Podcast
From Imposter To Poster Boy: How Adam Sinkus Overcame The Imposter Syndrome And Became A Smart Marketing Guru
This episode’s guest is about as straight up, unfluffy and down-to-earth as they get. In fact he sounds a lot like how he describes his typical client…”Chuck in the truck.” You wouldn’t expect this person, who not too long ago suffered from the imposter syndrome, to become a poster boy for SEO! Well, he is that and more! For a long time, Adam Sinkus felt like an imposter in his role as Managing Director of My Roofing SEO. No time more so than when he had to jump on a sales call and suddenly become the self-assured face of the company. Many of you can surely relate to this feeling of being a bit of a fraud, of saying to yourself, “Who am I to think I can pull this off?” If that’s you, you’ll learn a lot from Adam, who is here to relate how he’s gone from imposter to being a guru of smart marketing strategies for small to medium sized businesses in the trade and home services industry.
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From Imposter To Poster Boy: How Adam Sinkus Overcame The Imposter Syndrome And Became A Smart Marketing Guru
My next guest is about as straight up, unfluffy and down to earth as they get. In fact, he sounds a lot like how he describes his typical client, “Chuck in a Truck.” What’s so surprising then is that for a long time, he felt like an impostor in his role as Managing Director of his business, My Roofing SEO. No time more so than when he had to jump on a sales call and suddenly become the self-assured face of the company.
I’m sure many of you relate to this feeling of being a bit of a fraud, of saying to yourself, “Who am I to think I can pull this off?” If that’s you, you’re going to learn a lot from my next guest, who is here to relate how he’s gone from impostor to poster boy for really nailing your niche. It gives me great joy to welcome Adam Sinkus, the guru of smart marketing strategies for small to medium-sized businesses in the trade and home services industry. Welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
I enjoyed our initial conversation. You’re someone who could really give some valuable information to someone who might be sitting behind a desk in the Corporate US going, “Can I make that leap from where I am to a consultant?” or equally the small business owner, and I know I’ve sat in that seat many times who are going, “Why is my marketing not working? What is it that I’m not getting?” I’d love it if we could address those issues for people that are reading. I think that one of the things that startups struggle with is they want to be all things to all people. Can you tell us why that’s not such a great idea?
It seems like marketing is a product that every business, or even every person, essentially can use, but at the end of the day, if I try and talk to everybody, I’m going to end up talking to nobody because my message doesn’t speak to specific problems that each person is having. It’s one of the reasons why we niched down and broke out the My Roofing SEO section of our business because we to realized that we’re seeing these roofing restorations and HVAC companies, and these people are super tactile.
They just want the information like, “Give it to me straight and how it is,” whereas we were also working with nonprofits, retail, eCommerce and some SaaS companies, and they like the flashy show, the PowerPoint presentations and the fluff and the love, so it was two very different types of messaging, but if we try and talk to our home services clients with all that fluff and love, they’re like, “I’m going to go find somebody else because they’re just going to tell me what I need and I’m going to go yes or no.”
You have to understand what messaging works for the target audience that you’re going for. Even though we can market to anybody and I can do marketing for anybody, I know who I’m talking to when I put my message out there. It doesn’t mean we work in home services, construction and trades. It means that’s who we’re talking to when we put our message out.
Thank you for sharing that. It sounds like you tried a few different avenues before you zeroed in on that market, is that correct?
Yeah. We tried to niche down in some different spaces. We’ve been successful in those other spaces, but what we realized is we also had a lot of people in this space as well that we were already working with, so it made sense for us to move the brand into a space where we could work a message directly to those people while not impacting the other clients that we’re working with. Strategically, that’s part of why we looked at, “Do we split this brand off from our other brand?” which is Elevare. It still operates in that nonprofit, eComm, retail and SaaS space.
Often when we’re thinking about where we might’ve hit the ceiling in our current job or be in a business which feels like the wheels are spinning a little bit, there can be a lot of fear in that area. I’ve noticed with myself that if I’m coming from fear, I want to be all things to all people, which is a scarcity mindset, and if I come from an abundance mindset, I then have the courage to zero in.
In a specific audience, it’s a case of going for less really does deliver more. How do I know which audience to go for? I’ve spoken to a few people, for instance, who’ve worked in the financial world. They’ve left one of the big organizations and they might say, “I want to make my clients wealthy.” Wealth is a huge category. Where did they go from there? What’s the process of nailing your niche? What advice would you give them?
It is a process. The first thing I always look at is, “Who am I currently serving? Do I have current clients that I’m already serving in a space?” I start to look at them under the microscope. I look at everything from how much money do they make to what kind of house do they live in, do they have a wife and kids, do they have a sports car collection or are they living in an apartment in a little shoebox in New York City trying to make ends meet? All of that starts to tell me what problems they have.
Once I understand who they are, I can start to address their problems because somebody that has an abundance of money doesn’t have a problem of trying to make more money. They have a problem of trying to manage the money that they have so that it keeps growing on a scale that allows them to live the lifestyle. Versus if I’m a struggling college student, then my problem is I need an abundance of money to pay my bills, go out, party and do all the social things that I want to do while still maintaining that I have to go to college every day.
You have to understand who your clients are so you can start to understand what their problems are. The first niche I’m going to go after is the clients that I’m already servicing. Why? It’s because I’ve already effectively done something to attract that audience. I’m going to start there. It’s the low-hanging fruit. From there, I start to look at what other audiences exist that parallel that audience.
If we’re talking about the wealthy mid-sized business owner that has a nice house, a wife and kids, they’ve got a boat, an extra car or a sports car. I’m going to start to look at, “Who else fits in that mid-sized business owner space? What do they care about?” Now, I can start to expand that niche a little bit and I can go, “I need to talk to people that make $150,000 a year or more. They live in this type of an area and this is their demographic of wife and kids.” I can take the same messaging that I was using for that group that I’m already serving, and I can start to apply it.
What you’ll find is that as you find these additional groups, you’ll have to tweak your message a little bit here and there to make it count for them, but all in all, you’ll see a lot of parallels. It’s like for us, we service home service and trades. We started with roofing and restoration companies, but what we found is that window guys, electricians, HVAC guys and gals all care and approach things in a very similar manner.
Does an HVAC guy knock on your door like a roofer does? No, but are they still very tactical in how they approach marketing via mailers and some very traditional marketing methods? Yes, they are. We know how to work within the confines of the marketing that they’re working in to add this digital space that is a little more unfamiliar for them.
It sounds like you niched right down and then decided to pull back a little bit to broaden the market from having gone very focused. Is that right?
Yes, and I always encourage people to do that. Start narrower than you think. Believe me, there’s a broader market in that narrow market than you realize. There are 40,000 roofing companies in the United States.
When you look at the numbers, you go, “1% of that market is all I need.”
I don’t even need 1%. If I had 400 clients a year for websites, I’d have to hire quite a good team to get all of that done. Just 400 new clients a year.
You spoke to the issue of understanding the problem, and I totally get that. In fact, I was reading a line saying that the number one motivating factor to get someone to change their behavior is pain. Speaking to the pain of that problem, how important do you feel it is for you, or the business owner that we’re talking to here, to have personally experienced that pain to be able to really relate to the client?
I don’t think you need to experience it personally. I’ve never been a roofer and I’ve never worked in the trades or construction industry, but what you need to understand are the industry and the problem. This is done through proper research, asking questions and being engaged in that marketplace. I spend a lot of time talking to roofers, tradespeople and people I know that are realtors that talk to all these people.
I ask the questions like, “What are their problems? What are their pain points? How are they getting clients? What do they complain about those clients?” All of that helps me understand what their problems truly are. You have to define a problem that is narrow enough that it speaks to your target group but broad enough that it’s not just speaking to one person in your target group.
What would be an example of a problem that comes up that you go, “That feels like something I could zero in on?”
For instance, with roofers, we talk a lot about how do you maximize your marketing dollars so that you can get the biggest return. Marketing dollars doesn’t consist of a website and traditional mailers, but it’s also door knockers that are setting appointments and running around neighborhoods trying to get people to set a sales appointment. There are other costs involved in that.
One of the problems that we address with our clients is, “Let’s talk about your overall marketing strategy first and then we’re going to talk about where we fit into that strategy. We’re going to solve the problem of how do you continue to get leads when your door knockers go home for the end of the day and your website is still running.”
That’s their issue. They’re really in that physical space that’s very literal, like knocking on doors. Does that speak to a problem also of being a little bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the digital world?
Exactly. One of the things I see so often, especially in the trades industry, is we see marketers that they position themselves as, “Fire all of your door knockers. Fire all of your salespeople and go digital.” I’m like, “That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in business.” It’s about addressing the problem that maybe they don’t even know they have, but doing it in a way that speaks to them to go, “I want to get you leads while your door knockers are asleep, so that when they wake up in the morning, they have a pile of leads to go start with.”
What I’m hearing is that you’re coming from their space, which is a very physical hands-on space. They’re in trades. That’s what they do. They work with their hands and their marketing reflects that. Feet on the ground and get back from that and say, “You could be missing an opportunity here. Let’s tackle this beast called the digital world, which I can make easy for you to understand.” Does that sound like the approach that you’re doing?
That’s exactly it. I think 90% of the problems that people see in business are purely from a lack of understanding. Business owners are experts in what they do. People that own a roofing company are expert roofers. They’re not expert business people. Not to say that they can’t get good at that, but they start a company because they’re like, “I’m an expert at this and I saw an opportunity where I can make more money working for myself than somebody else.”
You have to help them understand and help them get out of their way to realize that they’re limiting themselves by not bringing in expertise to solve the problems that they maybe don’t know that they even have. That sounds convoluted, but at the end of the day, you spend a lot of time convincing clients why they should spend on marketing, why they should spend on this service or that service, why they should hire a bookkeeper, all those positions or roles that you might hire into a small business.
Those people spend time helping you understand why it’s easier for them to hire you for X amount hours per month than it is for them to struggle through it for ten hours a month when they could be managing another job, driving more revenue or selling another thing. That’s always the approach with it. How do we get in and help them use their time to the best of their ability and leverage that?
You mentioned having the need to get them out of their own way. That’s probably a nice segue because we all self-sabotage. That’s my area of expertise. How do we stop ourselves from self-sabotaging? That’s the tragedy, the way I see it, that we have all these people with the best intentions wanting to make their personal dent in the world, and then so often, they don’t. Not for external reasons, or they might feel like external reasons because it’s something that’s going on inside.
I’d love to speak to you about how you dealt with what you identified as your big, if you like, internal issue, which was this feeling of impostor syndrome. Can you speak to us about that? If you do a little bit of research on impostor syndrome, apparently 70% of people say that they feel like that, that they feel like a bit of a fraud in their position. Even some of the most accomplished people out there, actors like Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, they’re saying that “I often stand in front of the camera and go, who am I even doing this?” Can you talk to us about that? How did that affect you in your business?
I’m going to start with a story, and then I’ll dive into how it’s affected me. I despise sales. When I first said, “I’m in this. I need more revenue coming in. I don’t have a salesperson right now, so I am the salesperson,” I’d never really done a whole lot in sales prior to that. I started with the first cold call and I remember getting on the phone and being in total panic mode. I felt like I sounded like a blabbering idiot that had no idea what I was doing with marketing.
I ended up feeling like I didn’t even talk intelligibly on the call enough even to warrant the second call to go through the sales process and close the deal. I paused in the middle of the call and I remember taking a breath and going, “I know what I’m doing. I just need to talk,” and from that moment, I could feel my tone and confidence level change. I pushed out the rest of the sales call. I got the second call, but I did not close that sale, and that is totally okay.
I was so worried about what this person was going to think that I’d never talked to. If I didn’t close the deal, I’m never probably going to talk to again, that they were going to go tell my mother, my friends and my cousins, “This guy’s an idiot. I don’t know why you even keep him around,” but the reality was none of that was going to happen as soon as I realized that in my mind, I could feel the whole change in my mood and my emotion at that moment. The problem became that I had always talked to myself about, “I hate sales. I’m no good at sales.”
I still don’t like to cold call. I don’t like the process of cold calling because I hate interrupting people’s days, but at the end of the day, I also understand the necessity of it. For me, it was all about stepping back and going, “There’s going to be two options that they’re going to give me. It’s either going to be yes or no. If I get a yes, great. I have an opportunity. If I get a no, I hang up the phone, I dial the next number and we keep it moving.”
I can take some time at a later point to reflect on that and go, “Is there something that I could have done differently that maybe would have made that presentation go better or smoother to get the yes?” That’s always important, but at the end of the day, sometimes you got to pull your pants up and say, “I’m going to do this.” And just jump in and do it. That’s what’s gotten me over the hump. Now, I get on the phone and my confidence level is totally different because I realized that at the end of the day, it’s either yes or no. If I get a no, I either didn’t help them understand, or they truly don’t need my services now.
Thank you for sharing that. I think that’s a good advice to see yourself as a witness to the process, reduce it down to the basic that it’s either a yes or no and not get too emotionally embroiled in it or not take it personally. One of the things I find helpful too is to go, “At the end of the day, I’m delivering something of real value that’s going to give them something way beyond their financial time embedment.” Do you use that strategy? Is that something that you do as well? I sense in talking to you that you really are about delivering results for your clients. You really do care about getting them an outcome. You don’t just talk about it and then walk away.
I truly believe that everything that we offer to the world, whether it be paid or it be something that we’re giving away for free, like advice, passion, love, or friendship, you need to give more than you ever expect from anybody. As soon as you do that unconditionally, the world unlocks. I started down a journey with this of, “How do I go and give so much value to people that they can’t say no to me?” Part of that has led me to say, “If I’ve given them so much value that they can’t say no, am I giving away too much of the farm?”
What I’ve realized is I can step back and I can give value to the price point that they want or that they can afford. It comes down to I meet my customers where they’re at, instead of trying to pack my customers inside of the box of my products and put them in this space. If they’re not a $15,000 client, I’m not going to try and sell them a $15,000 website, but if I can do a $1,500 website for them, sure. It’s not as profitable for me and it doesn’t make as much revenue, but they’re going to remember that, and when they’re ready for that $15,000 website, who’s the first call that they make?
I think it’s a great philosophy to have. It’s about striking a balance. I was on a sales call with someone. At the end of it, she said, “I’ve got everything I need from the sales call.” She created her own transformation on the spot, but then I think, “That’s great that she did that.” I go, “Have I not served her? Impossibly, she thinks she’s got everything that she needs, but I know she probably doesn’t,” so it’s a dance. It’s knowing what the right amount to give is, and then to stop, but always coming from the position of what’s in their best interests.
It’s interesting because I’ve been down that path to where I’ve given so much value on the call and they’re like, “I can go do this.” They come back to you in a month, six months or whatever the timeframe is, and they’re like, “Look what I did,” and you’re like, “You really should have worked with me,” but if you become their cheerleader at that moment when they’re ready to work with you, they’ll come back. The other thing I’ve learned at that moment is what if I fulfilled all of their needs on the sales call or the prequalification call? I’m going to vehemently ask them if there’s somebody else that they know that’s having the same issues that they are that I can help solve their problem with?
I think you’re hitting on something important. Let’s call it a Metaphysical Law, the Law of Exchange, where it’s very easy for us in the giving space to give away something and not receive anything in return. There’s an imbalance there. As a business owner, particularly, if you really do want the best thing for your clients, and I think that’s the only way to survive in business is to be coming from that authentic place, but to be mindful of this law, because it’s a really interesting law that I was studying and it basically said, “If you give too much away for free, what you’re doing is also giving to that person the burden of guilt.”
They don’t understand it. It’s a subconscious thing, but they feel indebted to you and they don’t like that. That can breed resentment. That might be typically a coach, for instance, or someone in your role marketing who gives away lots of information almost to the point where they don’t need you. We do need to give them the opportunity to give back, too, even if they’re not buying. As you say, to recommend you to someone else.
I think that’s great and I actually have that line on my board, “Do you know somebody else who would benefit from our conversation today?” I remember you saying that to me and I appreciate that, so I’ve got that in big red letters. The other thing too is if you have genuinely given them something of value, ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn, for instance, if that’s a platform you use. I started doing that and their faces light up because they actually want to give back, even if, for some reason, they don’t want to proceed with that particular product or service.
It feels to me like we’re closing a loop at that point. It’s a fair exchange. That’s very important because we, as business owners or entrepreneurs, don’t want to if you like to please ourselves energetically. It’s really important that what goes around comes around too, from that point of view. You completed the magic triangle process, which was all about isolating the three core needs. The most important things that would make the biggest difference to your life.
I’d love to take you through those results. To explain to anyone who’s reading who might not be familiar with this process, basically, we’re isolating the three most important things and we’re working with some really simple geometry, a triangle, which is about as simple as it gets. I love triangles because they’re immutable, they’re rigid, you can’t bend them out of shape. What it looks like is that at the top of the triangle, there’s the number one core need, and then the secondary and the tertiary ones are at the base, the foundation of the triangle.
In your case, you’ve got authenticity at the top. That’s your number one need/value and at the base, flexibility and wonder. Firstly, just to find out from you about flexibility and wonder, we’ll address those first and then we’ll look at authenticity. Could you share with me, firstly, flexibility? That’s an interesting need. Tell me about that. Why did that come up for you and why is it so important for you?
I think we get wrapped up in this premonition that everything has to be this hard-coded system process. Even at home, Saturday is chore day. We start chores right after breakfast. Everything gets so rigid in life when you have to follow these systematic processes all the time. We spend a lot of time in business and systems because that is a critical piece of success, but at the end of the day, flexibility allows us to wander off the path a little bit and get into spaces where we can be more creative, where we can flex the different parts of our emotions and go into conversations and things that are truly unique to a moment. Flexibility, in that respect, is very important to me because I don’t like to be stuck in a box.
That feeling of being boxed in, I guess that speaks to the delusions in the marketing sense that might be too cookie cutter. Is that right?
 Yes.
You’re not saying, “Don’t have structure or system.” You have to have those structures and systems, but don’t let them play God. Have them in place, but that in a way it gives you the freedom to be creative, to think intuitively and to come out with of the box solutions. Is that right?
Exactly. I look at it from customer interactions too. I can’t control what a customer is going to say, do or want, so for me, it’s incredibly important. Even though I have my system of how I develop a website, I need to be 100% flexible to what my customer’s needs are at that moment through that system.
Staying open to other possibilities and being curious. That makes total sense. What does wonder mean to you and why is that so important?
I have a lifelong pursuit of knowledge. I do have ADD or ADHD, whatever you want to call it. I was diagnosed way before ADHD was the coined term. I attribute it to part of why I’m so curious in life. I’m always chasing the next shiny thing because I get bored really quickly if things get too static in a moment. When I have conversations with people, I’m already at the end of the conversation, ready to start the next topic, and they’re two sentences in. Wonder to me is all about how I can keep that thirst for knowledge and growth to excite myself every day to get up to want to do the things that I do.
I wonder if some of these labels that we get handed to us aren’t coming from a system that’s not satisfying your insatiable desire to know more.
Maybe. I can’t pay attention to things, for the life of me. I have incredible systems in place to keep me focused and moving down a path as a result of it.
I noticed with a lot of creative people that just seems to be how they are. They’re wired. My husband’s like that. They’re always wired to be exploring new avenues. Sometimes I’ll say, “Can you stick to the thread of the conversation? We were talking about something else before,” but he’s off on another topic. It’s good to be aware of it. It can well be the sign of a very inquiring mind that gets bored quickly, which makes total sense.
Let’s talk to the next one. If you like, the cherry on the cake, but what is also, in a sense, your North Star, the thing that’s most important to you. I’d love to speak to that authenticity. Authenticity can be one of those words like the freedom that’s been commoditized to the point where it starts to lose its meaning. Everyone has to be authentic these days, but what does that really mean for you to be authentic?
Authenticity and being authentic have nothing to do with a label. It has nothing to do with who your business is and what you post on social media. To be honest, social media is ingenuine, as I think most people get because we put out the best version of ourselves forward. Authenticity is about opening yourself up to the vulnerability of those around you and being okay with the fact that they may not agree with you, they may not like you, they may not appreciate you, your thoughts or your opinions, but being comfortable enough to say those regardless of what they think.
We live in this world where people throw around authenticity as a buzzword, but at the same token, I look at my LinkedIn inbox and I probably have ten or fifteen cold, hard sales pitches in there from people that I’ve never ever talked to or never even messaged. I have no idea who they are, what they’re about or why I should even care. To me, all that noise of people wanting to take up your space is so critical that you have to pause and go, “I’m going to be real with you. I don’t like your message and I don’t want to talk to you.” Authenticity is not being afraid to be who you are in every situation, not just those scripted moments.
Is that how you message someone back who just approached you out of the blue like that, unsolicited?
I’m a little more tactful with it because of what’s socially acceptable. I’m not nice about it. I’m very direct about it in those spaces. Regardless of how good a product is, I’ve refused to do business with people that lived in that space before.
How do you feel when you allow yourself to be direct and truthful like that? What does that feel like?
It’s freeing. It truly allows me to be who I am. I am a straight shooter and no BS. Of I have to dance around the truth, that’s frustrating to me. If I have to dance around how I might make somebody feel because I told them how I feel and think, that’s very frustrating to me. I want people to understand and accept that I might be direct with you, but it’s not because I don’t like you or because I’m mad at you or upset with you. It’s because that’s who I am and that’s who I’m authentically going to be every time.
How the triangle works, it’s uncanny, but it seems to work like this every time is that your highest vision of yourself, your life and showing up in your life, is living a life that really does pay tribute to authenticity. That’s what you’re about. That’s you. That’s your brand. The way you achieve that or how you allow yourself to become authentic is really inscribed at the base of the triangle, through flexibility and wonder.
The way you’ve talked about this is by having the security of a solid base of having those structures and systems in place, allowing yourself the flexibility to be creative and to come up with out-of-the-box solutions. That increases your appetite for curiosity. That feeds the wonder gene, knowing that you have the freedom to use your intuition and come up with creative solutions, then that fuels your innate curiosity, which you always have had. That sense of wonder, which is a beautiful child-like quality. As children, we have this sense of wonder and we need to recapture that.
Flexibility is naturally a must for you and, therefore, enhancing the sense of wonder. It’s really from your creative self that you can be truly authentic because in that space, you have the courage to say it as it is. If we’re going to simplify it right down to your personal mission statement through flexibility and wonder, I achieve authenticity. Does that make sense?
It makes a lot of sense. It truly does.
What I do with this triangle is I have mine up on a wall to remind myself to stay on that path. Particularly, the initial need is flexibility, so to keep that your focus right now, to make sure that it sounds like a little bit of not a balancing act, but it sounds like you just have to make sure you’ve got the structures in place that you need along the way. That will give you the freedom to be flexible to break those structures then.
If you don’t have the structures, that leads to chaos, which is the opposite environment for creativity, so that safety of the structure is an absolute must, but going to the trouble of creating it, you’ve given yourself permission to be flexible, and you can apply that to your clients. That’s really what your inner self needs. What’s interesting is everything that we see in the outside world, let’s face it, is a reflection of our inner self. We might think all our problems are external, but they’re really mirrors of what’s going on inside.
What’s powerful about this for you is that if you really do follow this triangle faithfully, it’s how you will ultimately show up in the world on an ongoing basis. You can even speak to that in marketing terms. Let’s look at that. In other words, when you follow this and you satisfy these needs, so they become values. The need is out there at the moment. You just have to bring it into yourself and it becomes a value. It’s what you stand for, and then you start to communicate to others. They get that about you. Authenticity at the top of the triangle is not what you want for yourself, but it’s also who you become.
It’s like your why. You wouldn’t feel good about yourself if you didn’t feel that you could be that straight shooter or that person who says it like it is. You wouldn’t want to get out of bed if you felt that you had to compromise that. You’ve spoken a couple of times about being boxed in, and I see that’s at the back of authenticity. You don’t want to be boxed in. You want to be able to say it as it is. That’s your modus operandi. That’s what you stand for. That’s your highest value, the thing most dear to you, and you don’t want to compromise that. That’s what you offer your clients.
It’s interesting that because that’s so high on your radar, that’s who you’re attracting into your life. People that are the same. The same straight talkers. You don’t want fluffy people who are going to BS you and waste your time, essentially. That’s really your why. What you bring to the table is a wonder. When you’re talking to a client, and this is how I interpret that from your position, you’re inviting them to entertain the possibilities of what they could achieve through their marketing.
To be curious and to go, “What if we could do it beyond pounding the pavement? What if there was this whole other world out there for you and I’m going to bring you into this world and share with you what’s possible?” As scary as it looks now, you’re going to become so familiar and so at home with this that you’re going to go, “To think that there was all this room for expansion that I was never tapping into because I was too scared to go there.” You’re starting to allow them to be curious about something that up until this point has been on, “It’s too hard. I don’t want to know about that.” Does that make sense?
Yeah. It makes a lot of sense.
That’s really your what. How you do this is essentially by you being flexible. You are flexible in terms of dealing with them. It’s through your own flexibility that you can meet them where they’re at. You have such a dislike of being boxed in that you don’t want to pass that onto your clients, so your how is to meet them where they’re at. Within reason, of course. You can’t compromise yourself. Does that make sense?
It makes a lot of sense. I’ve never thought about it in that way, so it’s very eye-opening to approach it in that modality.
Thank you for that. It really speaks to what I struggled with when people would say, “What do you want? What are your values?” I’d be plucking things out of the air, and they weren’t authentic because they didn’t come from me. Need speaks to something that we’ve lacked. That’s why we feel so strongly about it because it was something that we lacked, that we buried, or suppressed that was always there within us.
When we suppress something that is within us, it’s okay if we never had it. That’s another story. We don’t miss it, but if it’s something that was within us all along and then for whatever reason someone’s put us in a box and we feel that we can’t get out of that box, there’s a lot of pain around that because it’s stopping us being who we really are. That’s why that’s so dear to you. That’s a separate conversation to look at what sits behind the need, but this is really saying, “This your map going forward. This will serve you best because this is what you feel most deeply about.”
I appreciate that. That’s very enlightening. It’s very eye-opening and it makes so much sense.
It’s putting yourself into a black and white so that you can see that we are taking this nebulous thing called the self. If we were to put it on paper in writing, this is what it looks like. It might not be perfect, but it’s better than just facing a fog, which is how most of us get through life, not at all clear on our paths forward. What I’d like to do is finish up this conversation with a message from you.
I’m thinking about me sitting in that business owner’s space. I wasn’t really in the trades alone. I did get very involved in real estate and renovated a lot of properties, 117 when I counted all of that. I would’ve loved to have met someone like you who could have solved a lot of my marketing problems. What would you be saying to the business owner who’s looking at the complexity of the digital space and feeling a little bit all at sea about it and just wanting to know what the next step that they can take is? What would your advice be to that person?
First of all, you need to understand who am I trying to talk to? As soon as you know who you’re trying to talk to, then it’s about figuring out where are they at and what messaging are they expecting from me? It’s not what’s important to me. It’s what’s important to my customer because at the end of the day, I can build a website that is absolutely stunning, that has all the bells and whistles on it.
Somebody would look at that and go, “This is crazy awesome,” but if the message that’s there doesn’t speak to the audience that it’s intended for, they will never buy from it. You need to step back and go, “Who is my audience? What do they care about? Where can I find them?” In this day and age, you got to think about social media and their mobile device like, “How do I reach them in those two places?” That is where most people are at.
We approach that in the digital marketing space by looking at, “Is your website mobile-ready? Is it mobile-first?” It is a new thing that people are taking into account as well. That’s what it comes down to. That’s my biggest advice. Figure out who your customers are, find out where they’re at, meet them there and create a message that talks directly to them.
I think that’s such an important reminder for the business owner because we can get caught up in a bit of our hubris. Thank you for that very salient reminder. All the best with your business and thank you so much for being a guest on the show.
Thank you.
