarah Greesonbach: things. And I just had this light bulb moment of, I’m gonna stop trying to pursue authority by being neutral. And I’m going to like actually be more human, like exactly what you said. And that was when people actually started caring what I was saying.08:13 – 08:23Rochelle Moulton: Wow. I feel like that’s a mic drop moment where you realize you can be yourself and you can have an opinion and you can really find your own voice.08:24 – 08:56Sarah Greesonbach: Ooh, yeah, that’s like 12 mic drops right there. Cause there were so many reasons. I’m generally a fairly confident person and I know I have things to contribute, but when it came to Getting on the internet and telling people to look at me and listen to me I definitely had to give myself permission for that and to just accept that maybe I had something relevant for people to see and hear. It was a process I would not have gotten through without 2 coaches. A mind tech coach and a business coach and lots of crying.08:56 – 09:13Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Clearly you’re a terrific writer but Lots of great writers crash and burn on LinkedIn and Twitter too, for that matter. So what goals did you have at first and how did you start making it work for you? I mean, once you decided not to be bland.09:14 – 09:47Sarah Greesonbach: Oh, I love that because at first I definitely thought if I just show off how much I know about writing or business then surely droves and droves of people Fuck to see what I have to say and obviously that’s not a good decision because the internet is full of information. It’s actually, so I do improv for fun with my husband. And 1 of the lessons they really hammer in is people don’t care what you’re talking about. They care how you feel about it and how you make them feel about it. And so people don’t care what09:47 – 10:04Sarah Greesonbach: information we’re posting, but if we can share it in a way that finally lets it connect or lets them connect emotionally with themselves, like some kind of in there communication wise, that’s what makes people actually stop and pay attention and maybe even look forward to the next thing you’re going to share.10:04 – 10:39Rochelle Moulton: Well, it’s working on me because like, first of all, you post a lot. So you’re in my feed a lot, but I never pass them by. Like sometimes If they’re really long, I might scan them. And the other thing that you do that’s really intriguing to me, I’m so in awe, I just could not do this myself, is you’ll get, let’s say 10, 20, even 30 responses on something, and you’ll have this quick witty response to each 1. Like, I think just recently you said something to me, I commented on something and you said, I’m putting10:39 – 10:50Rochelle Moulton: on a hat and I’m tipping it. Who says that? But it made me feel seen and appreciated. And it was clever. I mean, I just love that you’re able to do that.10:50 – 11:03Sarah Greesonbach: Oh, I love that. Thank you. Yeah, I definitely had to talk myself into being more comfortable. And sometimes I just have to go with whatever comes to mind first, and really not think about the consequences.11:03 – 11:19Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Well, and sometimes you’re a little goofy, which I love. I think you had something, like there was something for 1 of the products that you were selling. Like there was some extra that came with it. I can’t remember. I think it was like a drawing of a cat or something. I can’t remember.11:19 – 11:20Sarah Greesonbach: The crap dragon.11:20 – 11:25Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. That was it. The crap dragon. I love that. I thought that was genius.11:25 – 11:27Sarah Greesonbach: That’s a deep dive. Yeah.11:29 – 11:33Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. So What do you see as your goals for LinkedIn now?11:34 – 12:08Sarah Greesonbach: Again, I feel like I’m admitting to being really sneaky, but that is what marketing does sometimes. And I think I realized my goal for LinkedIn is to be known and be able to have a relationship with people because they can’t trust and like you or buy from you until they actually feel like they know you. And once that clicked for me and once I realized it could be safe to be known on LinkedIn, Then it got really easy to share about marriage and parenting and the times in my business that I felt failure. We had mentioned12:08 – 12:12Sarah Greesonbach: a little bit about weight stuff and being a plus-size person online.12:12 – 12:36Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Will you talk about that for a moment? Sure. Because anybody who doesn’t look like what they think is the entertainment norm, right? Like A58 blonde haired white woman with blue eyes, right? Anybody who’s who doesn’t feel like they’re that archetype can often have a lot of trouble getting in front of a camera or a microphone or a LinkedIn page.12:37 – 13:10Sarah Greesonbach: Yeah, it kills me how subconscious it can be, because if you had asked me if I thought that had anything to do with leadership or being in public, I would have laughed and kind of scooched past you on the sidewalk. But when I went to do it, it was suddenly, everything was cold. My intuition was like, no, don’t do this. It’s dangerous. You can’t do this. And When I did that inner work with the coaches and the journaling and stuff it came up Well, who am I to contribute anything since I’m fat? Once I wrote that13:10 – 13:38Sarah Greesonbach: down and I read that and I was like, do I actually believe that that can’t be no that who would believe that because it sounds so crazy, but I was holding that belief with what I was doing. And that literally kept me from posting something online that I thought. I thought that was really silly. So I had to address that and then move past it kind of like, gosh, was it the big leap? Just something where once you shine a light on it, it disappears and you can move past it. And I had to do that13:38 – 13:39Sarah Greesonbach: really intentionally.13:40 – 14:03Rochelle Moulton: Well, thank God you did, because the world needs your voice. We need your voice. And just thank you for sharing that, Sarah, because I think a lot of us have had, you know, very private struggles with that and putting our voice out there, attaching our names or our faces to a belief that feels scary. And yeah, and once you shine a light on it, you might even like the spotlight.14:03 – 14:30Sarah Greesonbach: Yeah. And I have worked with at least 3 or 4 coaching clients at this point who feel that way about age. Again, it just kills me that someone would have this outrageous, wonderful experience in these cool life stories, and then hesitate to share something because they think they might look old or they might not look the way they’re supposed to look when I would find those the most interesting stories in my feed. So I I love being able to encourage people to do that.14:31 – 15:08Rochelle Moulton: Ageism is alive and rampant. Yeah and especially women of a certain age, we tend to be invisible. So it’s yeah, it’s pushing those stories out. Just as a side note, though, if anybody is dealing with this, go on Instagram and pay attention to some women in their late 70s, 80s, and yes,...

You’re committed to becoming a better communicator to help your clients more effectively—and to turbocharge your marketing. Has AI complicated or instead simplified standing out with your communications? Consultant, author and writer Jessica Mehring shares the results of her research on the impact of generative AI on communicating strategically:Why even though she writes professionally, Jessica doesn’t use AI for writing (note how she instead leverages AI in the writing process).How the two key cons of using generative AI can be overwhelmingly trumped by its advantages.How empathy, listening and storytelling are intertwined in becoming a more effective communicator.Why becoming a better storyteller is actually easier in the age of AI.Specific use cases where AI can help you become a better storyteller (one in particular may well surprise you).LINKSJessica Mehring Website | LinkedInRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOJessica Mehring is a strategic consultant for technology companies, a published author, and M.A. in communication (May 2024). Through her graduate academic work, she has closely examined the impact of generative AI on strategic communication, and is exploring how storytelling fosters empathy and can help us connect in a modern context.When she's not working to bring more humanity into tech marketing, you can find her researching the intersections of art and science, creativity and data, and communication and innovation.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:28Jessica Mehring: In the age of AI, storytelling and listening being an important aspect of that is more important than it's ever been because AI will never be human. And as humans, storytelling is how we relate to 1 another. It's more important than ever. It reveals our humanity in ways that AI will never be able to replicate. And it connects us human to human, company to customer, in a way that AI cannot replicate.00:33 - 01:10Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm here with Jessica Mearing, a strategic consultant for technology companies and an author with an almost master's in communication, unless you're listening to this by May 2024, through her professional and academic work she has closely examined the impact of generative AI on strategic communication and is exploring how storytelling fosters empathy and can help us connect in a modern context. Jessica, welcome.01:10 - 01:13Jessica Mehring: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited about this conversation.01:15 - 01:47Rochelle Moulton: I am too. And I'm excited to talk to you about this whole idea of AI and its impact on our communications. And in between the times that we were emailing back and forth, I was actually stunned when I read that the Masters of the Universe at Davos ignored 2 inflammatory wars in favor of obsessing over AI and its impact on the global workforce. And the wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine didn't even make their top 10 issues list. So I mean we could talk all day long about whether AI is good or bad for01:47 - 02:03Rochelle Moulton: global business, but let's 0 in on how in this early age, relatively early age of AI, we can become better strategic communicators and even leaders because I think it's far more interesting to talk about how we can use AI strategically.02:04 - 02:26Jessica Mehring: Oh, yes, absolutely. I was, I was actually shocked too. I went to the Davos website and just kind of went through their 4 takeaways. And you're absolutely right. AI was in the mix on all 4 of those. That's so telling, right? To where we are in the world, where we are in the marketplace with AI being such a hot topic.02:27 - 02:52Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I then read another piece that said that the Davos things are always wrong. Because it's the CEOs who are insulated from anyone ever disagreeing with their opinion. So we'll see. I mean, right, it could go either way. But maybe we could start by giving generative AI a quick definition. What is it specifically compared to say, other types of artificial intelligence?02:53 - 03:34Jessica Mehring: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question because I do feel like there's a little bit of confusion around what generative AI is and isn't. Generative AI in a nutshell is AI that creates content. And that can be written content, audio, video, images. This is AI that creates, which really is different than the AI that we've had in our lives for decades. When you think about Alexa or you think about Arumba or you think about Siri or any of those kinds of devices and software that we've had in our lives for as long as I can remember.03:34 - 04:17Jessica Mehring: Predictive text, that's another 1. Predictive text on our phone or in Gmail. That's all AI. Even grammar checkers. The grammar checkers in Word or now there's really advanced software that checks our grammar, That's all AI. So we're used to AI in our lives in those ways, but generative AI is different because it creates. And it does this through natural language processing. So it understands human language and then produces a human-like response. What was so interesting to me, I did a deep dive on this back spring of last year, I did an independent study with the university04:18 - 05:02Jessica Mehring: and looked at how generative AI is impacting strategic communication. And of course, because I was just living and breathing that subject, I was talking to a lot of people about it. And what I was shocked by is how people didn't really understand what it was, what generative AI was, but also didn't understand some very serious limitations, which are still limitations today, even though there have been updates since I did that study. 1 of the limitations, of course, being hallucination. And I hope that your listeners all know what hallucination is. It's when chat GPT lies to us.05:03 - 05:43Jessica Mehring: It's when generative AI gives us a very confident factual response that isn't actually fact. And when I was talking to people about this a year ago, I got some really funny responses. People would say, oh, hallucination. What a fun word. Did you make that up? No, no, I didn't make up the word hallucination. That's the term for when These tools lie to us when these tools give us facts that aren't facts. And I realized that people are using tools like chat GPT without understanding that not everything chat GPT was giving them was true.05:43 - 05:45Rochelle Moulton: Yes. People didn't know05:45 - 05:45Jessica Mehring: that.05:45 - 05:46Rochelle Moulton: That's interesting.05:46 - 05:56Jessica Mehring: The average person I spoke with did not understand that, which was really terrifying when you think of this environment of disinformation that we're living in right now.05:56 - 06:01Rochelle Moulton: We're in an election year. This is not the year for that to happen.06:01 - 06:43Jessica Mehring: Oh my goodness. Yeah, so that's something I've really been talking about a lot. I've been doing some student teaching, I've been TAing classes and giving presentations to students at the university. And that's 1 thing that I've really hammered on is these tools hallucinate. If you are using tools like ChatGPT, and that's just 1 example, to help you create your content, then you need to check every single fact it gives you. I mean, fact check until you're blue in the face. You cannot trust this output as fact because it's not fact. Generative AI is a prediction model.06:43 - 07:13Jessica Mehring: The tools like ChatGPT are, they predict the next right word. They are language prediction models. These are not tools that know the difference between fact and fiction. ChatGPT doesn't have ethics. It's doing what it was programmed to do, which is give you an answer to your question. Whether that answer is true or false, well, it doesn't know that. That's your job as a user of these tools. It's your job to check your facts.07:13 - 07:21Rochelle Moulton: What about the creative aspect of this? Can it give you answers that are actually lifted from someone else's content?07:22 - 07:53Jessica Mehring: It can. Yeah, it absolutely can. There's always the risk of plagiarism, which again, I'm really hoping nobody's taking the output from from these tools and then publishing it as their own for many reasons, 1 of them being, yes, there is the risk of plagiarism. Generative AI was trained on a mass amount of data, much of it scraped from the internet and much of it under copyright. So there's that issue. But then you also have the issue of AI output is not protected by copyright.07:53 - 08:08Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that was where it was going to be my next question. What you're saying is if we use let's take chat GPT as an example, if we use that to write something and we add some other pieces to it, we can't copyright that completed piece.08:09 - 08:45Jessica Mehring: Yeah, when you add your own words to it, it's a fine line. But if you are taking output from these tools and you are not editing it, changing it, making it your own, if it is direct output from a tool like chat GPT, and we'll just keep picking on chat GPT because that's the most popular right now, But if it's directly copied from output from chat GPT, it is not protected by copyright. And same thing goes for image generation tools. If you use mid journey to create a book cover, your book cover is not protected by08:45 - 08:56Jessica Mehring: copyright. Somebody else could use the same book cover. Interesting. Yeah. Not a lot of legal protections for, for creations, for content from AI output.08:56 - 09:23Rochelle Moulton: Although, I mean, I'm sure it will get better, but there's nothing I've pulled out of chat GPT that I would want to put my name to so far. I'm glad to hear that. I'm sure it's going to get better, though. There's only 1 way that curve goes. But I did see in a LinkedIn post that you do not use AI at all for writing. And obviously, writing is how you make your living writing in strategic communications. Talk us through your thought process with that.09:23 - 09:55Jessica Mehring: Yeah, well, and to be clear, I know we're talking about a lot of negatives with generative AI right now. There are some positives. And I went into my independent study a year ago feeling very positive and came out on the other side a little more pragmatic So I feel like there's a lot of pros and cons. I'm happy to talk about when it comes to my own writing I use chat GPT and tools like that for as a thesaurus to help me come up with more creative words. I Use it to help me brainstorm analogies. I09:55 - 10:35Jessica Mehring: use it to Help me think through a structure of a piece or maybe re-swizzle an outline if something isn't flowing quite right. I use it to summarize my own work, which helps me see holes in my thinking. What I do not use it for is writing. And there are a few reasons for that. 1, 1 big 1 for me is language homogeneity, and that just means that everybody sounds the same. Yeah. And I saw evidence of this in the study that I did last spring, which was essentially a literature review where I was looking at actual10:35 - 11:21Jessica Mehring: studies done by social scientists and there is already evidence that generative AI is creating language homogeneity. That means a lot of written content specifically is sounding the same. We're all sounding the same. There's very little differentiation. There's been a big push, of course, to remove bias from content, which in Fairness is a good thing, but the resulting content means that everybody sounds exactly the same. Now, I'm a professional writer. I write copy for my clients. I write books. I'm the author of business books and romance novels and cozy mystery. Business11:21 - 11:21Rochelle Moulton: and romance.11:21 - 11:45Jessica Mehring: Business and romance. Yes, yes. What a combo. My own voice is important in the content that I'm writing for myself and for my business. My clients' voices are important in the copy that I'm writing for them. And I wanna make sure that we're not all sounding the same because how boring would that be? Well, and11:45 - 11:52Rochelle Moulton: then why would you need a writer, right? You just go to chat GPT and type in this thing and just pop it into wherever you're going to11:52 - 12:05Jessica Mehring: use it. Yeah, well, and I work with technology companies. So differentiation is everything. If my clients all sound exactly alike, how do their customers know who to choose? Exactly. That's a big reason.12:05 - 12:14Rochelle Moulton: You said earlier that, you know, there are lots of pros and cons, and we were kind of focusing on the cons. What do you see as some of the pros, especially after you did this study?12:15 - 12:53Jessica Mehring: These tools are really great, I think, as jumping off points for your own thinking and for your own creativity. I think a lot of us who are in more creative spaces especially can suffer from what I call the blank page blues. And that just means sometimes you're staring at a blank page and you just don't know what to put down you don't know where to start you've got a lot to say or maybe you have nothing to say but it just feels absolutely overwhelming to be staring at a blank page. And generative AI can really help12:53 - 13:28Jessica Mehring: just get those creative juices flowing when you just go back and forth with ChatGPT, have a conversation, see what comes out of it. That can be a great jumping off point for your own thinking. And you can even ask ChatGPT, hey, I want to have a conversation with you about this topic. Can you ask me questions about it? And it will. And you can answer back and have a conversation with ChatGPT and just to get your creative juices flowing. Now another thing that you can do with these tools is to start structuring your thoughts in better13:28 - 14:07Jessica Mehring: ways. I'm big on structure because no matter how great your idea is, no matter how unique your take is, if you don't structure a piece of writing well then your reader can't follow along and they're gonna drop off and they're gonna go to something else. So structuring your writing is really important And I think that tools like ChatGPT and other generative AI can really help us to just think through how we might structure something for a logical flow. And tools like ChatGPT are also evening the playing field in some ways. Now there's a lot of people14:07 - 14:58Jessica Mehring: in the world who are really great ideators. They are creative thinkers. They come up with really unique takes on things, but for 1 reason or another, maybe it's a neurological difference, maybe it's an educational difference, but they struggle to put their ideas into strong writing. Now that's something that I think generative AI can really help with. Folks who are strong ideators but maybe have weaker writing skills, this is an opportunity for them to get their ideas down in more structured and effectively written formats so the rest of us can get the benefit of these creative thinkers.14:59 - 15:31Rochelle Moulton: I just have to share an example. I was working with a client who really didn't like to write. And I'm not going to say that he couldn't write, because he could. Really super smart and very creative, but was really intimidated by writing. And he literally used ChatGPT to help him write his website and to help him write some marketing descriptions. And obviously it needed work. But what I loved about it is I could see the difference in his confidence at the very beginning to once he had gone through and produced a first draft that he could15:31 - 16:09Rochelle Moulton: feel good about. So, yeah. And there's a lot of people who are really good ideators, as you call them, who aren't as comfortable writing. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So, 1 of the tenets of your work, which I know this audience is radically in sync with, is that storytelling fosters empathy, which helps us to connect with others. And of course, that draws in clients and buyers who ultimately buy our stuff. Do you see storytelling any differently with the proliferation of AI? I mean, can we use storytelling as an even more powerful tool now? Like, how do you see16:09 - 16:10Rochelle Moulton: it?16:10 - 16:38Jessica Mehring: That's so interesting that you asked this question because I really have been feeling like storytelling is more important than ever, which is a big statement because storytelling is how we've communicated human to human since we lived in caves. It's always been important. That has been a fundamental tenet of human communication. But now it differentiates us from the machines.16:40 - 16:40Rochelle Moulton: True.16:40 - 17:09Jessica Mehring: Yeah. AI cannot replicate human experience. AI can replicate a lot of things, but it can't replicate human experience. And because it can't, it can't replicate how we humans relate to 1 another. And story is how we relate to 1 another. So Chad GPT might be able to tell you a story, but there's going to be a fundamental lack...

You’ve built a successful consulting practice using methods, tools and frameworks you’ve developed and road-tested with clients—is it time to ratchet up your impact and revenue? Award-winning author, speaker and certification expert Pamela Slim walks through the practical and strategic considerations of scaling your IP.Pam shares her from-the-front wisdom:The benefits of deliberately codifying your intellectual property: your approach, method, tools and frameworks.Why B2B programs are often an easier sell (and far more lucrative) than B2C programs.How to tell if your business is a good candidate for developing licensing or certification programs.One wildly successful real-life example of practitioner certification.The value of building your marketing engine (spoiler alert: it doesn’t have to be big to be mighty).LINKSPamela Slim Website | The Widest Net | Books | LinkedIn | Instagram | FacebookRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOPamela Slim is an award-winning author, speaker and agency owner who has spent three decades helping business owners scale their businesses and IP.Pam’s agency specializes in the design and development of certification and licensing programs. She is the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation (Penguin Portfolio, 2009), Body of Work (Penguin Portfolio, 2014) and The Widest Net (McGraw Hill, November, 2021, winner of Best Sales and Marketing Book of 2021 from Porchlight Books).Pam and her husband Darryl co-founded the K’é Community Lab in Mesa, Arizona, where they host scores of BIPOC entrepreneurs and contribute to the local social, health and economic development of their community.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:17Pamela Slim: Ideas are out there everywhere. The challenge, the hard thing, is taking that idea, putting it through a specific process where you can actually end up translating it into concrete behaviors that people besides you can be doing at scale out there in the world.00:23 - 01:07Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton. And today I'm here with Pamela Slim, award-winning author of 3 books, speaker and agency owner who spent 3 decades helping business owners scale their businesses and their IP. Her agency specializes in the design and development of certification and licensing programs. Plus, she and her husband, Daryl, co-founded the CAH Community Lab in Mesa, Arizona, where they host scores of BIPOC entrepreneurs and contribute to the local social, health, and economic development of their community. Pam, welcome. Thanks so much01:07 - 01:27Rochelle Moulton: for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Well, I'm delighted to have you on the show for many reasons. But the initial spark was when I read your second book, Body of Work, just last year, and I put you on my ideal guest list. And then when you showed up in my inbox via Alastair McDermott, I figured I'd better ask you right then. So I'm really glad you're here.01:28 - 01:49Pamela Slim: It's so fun. We were just saying pre-show what a serendipity it is. It's amazing given the alignment of our work that we haven't met before, but I love that it took a wonderful thought leader in Ireland that actually brought us together. We could probably throw a stone from my desert dwelling to you in Palm Springs and we could hit each other. So isn't that beautiful?01:50 - 02:15Rochelle Moulton: Exactly, small world, sometimes big world. Well, as I was preparing to talk with you, I clicked to your website and the first thing I saw was your headline. You have the power to shape the world through your work. And I love how with that statement, you set up this idea that everything we do in our businesses not only matters, but that we can deeply connect it to the change we want to make in our world.02:16 - 02:52Pamela Slim: Yeah, I so appreciate you picking up on that. This is probably the thought. Usually I go in waves and cycles for months, sometimes years, of really deeply exploring a core element of the way that I'm looking at business or the way that I'm doing work with clients. And at this stage, I've been experimenting. I'm getting ready to be doing some keynotes this year, which will be really fun to be on the road. And those of you who do that know it's probably the best way to make sure you are clear in your thinking and what your02:52 - 03:23Pamela Slim: big ideas are, because you think about being up on stage with other people. But part of really what's been hitting me about that and around my work is 1 of the things that I observe a lot as an author and a long time business coach and somebody who works with thought leaders, especially interfacing with more mainstream publishing and the way that we tend to celebrate thought leaders, is there's a lot of focus on just the idea, whatever that idea is, you know, AI, habits, you know, amazing great things that I think a lot of us can03:23 - 03:59Pamela Slim: be driven by that thought of, oh, if I could just think of the thing, that big great idea, I could get the book deal, I could be distinguishing myself between other competitors, and we think about it sometimes in that singular way. Part of what has me really work it through based on 1 of my strong through lines in my own body of work is being a training and development, organizational development person, which is ideas are out there everywhere. The challenge, the hard thing, is taking that idea, putting it through a specific process where you can actually03:59 - 04:36Pamela Slim: end up Translating it into concrete behaviors that people besides you can be doing at scale out there in the world and that middle section involves sometimes Instructional design and change management and psychology and philosophy all of these kinds of things of what it actually takes for taking a big idea. Like, hey, we should focus on habits. James Clear's great book, Atomic Habits, such a powerful idea, it's so interesting. We think about really what it takes in order to be implementing that into our life, to really change the way that we are, that to me is this04:36 - 05:07Pamela Slim: interesting intersection between often the market fit of ways that we're communicating and telling our story and driving interest for ideas, the method, the way that we actually develop something that consistently over time can make change, and then the model, which is the way that we can be describing things in a way in which it's sticky so that people remember it And again, they begin to develop these habits in their everyday life where they really do things differently because we've architected it that way.05:08 - 05:38Rochelle Moulton: It's interesting, Pam, because I was going to ask you some questions about your business, but I will come back to that because I want to explore this a little bit more. It's a really great setup for what we're going to talk about today. But let me ask you about you, because 1 of the great things about looking at the entrepreneurial part of your career is that it's long, right? You've been doing this for a while. You've written 3 books that, again, from the reader perspective, they're quite different, and yet they're connected. So will you talk just05:38 - 05:50Rochelle Moulton: for a moment about how you see your body of work and the threads that connect some of the really interesting things that you've done in those in those chunks of years because I can I can kind of see where your brain was going?05:50 - 06:28Pamela Slim: Absolutely. So I think in the biggest arc, the early days of my work, my degree in college actually was international development. So I have a very long winded major, which was the focus was non-formal education as a tool for social and economic change in Latin America. So I studied in Mexico and Colombia. A lot of the systems that you study in economic development are extremely similar to the kinds of models that you might see in organizational development, in change management. And so I was always driven early on and just excited. I was an exchange student multiple06:28 - 07:00Pamela Slim: times and studied abroad and was just really interested in transformational change, especially things like really eradicating harmful systems and creating more equity in the world. So those were like my earliest roots. And I worked through more of the nonprofit model for a while, and then I kind of fell into the world of training and development, which I actually ended up being so excited by because it had some of these elements that I was really excited by that I saw in the international work. I just knew that it wasn't a fit based on my philosophy of being07:00 - 07:29Pamela Slim: this fresh-faced 20-something white girl from Marin County, California originally, like living in Columbia doing economic development. I was like, I've met people from there that are so much better at making that change. And I don't really believe in that like external person parachuting out from a theory of change perspective. So it allowed me to really then dig into a whole number of years while I was working inside corporate, which I actually loved, which surprises some people, knowing that the first book I wrote was Escape from Cubicle Naked.07:29 - 07:30Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, it's Not intuitive.07:31 - 08:04Pamela Slim: That's right. But it really is this lifelong enthusiasm for how can we make transformational change? How can we make communities, organizations more healthy, and really embracing training and development as a tool in order to do that. So I worked, my last real job was 28 years ago at Barclays Global Investors as the Director of Training and Development. I think they're BlackRock now. They went through a whole series of acquisitions, but I left there and then spent the first 10 years of my career as a management consultant in Silicon Valley. And that was so fun and interesting.08:05 - 08:34Pamela Slim: Got to just do all kinds of different projects, really for growing and scaling a lot of tech companies. And then around 2005, I met my husband, wanted to move to Arizona and be off the road so much. And that's when I launched my blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation, that really dove me into this exciting exploration of helping people who were in corporate who wanted to leave and start a business, which were many of the clients that I had actually interfaced with when I was a consultant. And so I spent about 10 years in a deep dive08:34 - 09:04Pamela Slim: there, which led to my first book deal, and then really doing a lot of work and developing my own body of work around tools to help people do that early stage transition. Then I just started to slide more in the body of work years, the way that you begin to understand body of work, many ways that was a reaction to noticing how a lot of people in the startup space were saying, you can only be creative and free if you work for yourself. It felt so limited, untrue, privileged, frankly, right? Not everybody can do it. It's09:04 - 09:35Pamela Slim: hard. Work is hard in general, but I think the main focus and the tools I wanted to bring forth in that next stage was to help people be more deliberate about just what is that body of work they wanted to move forward. Having a metaphor much like artists or writers do of saying you don't always have to be doing the same thing over time and you can have experiment with different work modes as you're building your body of work at different stages of your life depending on what's going on. You can choose to work deliberately in09:35 - 10:06Pamela Slim: different models. So it's perfectly okay if you work for yourself for a while and that works, then you decide to go back and work for an organization, awesome. Then you might work for a smaller firm, You might start a nonprofit. It's more about that context that you create and really being deliberate about driving satisfaction based on what work that you're creating. How are you using your gifts and skills to bring great work into the world? So that body of work, body of work came out in around 2014. And I just spent a lot more time easing10:06 - 10:38Pamela Slim: in some ways a little bit more toward people who are doing work at scale, kind of like the earlier work that I had done, you know, as a management consultant. And I'm an author practitioner, I often say. So I write books based on what I'm seeing and hearing and experiencing with clients. When clients were getting more deliberate about the work they wanted to bring forth, usually the main question was, where are my customers? How can I consistently and not in a not overwhelming way generate all kinds of leads and referrals and visibility? So that's really where10:38 - 11:13Pamela Slim: the widest net came around full circle, where actually a lot of the ecosystem building principles that grassroots development models absolutely fit into work that I was doing and in the way that I would talk about business development with my clients. And then as you said in the intro, about 7 and a half years ago, my husband and I also opened up this community lab here in Mesa really utilizing all the principles in that widest net method. Widest net was my latest book that came out in 2021. And so looking backwards that's often where we see that11:13 - 11:32Pamela Slim: through line, right? Widest net was helping people get their body of work out. Body of work was a reaction saying, hey, if it doesn't work as an entrepreneur, that's not the only way to think about it. But I didn't necessarily have that perspective from the beginning, right? I was more reacting to work that happened and issues that came forward.11:33 - 11:58Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, I was really impressed with this idea that you created a physical space that manifests the change you want to see, right? Because that's the hardest thing sometimes is to do physically what we're talking about virtually. So I think you get extra bonus points for that. Well, it's a real joy that 1 part just for brevity I left out when I was in San Francisco for about 11 years.11:58 - 12:31Pamela Slim: I was the volunteer executive director of an Afro-Brazilian martial art group, Capoeira, which I was a passionate practitioner and eventual teacher working with an artistic director. So I'd actually done lots and lots of work on a local level in San Francisco doing community building and engagement. So it was kind of a coming home for me, but here in Arizona of doing the local engagement work and I'm not bearing the lead. It's now been publicly communicated, but we're actually will come up on 8 years in June Which is when our lease will be up and we have12:31 - 13:05Pamela Slim: come full circle to be closing that project. So my husband and I, it's always been something that we knew was not by definition supposed to be something that was long-term the way that we built it. It was specific space that we opened up for. My husband is Navajo, So he's a Navajo traditional healer. So it really was a specific space that we provided at no fee to BIPOC entrepreneurs in our community to really experiment, have events, you know, sort of get support in an informal way that now where we are in the process of economic development13:05 - 13:18Pamela Slim: here, we'll be moving forward in a different way, like with partners moving forward. So it just another chapter and you notice it tends to be around 7 to 10 year cycles in which projects happen.13:18 - 13:26Rochelle Moulton: And it also explains something that I saw, I think, in social that said there's going to be some big changes this year, so now I know what13:26 - 13:26Pamela Slim: that meant.13:26 - 13:51Rochelle Moulton: That's right. Well, congratulations, though, because I like how you're looking at this as it's a process and it needed to be a physical space until it didn't. And you know, I think a lot of times we tell ourselves a story about what we did that is bad versus because it works differently than what other people might define as success. Closing the center is progress.13:52 - 14:27Pamela Slim: 100%. Yeah. And it really is. It's tied to, I'm a big proponent of theories of change and really having an analysis about how and why that you're doing things. And if we had 13 hours, I would go on a long diatribe about some of the critique about approaches that we can have, for example, to community projects or nonprofits. Just tangentially, 1 of the things that I noticed over and over and over is that most of the ways in which people specifically want to be engaging with BIPOC, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian entrepreneurs is by immediately coming to14:27 - 15:03Pamela Slim: a space, designing a program, usually without any input from the community, and just trying to put tons of focus and energy into launching it and trying to sell and pull people into the space. And my husband and I have a very, very different approach of that's actually not

Choosing a mastermind may well be one of your biggest investments as a business owner—and yet the right one will repay that investment many times over. How can you decide if a mastermind is right for you?In this solo episode, I explain:The three contributing factors that will impact the success you experience with any mastermind.Why you never want to join a mastermind where you’re the smartest person in the room.How to evaluate the mastermind facilitator (and why your spidey sense can be a good clue).Three types of masterminds for business owners and how to experience full value from each.LINKSThe Soloist Women Mastermind (Apply January 2024) A structured eight-month mastermind with an intentionally small group of hand-picked women soloists grappling with—and solving—the same kinds of challenges. Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramTRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:33Rochelle Moulton: Most experienced facilitators won't let you in if you're dramatically behind the group. But the idea is to find a group where you're literally the dumbest person in the room and think about that for a sec. Like how cool would it be to be in a room where everyone has been where you are now and sprinted past it, right? This is a room that's hard to get into, but if you do, it's a room where you want to listen far more than you speak. It's also a room where you have to maintain your equilibrium when you're surrounded00:33 - 01:15Rochelle Moulton: by people operating at a higher level. Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton and today it's just us, no guests, just some straight talk about 1 of my favorite ways to learn and grow masterminds. Now full disclosure, I run the Soloist Women Mastermind which is open right now for applications. So obviously this topic is on my mind. But what I want to talk to you about today is how to know if a mastermind is right for you. Because masterminds, mine or anyone else's, are01:15 - 01:54Rochelle Moulton: not the right choice for everyone. In fact, there's a bit of an art to choosing the right mastermind, which is what I want to explore with you today. So let's start with a definition, because I've seen a lot of programs called masterminds, but they don't really operate as what I think of as a classic mastermind. So a mastermind is a small group of peers, could be from the same industry and or with the same goals, who come together to brainstorm ideas, provide peer support and accountability, and offer a safe, constructive place to communicate. So even when01:54 - 02:40Rochelle Moulton: they're facilitated by an outside expert, the members are the main focus of discussion. It is not a place where you're being taught or coached by 1 person. Every member's input and participation is equally important. Now if you decide to explore choosing a mastermind, think of your decision as having 3 contributing factors, you, the facilitator, and your peer group. Now, first and foremost is you. To get full value from a mastermind, you'll wanna have some sort of identified challenge that you'll work on during the mastermind, which means you've got to set aside actual time to work on02:40 - 03:17Rochelle Moulton: that and attend the meetings, plus some headspace to work on the feedback you'll receive from the group. And you'll also want to be in both giver and receiver mode. And by that, I mean you want to be wired to do both in your mastermind, to give constructive and supportive feedback to your fellow members, and be willing to hear and work with the constructive and supportive feedback they give you. You don't ever want to join a mastermind where you feel like you'll be doing mostly giving because you're so far ahead of the others. It's not fair to03:17 - 03:58Rochelle Moulton: you. Instead, search for 1 that has your true peers. Ideally, your mastermind facilitator curates the group to ensure you get roughly equivalent amounts of giving and receiving, but it's something you want to pay attention to. Notice if your Spidey sense feels like maybe it's not quite the right balance for you. The second factor in choosing a mastermind is the facilitator. This is the person who will be responsible for ensuring that you get your needs met, that the container is a safe and constructive place to learn and grow, and that the peer group is truly a peer03:58 - 04:37Rochelle Moulton: group. So you want to choose a facilitator with experience working with other people like you. Now you might choose someone with experience in your vertical or your area of expertise or the kind of business you run. There is literally an infinite variety of choices. Now you'll also want to be aware of buying from what I call the sage on the stage and that's a leader who is more about pontificating a particular point of view than meeting you and the group where they are. Your leader needs to sublimate their ego to run a successful mastermind. And the04:37 - 05:10Rochelle Moulton: last factor in choosing the right mastermind for you is the peer group. Who will you be matched with? And when you're joining an existing group, it's fairly easy to shush this out, but it's a lot harder when you're joining a new 1. You may have to rely on the choices made by the facilitator, and you won't always know who will be with you until you've bellied up to the bar and committed. So in this case, you want to have mega trust in your facilitator. Okay so those are the 3 parties if you will in every mastermind05:10 - 05:44Rochelle Moulton: you, the facilitator, and the peer group. But there are also different ways you can use a mastermind and friend of the show Shannon Weinstein did a great episode on her Keep What You Earn podcast on the 3 situations when it makes sense for you to invest in masterminds. It looks like we're on a theme of 3 today. So the first type of mastermind is probably the 1 you were thinking about as you were listening to this so far. It's where you go to learn to practice to stretch to grow in a group with others in the05:44 - 06:19Rochelle Moulton: same stage as you. It's very much about the peer learning experience. The second type of mastermind is filled with people who are ahead of you. Now, this 1 is tricky because most experienced facilitators won't let you in if you're dramatically behind the group. But the idea is to find a group where you're literally the dumbest person in the room. And think about that for a sec. Like how cool would it be to be in a room where everyone has been where you are now and sprinted past it, right? This is a room that's hard to get06:19 - 06:55Rochelle Moulton: into, but if you do, it's a room where you wanna listen far more than you speak. It's also a room where you have to maintain your equilibrium when you're surrounded by people operating at a higher level. It's not the place to be shy or intimidated, but to soak up and learn and focus 100% on that. Now the third type of mastermind is with a group of your ideal clients. Now this is a way to hear about their challenges in an informal way to understand how they think and act as well as the language they use. Now06:55 - 07:27Rochelle Moulton: it can be pure gold just not in the usual way that you might think of masterminds. Now the other side of that coin is you'll be able to build some strong relationships with people in your target market and they may well sing your praises to the other folks they know or even wind up hiring you afterwards. So can you see how Any 1 of these 3 kinds of masterminds could be right for you at any given point in time. It comes down to this. What do you need most right now in your personal or business development07:27 - 08:03Rochelle Moulton: and who is the right facilitator with the right peer group to get you there. Now there are free masterminds and paid masterminds. There are low cost masterminds and high cost masterminds. You can even start your own. You want to decide which has the most value to you and your current situation. The general rule of thumb with paid masterminds is to get into the most expensive group you can afford to join that will also welcome you. The theory being that that's the room that will push you forward the fastest. But of course the devil's in the details,08:03 - 08:43Rochelle Moulton: so take a good hard look at your readiness and your commitment, the demonstrated skill of the facilitator, and the level and experience of the peer group. The right mastermind can literally catapult you into new territory when you're ready to do the work. So before we say goodbye today, if you are a soloist considering a mastermind, be sure to check out the link to my soloist women mastermind in the show notes. The next cohort starts February 8th 2024 and you can apply through Wednesday, January 31st. That's it for this episode. I hope you'll join us next time08:43 - 08:46Rochelle Moulton: for soloist women. Bye bye.

We tend to live by a set of unconscious rules that we’ve inherited—from our families, our culture, the media and more. But when they keep you tethered to a way of life that isn’t serving your highest good? Award-winning author, speaker and podcast host Heather Whelpley says it’s time to make your own rules.Together, we unpack:The four types of rules we have “inherited” from outside forces and how they play out in our lives.How to become conscious of the rules you’ve internalized and adopted—and start testing whether they are actually true.The relationship between culturally expected perfection and imposter syndrome.The role of “breaks”—big and small—in creating opportunities to understand, challenge and change the rules you’ve been living by.How to start—and stick with—making your own rules to expand your business and your life.LINKSHeather Whelpley Website | Email List | Grounded Wildness | LinkedInRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram BIOHeather Whelpley is a speaker, award-winning author of Grounded Wildness: Break Free From Performing Your Life and Start Living It and An Overachiever's Guide To Breaking The Rules, and host of the Grounded Wildness podcast. She works with women to break free from perfect and create their own rules for life.Heather has spoken to thousands of people across the US and internationally on topics like discovering your authentic voice, creating your own rules for success, and imposter syndrome. Prior to starting her business, she spent over a decade in human resources and managing leadership development programs for high-achieving women at Fortune 500 companies in the US, Australia, and Latin America.Her first book, An Overachiever's Guide To Breaking The Rules, has won multiple awards, including gold medals from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and Living Now Book Awards as well as being named a finalist for the First Horizon Book Award for first-time authors. Her second book, Grounded Wildness, was published in October 2023 and was an instant Amazon bestseller. Heather lives in Colorado where she spends as much time hiking and exploring as possible.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSThe Soloist Women Mastermind (Apply January 2024) A structured eight-month mastermind with an intentionally small group of hand-picked women soloists grappling with—and solving—the same kinds of challenges. 10 Ways To Grow Revenue As A Soloist (Without Working More Hours): most of us have been conditioned to work more when we want to grow revenue—but what if we just worked differently?The Soloist Women community: a place to connect with like-minded women (and join a channel dedicated to your revenue level).The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:20Heather Whelpley: I needed to overdo and achieve with everything, even in non-traditional career ways. And I finally stopped and asked myself why. And that was my first break was like, oh, wait, look at all these rules were handed in our culture as a whole that we always need to be doing more. We're not allowed to slow down. We're not allowed to take a break and really connecting our worth to success and to achievement.00:25 - 00:49Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton and today I'm here with Heather Welpley who works with women to break free from perfect and create their own rules for life. She's a speaker, award-winning author of 2 books and the host of the grounded wildness podcast, Heather. Welcome.00:49 - 00:52Heather Whelpley: Thank you, Rochelle. I'm so thrilled to be here chatting with you today.00:53 - 01:09Rochelle Moulton: Well, I'm delighted to have you on the show. And I want to give a shout out to Chris Jennings for suggesting that we connect Because this idea that women have to follow certain rules to be a good, successful, likeable female makes me insane.01:10 - 01:12Heather Whelpley: Yep, me too.01:12 - 01:28Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. So I'm excited to dig into this and talk about those rules, how they create imposter syndrome, and how we can make our own rules. But first, I do love to begin with a bit of background about how you got started in your business. I mean, you were in corporate HR, right?01:28 - 01:31Heather Whelpley: I was, yeah, for 10 years before I started my business.01:31 - 01:33Rochelle Moulton: So what made you decide to hang your shingle?01:34 - 02:04Heather Whelpley: Well, so I'd never thought about being a business owner. You know, I wasn't 1 of those people who was like, you know, 1 day I'll be my own boss. I know this is my destiny. I never thought about that. I was enjoying most of my work in corporate. I worked in HR and leadership development and change management. I had great colleagues, great managers, like things were good. And then 1 day my job changed. I had been doing mostly women's leadership development and my job changed to something outside of my control that I immediately knew I was02:04 - 02:33Heather Whelpley: going to hate. And it was my birthday, which is just, I think, a message from the universe. You know, we talk about like full body yeses. This was a full body no. Everything in my body, heart, mind and soul was like, absolutely not. Something's gonna have to change quickly because this job is not going to work. And I really took a step back for the first time in a long time and thought really deeply about, what do I want? What do I want my career to look like? What's the impact I wanna have? And for the02:33 - 03:04Heather Whelpley: first time, I decided to include entrepreneurship as a possibility in that it wasn't a sure thing. It wasn't, oh yes, immediately, this is what I'm going to do. But as I started talking to people, as I started reflecting, I did the Design Your Life book, which was a great activity reflection book, and gave myself some space to really consider. Then some excitement started building up, some excitement for these possibilities of what I could do if I was on my own. I could write, I could train, I could coach, I could speak, I could do what I03:04 - 03:34Heather Whelpley: wanted to do. And although there was a ton of fear there as well, particularly this fear of failure and having to go back to corporate, you know, with my tail tucked between my legs because I couldn't hack it on my own, Like that was all very real also, but this excitement was something that even though I enjoyed my corporate work, I hadn't felt that in a really long time. And it felt like this knowing of I need to try this out. What's really funny though, so that was 6 years ago, 7 years ago. And I found03:34 - 04:05Heather Whelpley: a business plan a few months ago for what I thought this business was going to look like. And really only 1 line of the 5 pages is accurate today, which was, I wanna work mostly with women. And that's still true, but everything else has changed in that time period. And so, yeah, but it really was a job change that initially initiated that reflection and that decision, but then it was the excitement and the possibilities and deciding it was worth the risk to try and figure it out and to try and run a business on my own.04:06 - 04:25Rochelle Moulton: I love that you actually had a business plan. I mean, I did the same thing, but a lot of people when they're, you know, first hanging out a shingle, there is no business plan. It's like, okay, how can I just make enough to pay my rent or my mortgage and put food on the table and I'll figure it all out later? So I love it. And it's not surprising that it changed over the course04:25 - 04:25Heather Whelpley: of, right,04:25 - 04:26Rochelle Moulton: you know, 6 or 7 years.04:27 - 04:54Heather Whelpley: Yes, I think almost everyone's would change. And it's funny when you said, you know, people just figure it out along the way. I think that's really what I did anyway. I just happened to write some things down first that ended up changing. It was everything I did not know at all how to run a business. You know, I had the leadership development background, which is, you know, still in the realm of what I do, roughly speaking, in my business. But it's, yeah, I had no clue how to actually run a business that was all learning on04:54 - 04:55Heather Whelpley: the job.04:55 - 05:02Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, it's a whole new skill set. You know, like consulting is a skill set. So do you consider yourself a soloist?05:02 - 05:34Heather Whelpley: Absolutely. Yes. I currently have no interest in growing a team. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at any time. But yeah, I'm a solopreneur. My overall theme in my business and really for my life as a whole is big impact, simple joy. So I want to create the biggest impact I can with the greatest simplicity out there. So I absolutely work with an accountant and a bookkeeper. And then I have an amazing marketing specialist that I work with like 1 to 2 hours a week who does some of the stuff on my05:34 - 06:04Heather Whelpley: podcast, the background things on my podcast and anything that I've ever designed that looks pretty. She probably had a role in, she's amazing. And then I work with someone else. I'm a speaker. So a few years ago I invested in having someone design my slides for me so that they look significantly more professional than when I was doing them on my own. But I don't have any employees and I don't have any interest in having any employees. Well, you're talking to the right crowd. Yes. That's why I was so excited when you when when Chris decided06:04 - 06:05Heather Whelpley: to introduce us.06:06 - 06:10Rochelle Moulton: Well, so how long did it take you to earn your first 100, 000? Do you remember?06:11 - 06:21Heather Whelpley: Oh, that's a great question. I think about year 3. I'm almost positive it was year 3, if we're talking about revenue that it would have been a hundred thousand. Yeah, yeah.06:21 - 06:35Rochelle Moulton: We talked top line because the bottom line in these kinds of businesses is all over the lot. But the beauty is that we do tend to keep a lot of what we earn versus businesses that have lots of employees or lots of overhead like rent?06:35 - 07:09Heather Whelpley: Very much so. Yes. I'm a completely service-based business. The only quote-unquote products that I have are my 2 books and an accompanying journal. That is it. And so I don't have any other tangible products. It's just me and the speaking services, coaching services that I provide, which does make it easy and flexible and yeah, low cost, low overhead, which makes it easier, I think, to also not having employees to take risks and try new things. Because in actuality, the risk is pretty low. It doesn't always feel low like the emotional component is still there but when07:09 - 07:20Heather Whelpley: I stop and take a step back and say like okay if this actually failed what am I gonna lose? Honestly the answer frequently is not that much. So it makes it easier to be more flexible, I think.07:21 - 07:42Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I love that point. When we had Emily O'Meara on the show, she was talking about how a lot of times what we think is risky isn't really risky at all. It's like what you said about, because I felt it too, is going back to corporate with my tail between my legs. I mean, so what? Like, nobody's going to remember that for more than a nanosecond other than us. If we feel shame around it, which like, why bother?07:42 - 07:43Heather Whelpley: Exactly.07:43 - 08:01Rochelle Moulton: There's no shame in any of this. At least we tried, right? That's kind of how I look at it. Yes. Well, thank you for that. But so I really want to dive into this idea that we we and I say women, but I'm sure08:01 - 08:02Speaker 3: it's true for all genders is that We all have08:02 - 08:18Rochelle Moulton: inherited some form of rules. And I like how you define them in your new book, Grounded Wildness. You had family rules, school rules, media rules, work rules. What kinds of messages do we internalize and make our own?08:18 - 08:47Heather Whelpley: Oh my gosh, so many. And what you just said is the exact right way to say it of these messages that we internalize and then make our own. And that's absolving any guilt or shame around that because we all do this. And those rules that we follow don't come from inside of us. They come from our, like you said, our families, media, general cultural expectations, our work experiences, our school experiences, what you've been praised for, what you've been punished for, what's been talked about, what's not been talked about. All of these different things is how we08:47 - 09:17Heather Whelpley: get our rules. And absolutely, totally right. Every person gets a set of rules regardless of gender. Both my books do tend to, particularly Grounded Wildness, do tend to focus on the rules that are handed to women that cause us to prove, please perfect, and sometimes rebel and push against them. But when it comes to women, a lot of the rules that were handed, if we think about kind of how we're showing up in work and relationships, it's like, I can't disappoint anyone. I have to be responsible for everyone and everything. I have to keep everyone happy.09:17 - 09:47Heather Whelpley: I'm not allowed to say no. I have to say yes to everything. Things have to be perfect. I'm not allowed to make a mistake. And then that can translate into, or I should always be doing more and working harder. And that can translate into our businesses as well. So those rules apply regardless of your type of position or career or job. But as a business, I think we also get additional entrepreneurship rules of around hustling and like rise and grind and you know you always have to be doing more. It's all on you so you can09:47 - 09:50Heather Whelpley: never take a break. If you don't post on social media, you're gonna09:50 - 09:51Speaker 3: lose your followers. You always have to be doing more. It's all on you. So you can never take a break. If you don't post09:51 - 10:23Heather Whelpley: on social media, you're gonna lose your followers. You always have to be doing more like just in this and growing more and constantly getting bigger and not taking time off and just this hustle grind hamster wheel. And that part I will say applies to all genders. That is not women specific, the hustle culture at all, but I've seen that women can often take on, because of these rules handed to us, greater responsibility and guilt around some of these rules as well. So even though they might be handed down to all genders, they don't always impact all10:23 - 10:24Heather Whelpley: genders in the same10:25 - 10:57Rochelle Moulton: way. You know, 1 of the things that struck me as you were talking about this is that what we're praised for, the way you said that. And it's kind of like, I'm developing this theory that what we're praised for tends to be what gets us stuck in our zone of excellence versus our genius zone right and we just we get praised for things especially in an organization and it's great to be praised, you know, we can get promotions, we can win things and encourages us to work harder at the things we're good at or even excellent10:57 - 11:02Rochelle Moulton: at, but somehow it leaves us short of our genius zone.11:02 - 11:28Heather Whelpley: I completely agree. And I just listened to your podcast episode on that and I've read the big leap as well. And I really liked that concept of zone of genius versus zone of excellence. And I will also say in addition to everything you just said, I think sometimes those rules can also cause us to hold our voices back because part of the rules that women are handed about being a quote-unquote good girl or good woman is to like not make people angry and to be polite. And of course not everyone gets handed all of these rules11:28 - 11:58Heather Whelpley: in the exact same way, But I've definitely felt them and I've talked to a lot of other women who felt them that makes it can make it harder to disagree to put yourself out there to raise your prices to take a stand to share something that might be controversial where you might get Criticism, you know all of these things that can make it harder, which I think also makes it harder to leap into your zone of genius because I think in my experience personally, not always, that zone of genius might be a little bit more, might11:58 - 12:27Heather Whelpley: be a little more controversial. Like not everyone is going to love what you're doing and saying in your zone of genius. And women are so programmed to be liked. Like this is part of our value is in being likable. And oftentimes working in your zone of genius, not everyone is going to like what you do. Fewer people are going to like it more and benefit from it more, but it's not going to be likely not going to be across the board, which is a challenge if you've been told directly and indirectly throughout your life that...