Fractional CMOs & The Best Marketing Strategy You Can Use Now

I would say the basis of all of my work and all of my consultation has always been in search engine optimization. I I know you talk about this. I've listened to a couple of your episodes as well. In terms of building foundations, SEO to me is the foundation of every business. No matter if you're trying to do B2B or B2C, you have to be in the moments that people are asking questions to solve their problems. And that's what SEO is. And I tell this a lot to salespeople when they want to say, well, SEO is marketing, right? SEO is your inbound channel. SEO is the best VDR you could ever get right because you are 247 on answering people's questions in the moments that they have them. If you've got the right content and the right technical structure for your website.

Hey there. I am so excited to be here with you today. Our guest, Amy is an expert at marketing the invisible okay, that grabbed me right away. She has spent the last 25 years helping B2B organizations like Miller Hyman Group, DLA Piper and Homefinder.com build advanced and energize their lead gen programs so getting leads into their business so they can continue to grow. Amy founded Bandwidth Strategy, a fractional CMO and COO consultancy to help growth stage organizations drive the right leads into the funnel that result in closed one business. Amy uses her expertise and a bit of humor in improv honed as a student of Second City to create common language among all too often warring fractions of sales and marketing. She's a go to voice on sales and marketing alignment and workplace equity and her work has been featured in Fast Company and Business Insider. Now this is a fun conversation and it is one of my favorite things to hear the approaches people take to building strategy and bringing strategies to life. And Amy's experience is in with larger organizations. 5 million annual reoccurring revenue on up she has sold a company. She works with companies and founders who are all also building to sell. And it is so interesting to hear strategy and think about how it is translated into our different businesses at the various sizes that we are running our businesses at. Because there are nuggets in here that we may not think about as small business owners as entrepreneurs day to day, but man do we need to be thinking about them. And as we think through sales strategy, strategy, as we think through marketing strategy, as we think through right our brand voice and messaging, all of these things come together. And if you're just building a strategy, if you're a solopreneur if you have a small team, the strategies in this conversation still apply to you and may help you prioritize where you should spend your marketing time, your sales time, your branding messaging time, as well as your dollars in various marketing activities. So. So this is a fun conversation and I can't wait to hear what you get out of it. After you listen, definitely reach out. Leave us a review. Find me on Instagram. Share it. Say hello. I always love to connect with you, but first, let's dive into this episode with Amy. Amy, welcome to the show. Amber.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh my gosh. Thank you for being here. I am so thrilled to chat with you, fellow Midwestern Turner.

There we go. You know it's gonna be a nice conversation.

Exactly. Exactly. Midwesterners, meaning everybody. Amy is from the Chicago area and one. What would you say Chicago is known for the summer? This summer, stay away.

Come here from end of April to the end of October and you will think it is the greatest city in the world. And in April to October, it is the greatest city in the world. We summer hard here. We love being outside the street. Festivals, the lake, all of it. It's wonderful. And then we all hibernate or run away for the rest of the year.

Exactly. I actually just had a friend say to me who also lives in Chicago, said, oh man, I can't wait until winter. I just want to hire Renee. I'm ready to stop going places. She's like, forward to it.

We. We. Some are hard. We, some are hard.

Exactly. Oh my gosh. That's so fun. Tell us what you do. Tell us about what you do in your words.

Yeah. So I am a fractional CMO and CEO to companies, usually between about 5 million annual recurring revenue and 100 million annual recurring revenue. I love to tell people that I sell the invisible. If you want me to sell Doritos or toilet paper, I'm not your girl. But if it's a service or if it is a softw, if it involves a longer scale sales cycle, more intricate, you know that that's really where the bulk of my 25 years of marketing experience has been.

Oh, amazing. You know, something that comes up a lot when I am seeing people grow their businesses, especially for people who are building businesses that are not B2B. I oftentimes hear them say, oh, I Wish this was B2B because it's easier to sell business services, business consulting. And then people move over to that side and they're like, oh, maybe not, maybe not. Which side of that argument.

Oh my gosh. I absolutely think B2B is harder but it's all of ever known, so that's just my world. I have a good friend who used to work in her family's business and it was a manufacturing company for lighting. And she and I used to have that conversation a lot about how hard it was to have inventory management and manufacturing issues and supply chain issues and absolutely like those are real problems. But also having 18 to 24 month sales cycles and not knowing what your quote unquote cart abandonment is and guessing why people are coming to your website. Those are real challenges too. So I don't think one is necessarily harder than the other. I think it's just what you grow up doing in this business and what you get used to. And you can switch back and forth too. I think some people do. I have really spent a majority of my career in that B2B space. It just for whatever reason it was a fit for me.

Yeah, that's really cool. What kinds of companies have you worked with? Because you've got some cool stories and some cool things that you have done with in your experiences. So what is the space that you play in?

Yeah, so again it's really services and software. I, I'll give just a brief history of my, my background which is I, I started in legal marketing. So I spent really my first eight years working for terms and realized around like 2008 time period that this wave of digital marketing was coming. And for those of us that know a lot of lawyers, they're not usually the first ones to want to jump on something new. I, I say this with love. I'm, I'm married to an attorney now so I feel that I, I can say it, you know, being able to get ahead of some of that digital marketing, I knew I wouldn't necessarily be interesting to, to a, a tech company. So I started my own company. This, that was my first for to entrepreneurship. It was called the Eco Scene. We reviewed eco friendly products and services in the same time as like Daily Candy and Thrillist. So we were just looking to build audience, had, you know, advertising, sponsorship. I grew that and then was able to sell that to an organization here in Chicago and did the next part of my career which was starting and scaling, usually post series A, sometimes you know, series B companies in their marketing organization. So I did that for HR technology, I did it for real estate technology. So you start to see the theme, right. I'm always in those B2B spaces. My most recent full time was as the global CMO for a company called Miller Hyman Group, which is sales training, which again, talk about services and things you can't touch. Absolute invisibility, but so important when trying to train organizations on how to actually sell their products. So that was really my career up until I decided to go fractional. So it's been a really crazy, wild ride. I do love the tech space. I love the B2B space. I don't think you always start out with that level of intentionality. Right. Of like, I'm going to have this thread, but looking backwards. Absolutely. I was always selling, selling that invisible.

That's so cool. Let's talk more about that. Because that is a really unique way to look at service industry. And it's true. It's so true. It's like you can't see it, you can't touch it. It's not the bag of chips, it's not a product that, to your point, you can pop in a shopping cart, read all the details and. And I think that there's been a blend of digital marketing, like, has made some of that more possible. Like there is more description and there is copy courses to describe services and there's a lot there, but it's still a challenge. How do you describe that and how do you guide people that you work with to think about that?

Yes. So I would say the basis of all of my work and all of my consultation has always been in search engine optimization. I know you talk about this. I've listened to a couple of your episodes as well. In terms of building foundations, SEO to me is the foundation of every business. No matter if you're trying to do B2B or B2C, you have to be in the moments that people are asking questions to solve their problems. And that's what SEO is. And I tell this a lot to salespeople when they want to say, well, SEO is marketing. Right. SEO is your inbound channel. SEO is the best VDR you could ever get. Right. Because you are 24, 7 on answering people's questions in the moments that they have them, if you've got the right content and the right technical structure for your websites. So SEO has been a really big part of, of my foundation and really what I would encourage anyone to focus on, it can be super overwhelming. People get very nervous about it. They think it's super technical. There are technical components and there's lots of people that can help you with that. But what I would say is for any small business owner, if you are creating content that is Based on answering the questions of your potential clients, you are doing SEO and that is some of the best foundational work you can do from a search perspective.

From selling that invisible, that is incredible. So I love that you brought it back to the foundations because this is the thing. It's not sexy. It doesn't get you an immediate, like, it's not going to be an immediate response, an immediate like dopamine hit. So how long does it typically take when someone starts with SEO to start to see traction from that?

There's no magic answer. What I would say is if you are, if you have a solid technical SEO structure as well as building, building content on top of that, after about a quarter you should really start to see the results popping right. You're going to start to get more traffic because you've got Google Analytics on your site and you're able to see that growth and you're able to see what pages they're landing on. So you're knowing which of your content is performing. But you're right and, and that is, that's a really hard wire to walk for most marketers of how the importance of SEO, the importance of the foundation without the dopamine hit. I love how you said that because it's so true. It's not social, it's not ads, it's not going to be a quick win. But if you want long sustaining growth within that organization, whatever size it is, you want to start with SEO.

Oh, Amy, I love this. And honestly, a one quarter is not that long. When we think about the future of your business, like 1/4, 90 days and you're going to start seeing traction. Would you say there's a number of posts or a number of pieces of content that over that quarter you recommend someone take to market?

You know, I listened to your post with, is it Amanda Warfield, who did. She had a lot of great insights here and I loved her thoughts about batching content. My world tends to be slightly bigger than the small business, right? So mine is there's a consistency to how often you are putting content out there, but it really does differ depending on, on who you are and what you're trying to say. For example, if you're trying to do super technical white papers that are hidden behind fangate and you're, you're truly trying to capture information that's going to take a whole lot longer than just knocking out a bunch of blog posts. So I don't have a magic answer. I think that if you're a small business, you know, looking to and listening to people like Amanda who have a lot of experience at that short burst. She's a great person to listen to. Once you get beyond that, Mark, you really got to change up your content, right? You've got to have those white papers that thought leadership. You're going to be speaking in pr, you're going to be doing social media. And all of that is also meant is managing and supporting your SEO. So I don't, I wish I had a magic answer. I don't. But I think there are plenty of folks out there who do small business content creation that have really strong strategic thoughts here.

It's so cool to hear you talk through this as well. Like getting strategic about one approach, one tactic, one piece of the marketing strategy. And I imagine like this is part of what one could partner with a fractional CMO on. Or there may be people listening to this and seeing this who are like, I'm a marketer, I'm curious about what it is to be a fractional cmo. So can you describe what that is?

I think of the differences in terms of how embedded you are with the organization. So to me, a fractional is someone who has a long term, longer term engagement. Long is always relative, right? So I would say probably a minimum of six months and most likely 15 to 20 hours a week that you're with that organization. You probably have an email address. You're privy to a lot of the financials, you understand the long term strategy for the business. That to me is really a fractional. If you are doing a consulting engagement, you're coming in, you, you obviously don't have an email address. It's for a specific project. There's maybe a smaller time component to it, but you're really there to solve a very specific problem in a very specific amount of time. As a fractional, you're there to solve a lot of problems. Right. And help them get on track for where they need to go next and set them up for success on a longer term basis. So that's really where I see the difference. But again, I, I'm probably not the final word in all of this, but that's how I view it.

I love it. It's so good to hear your perspective. As you know, you are in this role and play this role. It's interesting too because the CMO role, can you describe that in its essence? Also because I've had people say to me like, I need someone to teach me how to be my own director of marketing or my own cmo. I'm like, oh yeah, what an interesting question. Because when we put the business owner hat on, right, yeah. All of these other roles come with it until you bring on someone like a professional CMO or a CMO or your own marketing director. But what does that include in. In the day to day, those 15 to 20 hours a week?

It really is a combination of whatever that organization needs that can include managing on digital. Right? We've got our SEO components, which is our unpaid and our organic traffic. We've got our paid opportunities, which is either paid social or you know, search engine marketing, more of that specific lead paid. You've got things like pr, you have content creation, you could have events, you might have management of outside agencies, design. It can really run the gamut. What a marketing organization is, is responsible for. And I think the term has really changed and evolved. I like to say I doing marketing back when we were faxing press releases, you know, that was the mechanism for creation of information, was mass blasting faxes for our press releases. And to me that we've just come so incredibly far beyond that at this point in the digital world. I would say my specialty and where I tend to focus a lot of my time is in that digital space. Not as much in the event space, not as much in the design and sort of true brand management, but how we use those applications within the design, excuse me, within the digital world and how we actually create volume within the funnel and leads and opportunities for our organizations and the organizations that I help. But for anyone in a small business who is looking to do their own marketing, I go back to what we just talked about a few minutes ago, which is get smart on SEO. If you can get smart on SEO. And there's a lot of questions right now. I just did another podcast about this too, about AI and how AI is is impacting all of this too. And will AI replace all of us? And you know, from a content perspective and an SEO perspective, my answer to that is no. I think that there are evolution. As always, if you get smart on SEO as a business owner, you are so far ahead of the game, right? So far ahead of the game. So I would really encourage anyone who feels like they're struggling from where to start, from a marketing perspective is to start there.

Yeah, that's so good. It's beautiful because you get the foundation. And then you mentioned a number of different channels that people can market through the events, the digital, the pay, the organic. And when you start to look at prioritizing marketing activities, everybody start with SEO, like strong and Go back to that podcast episode with Amanda as well to dig it.

She's got some really good stuff.

So good. I love when things come back around like this. Like if you are hearing this, you're like, okay, I need to hear this. You needed to hear this again, right?

Building block. It's a building block.

Exactly. But then after that, how do you recommend people start to prioritize which marketing channel they're going to focus on to get ROI to get a return on their investment in that marketing? Because I think so many people like social, social, social. Like, I don't know, like socials momentary. And it takes a lot of effort.

I guess it would. The same question could be said. So what one product do you get at the grocery store? Right. You go grocery shopping for the day, right? Or for the week. You're not going to get just fruit or just carbohydrates. You put a lot of stuff in your shopping cart, right? Because that's what makes the entirety. I would say the same thing. Marketing is in a one channel. Of course, if you are going to have a certain amount of budget for your groceries or for your marketing, and Amanda talks about that too, you've got to figure out where to put it. But I really would try as much as possible and it can be draining. I get it. You're a business owner, you're a one person shop or a two person shop. It can be hard. Try to spread out and see where you're able to get traction. Because if you just put carbohydrates in your grocery cart, you're. You're probably only going to have that one experience, right? I think paid is usually myself. Again, we'll go with the grocery metaphor. State of the insides of the. Of the shopping. Right? You don't do the outsides. To me, the outsides are the paid. Paid's expensive. It's hard to do well if I am, you know, limited budget, limited time. I'm focusing on the SEO, I'm focusing on my content. I'm focusing on opportunities to tell my story. Things like this podcast. Figuring out if there's a PR angle I can take. Figuring out if there are events that are not going to cost a fortune for me to go to. I think that I would start there before I went to paid. Paid's usually the last thing I layer on top. Unless an organization already has a really strong foundation and we just need to make sure that we're amplifying what they're doing.

So good. It's interesting. When I started, when we Started our photography business. We started with very light word of mouth, like, because that takes time also when you're just starting out. And then we focused on SEO and then we moved to partnerships. We had some strong partnerships that really gave us some juice. And then we're like, okay, that partnership was kind of fizzling out. So fizzling out in terms of their marketing strategy had changed so we weren't seeing the return. So like, okay, we got to layer in the next, next thing before it completely fizzles out. Then that's when we layered in our paid marketing.

And I bet it was hard at first, huh?

It took six to nine months to get it dialed in.

It takes a while. And I think like anything, most of the organizations that sell you, the paid would like you to think that it's a, you know, turnkey approach and it's very easy. I think for a B to C customer and a B2C business, it is easier. Again, I don't live in that world, so it's not. I can't give you a timeline, but six to nine months sounds like a good timeline in terms of understanding when you really don't have a professional with you. I highly recommend it. Same with same like photography. You can take your own pictures all damn day on a, on an iPhone, but if you want really solid pictures, get a really good photographer. Same with paid. If you want a really good paid strategy, I suggest working with an organization. And if anyone wants to reach out, I've got a bunch of recommendations.

Oh my gosh. So dang good. And I believe it. Work with someone to accelerate that timeline. Someone that knows what they're doing. And we did work with someone that knows what they're doing. And we're in a little bit of a niche, so we had to like overcome some obstacles and play a little to make it work, of course, in boudoir photography. So we have to like, okay, like we'll figure out all the rules and make sure we're not breaking them. And we. So we were very conservative and walking cautiously into that. You're spot on. Six to nine months. On the E Commerce side, I have a great friend who I had mentioned, just started her E. Com business and she is now, I believe, nine, no, just over nine months in and it is ranking and I'd say it probably took three to four months for her to get her her ad style. That when she did it was like, yeah, that's, that's a good point. I always think it's so helpful and interesting to hear case studies and timelines so I can start to get, okay, realistic. And I'm even thinking about a NU offer, not a new. I'm thinking about redesigning something in my archives and like, okay, this was a good reminder. How long is it going to take? Like, give yourself some time, ease up on the pressure and engage expertise.

Yeah, no, and it's hard, right? There's real financial pressures, pressures to starting a business, whether they're your own or if you've taken investment. People are expecting really quick results and I think that's why you have sales, right? Sales is the, Sales is the quick and marketing is the slow. And that's why you, you make sure that you have sales so that you're getting, you know, you're getting those quick wins in the doors and marketing is the longer game. And that's important to understand.

That's so good. That is so good. Sales is quick marketing, slow, long game. Can you speak more to this?

Having had the experience of being I, I was the CMO for Miller Hyman Group and then I did a long term fractional gig for challeng, which is also another sales training organization. You know, sales. And again, we sort of have to split this up between B2B and B2C.

B2B.

Sales can also be a longer game, but salespeople are really designed to move the ball forward quickly. Right? Like that's the whole goal. It's, it's, their methodology is designed for, for more levels of predictability. Right. And you're, you're trying to get your sales force out front. Your marketing force is what's supporting them and the overall brand aware on a longer term basis. So to me it's, you know, long game, short game and you got to.

Manage that, you know, and spot on there. Right? When you said their methodology, I also thought about the entire psyche of someone who typically steps into a sales role and the compensation design. Right? There are rewards tied to sales and there's a book called Learned Optimism by Seligman. If you haven't read that, there's a big piece in it about the psychology of people in sales. And you have to be very, very optimistic to, okay, no, but I'm going to get back out there and no, I'm going to get back out there. So as entrepreneurs and small business owners, if you are doing your own sales, like, okay, got to embrace some of these traits and qualities to get those quick wins and complement it with something that's longer term. And I think in the, from what I see in the spaces that I Sit in. In terms of the digital marketing world, there is so much emphasis put on marketing and only in the last few years am I seeing more of that emphasis on sales team sales conversation. And it's so critical.

Sales is a weird industry. Right. They don't really teach it in college. There's not really a sales degree. Right. I think more organizations have started to come around to that and, and are teaching it. But sales are things that people sort of fall into. Marketing is a degree, it is style and a opportunity within higher education that you don't necessarily get when you have sales. So again, there's, there's a lot of push pull there of like, oh, anyone can do sales. Totally not true. Right. And it really isn't that, that standard for the most part, which is why you have all these sales training organizations to help and teach the methodology of sales, which I think is fantastic. I, I've spoken a couple times on moving beyond the founder sale. Just having that experience, knowing what it's like to work with founders and see them as the only salesperson and what happens when they have to transition that to the next stage. And to me, again, just like SEO is the foundation of any good marketing and brand awareness, to me having a sales methodology is very much the standard and the, the foundation of having a sales organization. So you as a seller, I'm sorry you as a founder, understanding what sales methodology works for you is incredibly helpful.

Yeah, it's, it's so true and it is so nuanced and it's so unique. And I think about my approach to sales is different than so many other organizations, colleagues, clients like, you gotta dial it in and it's gotta be aligned. And this is something you talk about too. You talk about when there's misalignment between sales and marketing organizations and then also in your brand identity and your messaging, which I was thinking like from a sales marketing messaging conversation, it really needs to be aligned and who you are and how you show up. Because when you're not aligned, what happens, what happens when we don't have that solidarity between this messaging.

Yeah, so I'll speak to it. In the sort of post $5 million ARR World, you have a lot of infighting within the two organizations. Right. You have salespeople who are saying I'm getting bad leads and you have marketing people that are saying sales isn't working the leads. You've got a ton of frustration there. What and how you prevent against that as a small business is you make sure that you have sales methodology set up ahead of time. You have a system set up ahead of time in terms of your CRM and your marketing automation. Right. You are again, if you want to be far ahead of the game in brand awareness, in marketing, you get that SEO foundation if you want to be far ahead. If you're looking to build a 5, 10, 20, 50 million dollar ARR business, get yourself CRM and a marketing automation system. There are lightweight ones. You don't always have to have the fanciest, but making sure that you get yourself in the habit of that, which I know is one really hard for founders enthusiastic about building and they get really excited about the drive and, and, and the new and the creation and the idea of like setting up a CRM is misery. But that again is the type of thing that's going to help you when you get to that $5 million $10 million ARR place because you are going to be so far ahead of the game because you're going to have systems in place that tell the truth. They tell the truth between sales and marketing and allow you to really cut through the noise and understand where you are seeing gaps in the business.

So good. And I would across the board, no matter what size of business you are operating, know these numbers because. So well said, Amy. They tell the truth. Guys take that. Right, right. That the numbers tell the truth. Don't forget it. And if you're hiding from them, if you're avoiding them, dig in, set yourself up with a date night, light a candle. You got to get in there. Oh my. Sometimes I'll like trick myself. Just gonna watch Netflix. Then I start working on numbers then or whatever. It's sometimes plan, sometimes strategy. Whatever it is I'm avoiding, like, okay, just trick myself for a minute, then I'm in it. We're good to go. Oh my gosh. Okay. If someone is thinking about like, okay, I, I'm, I'm interested in this fractional CMO thing and it's interesting. This fractional world, fractional coo, fractional, like it's all really something that, that people are looking for and a role that has been. How long would you say that this idea of a fractional CMO has been a thing?

So it's interesting. I did a little bit of research on this. In 2018, I think the search volume for the term fractional CMO was something like 200 hits. Any idea where it got to?

In 2022 I went to like 10 tens of thousands.

It went to 2 over 2000. So like, like it just crazy how much growth You've seen in just the search volume alone in those four years. I like to tell people I have this, you know, hierarchy of need that I established for myself when I was figuring this out. And you know, my fractional hierarchy of need as I explain it is number one, like, can you get health insurance? I think it's, it's a, it's a real baseline, right? And it's, it's an unfortunate reality. I know you're not in the States anymore, but like the reality of being here is you, you cannot guarantee yourself health insur. So if you have a means to do that, if you're leaving a job and you've got 18 months of Cobra, it's a great place to start, right? Really see how it goes. Number two after that is do you have a network that's going to carry you through? And what I mean by that is I talked to a lot of folks who've been doing this, you know, eight years, 10 years. I didn't go out on my own. I had almost 20 years of experience and that has supported me in a way I never thought possible. Having that depth of experience, having that fractional, that group of people that are able to hold you through the experience, who are able to do the networking that you need, who are able to send you business, who are able to meet with you, that comes after time, right? It's a lot of time and a lot of effort that was put in. But do you have that network and then finally do you get lit up by work that you may not see come to fruition? So I tell people that I love the first year of a new job. I always thought that was the most fun, right? I got to have the most impact. I was really interested in seeing what I could do to change things up, but I didn't love year two because it became a lot of rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat to me is like, I want to hand that off to someone. I want to let them iterate on it and make it better and make it stronger. I love that first year. If you are a first year lover of a job, fractional work is for you. If you're someone who really wants to dig in three, four, five years and understand the end results of a very long term project, fractional may not be for you because you're in and out, right? Six month engagement, year long engagement, two month engagement, you may not see the results of your efforts. You're providing a lot of support and help and infrastructure, but making sure that you get lit up by that type of work is really important if you want to consider fractional.

So dang good. I never would have thought of that bit about. If you want to see the rinse and repeat, you might miss that. It might be a transition in a handoff. It would also be interesting to dig into, like your strength finders there, because very strategic. I correlated that my head to the strategy that I love, but not the maintenance mode. Once it's in maintenance mode, I'm like, I'm good. I'm good. I will share that work with someone.

Yeah.

Amy, this has been so cool. The one thing that I really wanted to talk about that we didn't get to was Second City.

I know. I love it. I love it so much.

You. Well, maybe just tell us a little bit about that. For anybody who doesn't.

I think for anyone that's ever looking for how to improve your own business skills, improv is one of the best ways to go. It teaches you camaraderie. It teaches you a capability to support the organizations around, to support the individuals around you within the organization through very specific means. I'm actually. I'm leaving today to go for a client to do a session, and we're going to do a bunch of improv in that and just to, like, get people going. I think it's just one of the best ways to actually facilitate really good communication is improv. There's lots of different improv. Karen Hogue wrote a book on improv and in business that's really great. I think it's called the Improvisationist. But she's fantastic. She's written a bunch of books. There's tons of online stuff. If you're lucky enough to live near an improv, there's all kinds of different courses, but I'm a huge fan.

I love it. And so you are still involved in the improv community. It sounds like.

I'm not. I'm not. I did. I did a couple years of it and then, you know, had a family and had a business and all the things. But still.

And.

And that's the nice thing about improv is it really is life lessons. And I'm not funny by any means. Like, I'm not a funny person. But I think that's where people get confused, right? They think improv and they think second. They think Saturday Night Live, and you have to be funny. It really. It's not about being funny. It's about a different way of thinking and supporting other people in a group loop. I think from a business perspective is Just so incredibly helpful.

So what, is there an exercise or an activity that comes to mind when you think of, like, all right, let's change the energy. Let's change the way we're thinking about this problem?

To me, absolutely. I mean, you can. You can throw improv into anything. I. The biggest takeaway of any improv is the. Yes and Right. It really is this concept of trying to bring along the person on the other side of the table into the conversation in a positive, positive way. And. Yes. And we're gonna do that while we also do this instead of. No, that idea won't work. Right. Because it's just an ultimate thought stopper. Right. You've just ended a conversation instead of continuing a conversation. So for me, it isn't so much the mood of the room, though. Absolutely. Improv can take that. It is the way in which you communicate in a business setting that allows you to. To have more success, which we all need.

Yes, absolutely. And I think people should pick that up. Like, if there is a takeaway there and you're like, I'm stuck. Yes, maybe you are. And what is next? Keep it going. Oh, my gosh, Amy, such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise. Where do people find you?

BandwidthStrategy.com is my website. You can always find me on LinkedIn. Amy Schuster, happy to answer any questions folks have or want any of those recommendations.

You're amazing. Thank you.

Thank you.