On today’s episode of Rock the Podcast, Jess speaks with Interview Connections client Tim James! Tim is one of those guys that will leave you feeling younger and more energetic just by hearing him speak. 

After suffering from multiple health issues, including chronic acid indigestion and surgery to remove one of his organs due to serious digestive issues, Tim knew something had to change. But it was only after watching his closest ones die of cancer and the untimely death of his younger brother that he finally decided to take action. Tim’s journey led him to a shocking discovery that helped his friend beat cancer and transform every area of his life. 

Feeling charged with a duty to help others he started sharing his knowledge with anyone that would listen. This led him to produce his own chemical-free food products. Chemical Free

Body was born. Tim’s inbox is constantly flooded with people singing and dancing about how his products have given them a life they couldn’t believe was possible. His story will have you laughing, crying, and gasping but most importantly he will give you the recipe to a longer, happier, and healthier life!

Since Tim owns a product-based business, Jessica asked him why he chose podcasting to promote his business and increase his visibility. With products, many other entrepreneurs will choose more direct advertising.

“Why are you passionate about going on interviews to tell your story and educate the market?”

Tim had been selling mostly over the phone. He built his business over the phone, but then the Covid pandemic shut everything down. Tim didn’t really have any tech skills and had previously invested money with the wrong people.

But, Tim had been invited on some podcasts. Every time he went on a podcast, he saw that some sales would trickle in, however, Tim never really put a lot of thought into podcasts. 

Tim decided to call up a friend to get on some podcasts. He guested on three shows and did an enormous amount of sales. Tim thought, “This could save me.”  Within a few months of podcast guesting, Tim tripled his sales.

Once Tim began working with us here at Interview Connections, he created half a million dollars in sales.

Tim loves podcast guesting because he gets to do what he does best: tell his unfiltered story and educate people. Podcast guesting is simplifying the business for Tim, so he feels like he is getting his life back while still expanding his business! 

For Tim, podcast guesting is a no brainer. As a guest, you just get to show up on someone else’s podcast, who has put in all this work to establish trust and build an audience. Tim explains that it’s like getting in front of a stadium of people and having their attention for an hour

It’s a fantastic organic marketing strategy --no ads necessary-- and it’s just your unfiltered story doing the selling for you. Tim also points out that these podcast hosts need good content! They need good guests or they don’t have a show.

If you’ve got a story (and really, don’t we all?) Tim recommends that you get really good at telling your story. When Tim really started focusing on podcast guesting, he doubled his business.

Jessica asks Tim to expand on what kind of shows are giving him those amazing results. 

Podcast guesting was uncharted water for Tim. He just tried to get on as many different types of shows as he could. Tim would also track sales from podcast interviews by giving out a unique discount code on episodes, and tracking if that code was used. This would allow Tim to see exactly what podcasts were creating momentum for him.

Tim was interested in reaching audiences that he could relate to, and offer solutions to. These audiences excised in a variety of shows, so Tim went on a large number of different shows! Tim tracked his results and had a clear understanding of his client avatar, which was incredibly valuable for his podcast guesting strategy.

Tim understands who wants and needs his product, and understands his ideal client’s mindset.

If you’re thinking about doing a show, you have a great message but you are scared about how you are going to share it, Tim explains that you’re really getting in your own way. A friend of Tim’s paid $25,000 for a coaching program, and the first piece of advice the coach gave was to go live every single day. 

A lot of people would respond, “I don’t have my message yet, it’s not perfect!” Tim explains that the first 45-75 lives are not for the audience, they are for you to find your message and to refine your message! You will find your message and you will start getting comfortable sharing it.

The best way to hone your message is to start going live, hire a booking agency to get you on podcasts, and just go on the shows. You don’t have to be an ad expert, you don’t have to know how to build a website. You just have to have a message and a way to connect with those people who resonate with your message. You just have to be really good at telling your story!

If you’re saying, “I really want to do this, but I’m not ready. I don’t have my message right.” Tim argues that you just have to start!

You can connect with Tim at Chemicalfreebody.com and listeners can also use discount code “IC” at checkout!

On today’s episode of Rock the Podcast, Margy (virtually) sits down with Lisa Larter! Lisa helps businesses navigate modern entrepreneurship so that they can increase sales and profits. She works with her clients on everything from business strategy, understanding their numbers and measuring what matters, to online marketing, social media and the best way to turn connections into paying customers!

Lisa believes that business is all about the numbers and that you need to take lots of action in order to make things happen. She is known for her no-nonsense approach to helping business owners get results. You won’t get fluff from Lisa, only the facts and an expectation that if you really want your business to grow, you will dig in and do the work!

Margy and Lisa bonded over their love of numbers! They both agree that if you don’t have a grasp on your numbers, you will not be able to pay yourself and you will not be able to have the lifestyle that you want as an entrepreneur. Everything that you want as a business owner-- the freedom, the impact -- if your numbers are a mess your business will ultimately fail.

Margy and Lisa both loved the book The Ultimate Blueprint for an Insanely Successful Business by Keith Cunningham. That book emphasizes the importance of really understanding the numbers in your business and looking at numbers in a way that can benefit you and can benefit the people that work with you. 

Every new coaching client of Lisa’s receives this book. Lisa has held mastermind retreats  and spent entire days looking at and discussing concepts in The Ultimate Blueprint. A concept that Lisa loves to implement is comparing historical data year over year in your business to look for trends and exceptions. Lisa also ensures her clients are getting clear on their expenses.

Lisa explains that we have a tendency to throw money at problems. If you have enough money to solve the problem, then you don’t have a problem. The issue is that sometimes the money you’re throwing at a problem isn’t actually fixing the root of the problem. This is when you have to look at numbers and be able to understand what they mean in your business.

Lisa asks that her bookkeepers and accountants send her the numbers every month, so Lisa can unpack. Lisa knows that she needs to look at them and know exactly what is going on before she gets to the end of year, so she can make smart decisions based on that data. 

Margy asks Lisa what advice she has for entrepreneurs who tell themselves the story of “I’m not a numbers person.”

People hire Lisa for marketing strategy, and she almost always ends up working on their numbers! Her clients don’t have a marketing problem, they have a numbers problem. Lisa will work with them to get to the root of their issue: Are they having a pricing problem, an expense problem, or perhaps a billable hours problem?

Lisa notes that her clients always think numbers are going to be very complicated, but really it’s just basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. If you can calculate percentages and you can look for outliers, that’s all you need to be able to do. 

Lisa also observes that business owners often make a lot of emotional decisions to spend money. Business owners and entrepreneurs rationalize when they need to spend the money, but the logical side of the brain wants to avoid that, and that creates a lot of shame surrounding your numbers.

Instead, Lisa argues to look at your numbers up front. She tells her clients that they can reverse engineer what they want in your business, and together, Lisa and her clients can create budgets and forecasts to make that happen. That way, as an entrepreneur, you can spend the money the way you want because you’ve planned for it! You can still pay yourself and have a profit.

Margy has seen first hand how much emotional decision making comes with your finances. Margy really loves being analytical and looking at her numbers, but she also believes in intuition. When something feels right or wrong in your business, you shouldn’t ignore that feeling. But you should look at your numbers to either validate or disprove your assumptions and feelings.

It’s not “Never trust your gut.” It’s more “Marry numbers and intuition together.”

Lisa explains that many business coaches are doing their clients a disservice by not looking at the numbers. Business owners need to be able to interpret data to have successful businesses. The Ultimate Blueprint is all about tracking your numbers, what numbers to track, and tracking them over a long period of time. This allows you to see a comparison of month to month and year to year. 

Margy asks Lisa, for somebody who wants to implement tracking their numbers better but is overwhelmed by all the spreadsheets, what do you think are the key things that they should be tracking every month in their business?

The first action Lisa recommends is to track your revenue weekly and monthly. It’s imperative to track sales MTD on a weekly basis, so you can find patterns and trends. She also recommends looking at your profit and loss statements, looking at your cashflow situation, and if you have receivables to look at those. She explains, you want to pay as late as you can, and you want to get paid as early as you can. The longer the receivable sits, the harder it is to collect it.

Lisa is also a huge fan of per unit measuring, she loves slicing and dicing numbers in as many ways as she can to support a hypothesis that you have about how to make the business perform better. Lisa also points out that if you have a team and you are able to gauge revenue per person,  then you can create a factor capacity model. 

Another idea to consider as a business owner is per uniting the cost of acquisition of a new client. If you decide to spend $7,000 in facebook ads, how much are you generating in revenue as a result of that spend? How much did it cost you per lead? What did you get for every dollar spent?

When you can drill the numbers down that way, you can actually replicate what you’ve done that has produced results. You will also have a baseline measurement that will tell you if something is no longer working.  If you only measure it one time, and you don’t look at what the trends are, you won’t be seeing legitimate results in your business.

Lisa breaks business growth into 5 steps:

Attract

Convert

Retain

Expand

Refer

After you are able to both attract business and convert to clients, you need to then keep your client or customer, and expand the amount of business you do with them. This will have a huge impact on the lifetime value of your business. If they refer people to you, your cost of acquisition goes down; buyers are selling for you.

You can’t maintain a strong business with luck, you need to know your back-end numbers. Lisa and Margy agree that even during the good times, entrepreneurs need to be prepared and get everything in order in case they have a tough month ahead.

Lisa asks all her clients, “How much money do you have in the bank? What is your burn rate? How long will that last?”

Thought Readers is Lisa’s newest venture, the online Business & Book Club community. Lisa came up with the idea when someone had reached out to her explaining that they were always trying to keep up with what Lisa was reading. They asked if Lisa would start a business book club. They said, “Send me the book you're reading every month, tell me what you’re learning and I will write you a check.”

She thought, nobody is gonna pay me to read books with me! However, after the first year, 75 people signed up.

Lisa chooses a book, reads it a month before, and picks out all the important “ahas!” She then shares them with the group, records videos about her own takeaways, and she does a “Books and Business Q&A.” People can come to the call and ask Lisa any question they want about the book or just business in general!

Lisa is now entering her fifth year reading books together with this community! You can join the community and she will ship you the book, or join and be a digital member and buy the book yourself. Either way, you still get wisdom from the discussion that happens inside the community. It’s a great shortcut to reading the entire book.

A recommendation from Lisa is to pick books that are aligned with where your business problems are - read something that resonates with you, read something that will help you.

Margy’s big focus is on implementation, so she is drawn to books like Profit First and The Ultimate Blueprint. It’s incredibly helpful to have someone to talk it out with and get some bullet points on what you’re struggling with or want to learn more about. Thought Readers helps community members translate these books into their lives and their business to take action.

A final recommendation from Lisa is when you’re looking at business books, pick the lever that is going to lift you the highest with the least amount of effort. Don’t get stuck in the weeds of tactical implementation, instead stick with the one thing that is going to give you the biggest ROI on your time.

You can connect with Lisa at thoughtreaders.com!

On today’s episode of Rock the Podcast, Margy talks to Interview Connections client and great friend, Nikki Nash! Nikki is a marketing expert, Hay House author, and the creator of the Market Your Genius Brand. After a decade-long career marketing Fortune 100 brands and tech start ups, Nikki set out to help women build profitable online businesses.

Margy and Nikki discuss the buzzword “thought leadership” and what it really means. Nikki talks about how she decided to leave behind her career of working for other people, to start her own business. Nikki’s genius is building a personal brand, and helping people turn their experiences and expertise into a business where they are making money and feeling fulfilled.

Through Nikki’s business, podcast, and book, she helps people share what they know so they can make an impact in the world.

One thing Margy sees frequently, is entrepreneurs and business owners using reused ideas with no substance. However, Nikki is a true thought leader. She has great, original content, and she is consistently committed to her content.

Margy asked Nikki, “What really makes someone a thought leader?”

Nikki feels that thought leadership gets collapsed with influencers, or someone with a large following. But thought leadership is really about how can someone take people to a new level? A thought leader has to have a new way of thinking to bring their clients or followers into a new idea.

According to Nikki, thought leadership is living in the inquiry of “What could this be like? Let’s explore. Let’s learn and become experts.”

A thought leader is also someone who is a leader, and to be a great leader you have to do some self work and personal development. Understanding yourself allows you to understand others and be present with others.

What makes someone a thought leader?

Nikki recommends that you start with the questions: “Who am I? What are my gifts and talents? Why am I here? What do I believe that I can contribute?” How can you challenge a way of being or a way of thinking? You also have to be okay standing out into the spotlight and doing it in such a way that people will follow, listen, grow and develop for the better because of what you’re putting out there.

It’s not about reinventing the wheel, and it’s not about discovering something that no one has ever heard of. It’s going deeper within yourself that actually gets you to thought leadership. If you’re always looking externally, asking “what are other people doing?” -- that’s when content gets stale.

Margy and Nikki recommend that you go deeper within yourself by telling your story. Ask yourself, “What makes me unique? What have I learned on the journey that I've been on that no one else has been on? How do I apply that to help others?”

Nikki’s experiences and journeys led her to the realization that all the stages of her dating life can be applied to marketing! In marketing, you need to build relationships with people. To do that, it’s just like dating. You meet the person, capture their attention, get their phone number, and spark a conversation. 

By going out into the world and “dating” their potential clients or customers, changes the way Nikki’s clients think about marketing. By asking your potential clients if you can date them, you’re asking how you can show up for them. You may not be teaching a drastically new concept, but you’re teaching it in a way that changes the way people take action or move forward.

To anyone who wants to build their thought leadership, Margy explains that you have to get out on the court and you have to make content. She warns against giving into impostor syndrome. It’s crucial to get out there, make the content, and to have a goal to serve and put out quality content.

The best thought leaders are the ones who aren’t trying to be thought leaders because they’re not focused on being one -- they’re focused on other people and what can be of value to them.

The road to thought leadership starts with creating content and by asking “What do people need, what does my audience need, what do my listeners need?” Being present and listening to what is a great way to spark a conversation and to teach something. You don’t need to feel like you’re a thought leader or tell people that you’re a thought leader, it’s about how you can show up consistently and lead.

When you genuinely are curious and enjoying that process, you become a thought leader without trying to become one. 

People’s perceptions of your brand and company are going to shape your brand and company. If you have someone who is really mean answering the phone, people aren’t going to think that you’re a nice and friendly brand. So, how can you become the person who deserves that title of thought leader?

Margy, of course, recommends podcast guesting. One of the reasons Margy loves podcast guesting is the ideas and conversions that come out from sharing your story long-form on this platform is powerful content, especially compared to what you get from a social media post. 

An unexpected benefit that Margy has experienced with her own podcast guesting was the way that Margy’s content has evolved. By going all-in on connection, curiosity, conversations with all these different hosts who have their own different perspectives, Margy’s own content was shifting and evolving with every new perspective she heard.

Podcast guesting is one of the easiest ways to get started building your thought leadership because you don’t have to create infrastructure yourself. You don’t have to create a podcast, a blog post, or a youtube channel - it already exists. 

You are showing up on someone else’s platform where they have already built a relationship with their audience. By default, people are trusting you more because the host is putting you in the spotlight. The audience then feels that you must be worth listening to.

When you have these conversations with people, you start discovering and refining your own thoughts and ideas and values. When you want to be a guest on a show, it really broadens your ability to have conversations on related topics that then give you a holistic perspective and viewpoint because you’re curious. You’re having conversations with different people with different points of view, changing and shaping the way you think.

You will then start to see fans and a following, just by being out there and being visible.

Nikki herself, is going all in on podcasting in 2021. Podcasting gives you someone’s undivided attention and places you right in their ear. Not only that, but podcasting allows you to have a long-form channel to share your story in a meaningful way to your potential leads.

You can connect with Nikki by listening to her podcast, Market Your Genius, or heading to freemarketingbootcamp.com to check out her (no surprises here) free marketing bootcamp!

Today's episode is a special solo-Margy episode to talk about a concept that she coined, called “The King of Mediocrity.” What Margy means by that is, you can be a king of a mediocre life, or you can be a student of a great life. 

In other words, you can be right or you can be successful. The most successful people Margy knows care more about learning and being a student, than they do about being right. They don’t care as much about saying “This is what I know, I’m not open to other perspectives, I’m the expert on this.” Those are not the people Margy sees living lives that Margy wants to live!

Margy came to this statement while she was thinking about leadership. The leadership at Interview Connections always views their team as a mirror of the leadership. If we’re seeing results we don’t like in our team, instead of complaining about it, we look at ourselves and ask, “What does this say about us? About our leadership?”

Looking at results you don’t want and seeing it as a reflection of your own leadership requires humility. But this is the only way to develop as a business owner and as a leader! Practice looking at those results and saying “What is this telling me? What can I work on as a leader?”

When Jess and Margy wanted to grow to 7+ figures, they knew they needed to get in rooms and masterminds with entrepreneurs who are at 7, 8, and 9 figures. A common theme in successful entrepreneurs that Jess and Margy witnessed was kindness and humility. What are the chances that all these highly successful entrepreneurs just happen to be this nice and this humble?

There is a strong correlation between success and humility. Before Jess & Margy hit 7 figures, they went to Ali Brown’s Mastermind and met the incredibly successful entrepreneur, Michelle Bosch. At the Mastermind, while Michelle was talking about her multiple businesses, Margy felt like small fish. Michelle was so high-level, and that felt so beyond where Interview Connections was at that point.

Jess and Margy started chatting with Miichelle, and they were stunned by how Michelle was so humble and kind, even though Margy knew she was so successful and intelligent. Michelle said “It’s so great to meet you, I have so much to learn from you.” This absolutely blew Margy away. Margy said, “You are so high-level, what could you learn from us?”

Michelle said “But you are experts in podcasting, and I don’t know anything about podcasting so I am so excited to learn from you!” What Margy realized in that moment was that there was something else in that humility, it’s curiosity. The most successful entrepreneurs are students and are hungry to learn more.

If you are a genuine student and you want to learn, by default there is humility in that. You are admitting that you don’t know everything, and that curiosity is what leads to humility, and that is what leads to these incredible levels of success. 

There has been a myriad of studies that show the correlation between success and curiosity. These studies show that curiosity prepares the brain for better learning. Why does curiosity matter? Curiosity makes it so that you will be less likely to fall prey to confirmation bias, and you’ll be less likely to see what you’ve always seen. 

We need to stay curious, so we can be innovative and reach new growth while creating better results! When we’re curious, we view tough situations more creatively. In business, things are constantly going wrong. Breakdowns happen and it’s important to not fall apart.

But when we’re curious, studies show we are able to view difficult situations in a more creative way and that allows us to innovate and to overcome the issues and breakdowns. It also helps you see other people’s perspectives and have more empathy.

Curiosity makes you more focused on other people’s perspectives and less focused on your own, and this leads to connecting with other people better. And we all know that relationship and connection are the root of a healthy business!

You can be the king of a mediocre life or the student of a great one. Margy invites you to look at your life, look at your business, ask yourself - are you being a king or are you being a student? If you’re being a king, Margy implores you to make that shift to being a student and staying curious!