#152: What You NEED To Know To Overcome Adversity With Heather!

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I'm ready for my close up.

Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with me today. Okay, a couple of quick things I want to share with you. And then we are taking a different approach yet again today. I'm so excited. Innovation in motion. Okay, so this week. Well, first of all, I think you already know. I auditioned for my audiobook. I auditioned to be Heather Monahan, and I got it raw. I was so happy. But then be careful what you wish for. Cause I got it. And I had to go record my audiobook with my producer for days. So that was hard. But then what's harder is you get back feedback from HarperCollins leadership. They said, you know, there was a few things they wanted tweaked and changed. Not a lot, you know, just a few. But still, you have to go back into this living, breathing thing and then pull pieces out and then reinsert. So it's a little different. It's not a fluid read, right? You're not there that same day and going through the chapters, you have to kind of bring yourself back to, how were you feeling? Were you excited? Were you close to the mic? Not close to the mic? There's just a lot that goes into it to try to make it sound as great as it possibly can, which takes some time. So it ends up that last week I spent way more time working on the audiobook than I had planned for. And the problem was I had a big virtual keynote for a massive company that had been scheduled for months. And what I like to do is the day before, I'm going to deliver a keynote in person or virtual.

I just have a routine.

I go through, right? I go through all of my notes, I get up and do my outline. I just. I kind of give myself an easy once over of everything. But I spend a good at least hour, you know, going through it and preparing. Of course, I'd already prepared. We'd had three meetings with the client. I had pages of notes. Big picture. I knew what I was gonna do. But my routine is the day before. You know, I go through this process. Okay, well, I end up spending so much time recording my audiobook that I didn't have time to do it. And I was eating dinner with my son and I said, oh, gosh, I'm.

Just so bummed out.

You tomorrow I have this Huge virtual keynote. It's so important. It's with a new agent I've never worked with before, and I just, I want it to go extremely well. But I didn't get to practice today, and I'm really disappointed. My son said, mom, I'm a great basketball player. If I miss practice the day before a game, I'm still gonna play great in the game. You're a great speaker. You miss practice the day before the speech, you're still gonna deliver a great speech. And it was so simplistic, yet so profound. Right. It was just kind of that reminder that I needed. Everybody can mispractice once in a while. You put the big work in, which is the years and years of speaking. Right. And the three different meetings I did with the client ahead of time and the pages of notes and.

Right.

It's not just about that last minute practice. So as long as you're putting the real work in, it's okay once in a while to miss that last second work because I did deliver the keynote and I got back amazing feedback from the new agent that I just started working with and from the client. So it went really, really well. And I definitely turned it over to. Okay. I've been preparing for my talks for years. I've got this and my son's message landed really well with me. So I hope that lands well with you. If you're behind on something or didn't put in the extra work, have faith that all of the years and efforts that you've put in up until now will pay off. You can turn it over and have faith that you are going to be fantastic, because I believe you will be. Okay then. There's one other thing I wanted to mention. Accountability is so important. I had a meeting this week with my point of contact at LinkedIn and he had finally gotten me the newsletter option, which I had requested. It's hard to get. Not everybody's getting it. You know, there's all these criteria. Anyhow, I had requested it and he got it from me over a week ago, but I still hadn't launched it. Well, we were on a call this week and I said, so give me best practices, give me the tips and tricks. Tell me, how should I launch it, what should I do? And he looked at me like I was crazy and he said, just do it. And I heard him loud and clear. And I just did it and just launched it, knowing that having it live is gonna be better than not being live.

Right.

Cause I'll be amassing subscribers and getting feedback and understanding what people like. But doing nothing is never the answer. And me waiting around for one week after I already had this newsletter ability sitting in my inbox and I did nothing with it. That was the wrong answer. So luckily I chose the right person to speak to. He held me accountable. I pulled the trigger. And I have to tell you, this is so crazy. It took me years to amass the email list that I have at my website, heathermonahan.com Years, years and years. Right? Four years to get my email list.

Up to the level that it's at.

Now that I just. Today just. I think it's about an hour ago, I just launched my email program on LinkedIn. I already have 8,000 people that subscribed in an hour. So here's my takeaway for you. We don't know what the future holds in regards to technology.

Right.

I worked all these years, which I'm glad I did for four years, to get. I think it's a 30,000 person list. Now it looks like I'm probably gonna have six figure person list on my LinkedIn, which I didn't even know that wasn't even an option four years ago.

Right.

I think it's only been around for maybe a year. So sometimes there's things outside of us that are happening that are going to impact our world that we can't foresee. So it is important to put the work in, take advantage of the technology that we have currently, but also keep our eyes open and speed speak to people at different companies, different industries so that we can access the newest and best technology and find out that there's a way to rapidly accelerate our growth. Which is basically what I found out today. Don't wait. Do hold yourself accountable.

Okay?

So as I mentioned, I truly believe we have to constantly innovate. And that means sometimes things are gonna fail, people aren't gonna like it, and we can learn from the experience and grow in a different direction.

Right.

Take that feedback and translate it into something new.

Today.

What I'm going to try, which we've never done before, and it was actually my good friend Philip Stutt's idea. He's been on the show a number of times. Marketing genius. You definitely know him. If you've been listening for a while, if not, go back and listen to any of Philip's episodes. His insight and the data that he collects is just, it's unbelievable. But he just launched his own show and he had me as a guest on his show and he thought it would be kind of a cool new and different approach to share with you one of the interviews that I do on someone else's show. So that's what we're going to share right now. Hold tight. You're going to hear Philip and I sit down and Philip asked me some questions and I would love to hear your feedback. Do you like hearing episodes like this? Did it add any value for you? Or do you want me to scrap it and go back to. To my regular solo episode? Can't wait to hear from you. And please sign up subscribe for my newsletter on LinkedIn. You know that I'm live with it now. Hold tight.

Meet a different guest each week.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Undefeated Marketing podcast. Okay, I have my friend Heather Monahan on today. I think Heather is one of the best, best people out there to learn from. And the other part of this, Heather, that I'm going to jump into your bio in two seconds. But there's so few females in your space that come in and talk in an authentic way about the things that they're great at, the things they've screwed up in their past. They kind of lead by example. The thing I love about you, and I'm saying this selfishly because I feel like I'm kind of the same way, which is you actually did something before you went out and tried to create sort of a brand around yourself. You didn't wake up at 25, hold up a phone and put a video in front of you and go, I went, I'll tell you why you should listen to me. And there's so few females that came from the business world. You have such a unique space. First of all, it's shitty that there are not a lot of C Suite executives that are more female in this group in the world, but the ones that are out there are crushing it right now in your space. And you're one of them. And I was so excited to have you on. So everybody, Heather Monahan, who's become a friend, and I love her to death, and she's just a great, great human being. But if you don't know, she is the host of the Creating Confidence podcast, which she's had me on a couple times on now, and I'm very grateful for that. In the last year, she's launched an executive coaching program. She's been named one of the top 40 female speakers in the United States or maybe even the world. And now she has her second book coming out from Harper Collins called Overcoming youg Villains. And it launches just around the corner on November 9th. And Heather I always tell an introduction story. So Heather and I had introduced by, I think, Steve Cohen, right, who was James Altucher's podcast producer for a while. And it's so funny because my first book, Fire Them now, literally came out almost the exact same time your book came out. And I saw you everywhere when your book came out. And, like, I was following you everywhere. I followed you, I think, upon Dr. Drew. I followed you on James Altucher, I followed you on Gary V. And all this stuff. And I'm like, who is this? And then Steve was like, oh, you got to meet Heather. And I'm like, I see her everywhere. Yeah, who is she? And he's like, I'll introduce you. And then we ended up meeting and I went on your show and you've had me speak to some of your coaching clients, and we hit it off. And I think it's. I think for me, it's that you're an authentic, really, really, really great person. And I just like being able to hang out with you every once in a while on these types of platforms. So I'm honored to have you on. Thanks for being on.

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. I'm so grateful that Steve introduced us, Gosh, a couple of years ago now. And I'm so grateful to have you as a friend. And to your point, Philip, and it's important for people listening right now, I am so passionate about exactly what you described, which we both feel is important that you've got to have, in my opinion, and this isn't for everybody, which is fine, but in my opinion, you have to have some tangible credibility outside of just raising your hand to say, I'm an authority on whatever it is, you know, exercise, diet and nutrition business, I don't care. But don't just raise your hand when you're ultimately misleading people, because misleading people in this day and age, you will be found out. You will be discovered. And there's nothing worse than ruining a brand because you. You ultimately were lying.

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Asked this a lot of times. People ask me you've done 350 plus national TV appearances on CNN, ESPN, Fox News, Fox Business, all that. And I'm like yeah. And they're like how'd you do it? I Go. I didn't go do one TV appearance until 2012. I had done 0.0 at the time. I was 38 years old. I was 38. I'd never done TV. I had never promoted myself. I had my head down, and I was working and I was building and I was creating. And then I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur, real entrepreneur, and create businesses and do all that. And I figured I needed a brand out there to get my message out and started doing TV and did it. You know, I still do it, but not much anymore because it's so toxic. I just don't want to do it anymore. But, yeah, I mean, like, no one knew who I was until I was 38 years old, because I just had my head down doing the work. And I think, you know, good for anybody who's 25 years old and has 10 million followers and makes $10 million, $20 million a year and writes books and all the things that we kind of do. I mean, if they make it good for them, it's kind of like. Like, I'm. I'm good with anybody. I'm more libertarian in my thinking. Like, good for you. You go, do you. But I think that substantive about what you're putting out in the world that I respect and admire.

Well, I appreciate that. You know, it's funny, one of the things that I don't know if you're seeing these trends too, but since the pandemics hit. Before the pandemic hit, a lot of the content that I would create on social media was around teaching. Whether it be teaching how to accelerate the sales process, teaching how to build the right team, you know, teaching around leadership lessons from failures and wins. Yeah, a lot around really specific business instances. However, what I found is since the pandemic hit, that does not perform as well anymore. What performs well is more motivational, inspirational. You know, talking about facing fear and overcoming adversity. These kind of big, fluffier topics seem to do much better. And of course, the data doesn't lie, so I produce less content about real business strategies and examples because it just doesn't perform as well.

Yeah, I had this conversation with Jay Abraham because Jay Abraham is like, I put all of the 40 years of my work on my website and give it away for free, and no one ever downloads it. And I'm like, yeah, well, people are busy, and people go, oh, my God, there's work to do. No, no, no, no, no. Give me the get rich quick pill. Give me the easy answer. And it is what people look For. And you have to be able to distill that and say it's not easy, but let me give it to you in a summarized manner and then you can decide how to take that process forward. All right, so your book, Overcoming youg Villains, tell me about where it came from. Obviously, you wrote your first book and it was super successful. This may be a therapy session on writing books because we both have had. You had a book come out in like 2018. I had one in 18. Right. Earl? I said earlier, now we both had books come out in 2021. I'm so glad I don't have a book coming out soon. So tell me.

It's so much work. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh, it is. All right, so tell me about your process, why you came to this book, and then what it's all about.

My first book, Confidence Creator. I just. I got fired from Corporate America for my C Suite position. And I said, I need a product to sell. I'm going to write a book. This was my genius idea. So I thought, okay, if I self publish, I can move fast, break things and get it out there. So in five months, I had written the book, right? And I went to market, went to Amazon. One point of distribution, right? And I was a rookie author. However, I had been investing in my brand and my messaging for one year. So I had a community to, you know, familiarize the book with and sell the book to. So the book did pretty well. However, I thought to myself, okay, I'm not an expert in this. I'm a rookie. I'm brand new. And if you're brand new, in a rookie, you want to align with people who are experts so you can tap into some of the hacks and tricks to get ahead. So I Googled. At the time, it was 2019, I googled Rachel Hollis. She was the one of the number one or number two best selling nonfiction female authors of the year. And I thought if I could get to her agent, I could get the blueprint for success on how you sell millions of books with hundreds of points of distribution. So I found her agent, I got to her website and I pitched her. You know, essentially I put myself in her shoes and said, you've got the blueprint. I'm similar to your author and you could use the same blueprint. So it's very little work on your end. However, she leans very heavy into religion and being at home, cooking and whatnot. I don't lean that way. I lean on the business side. So I'm a compliment Not a competitor to her, and it would be a new revenue stream for you. So she said, I'm interested. Listen, send us the book proposal. And I didn't know what a book proposal was, right?

I mean, that's like, oh, my God. I did the same thing. I got yelled at with whatever I wrote back in, like, 2017 when I started. So I got yelled at, yeah, yeah.

Because if you're not in the business, you don't know. Right? So she said, okay, I need the book proposal. I said, what's that? She said, our conversation ends here. I said, before you hang up the phone, if you had a family member that wanted to write a book proposal, who would you send them to? And she said, peter Economy. And I said, okay, you'll hear from me again. I tracked down Peter Economy. I invested in myself, hired Peter Economy, we wrote a book proposal, and she said no to me 14 times. And finally on the 15th time, I got the yes. Then the pandemic hit, and we had to go to market. Right when the pandemic hit and we went to, I believe it was 15 or 20 publishers, traditional publishers, and the first six came back nos. And then the rest came back yes. And we ended up signing with HarperCollins leadership. So it's not been an easy journey at all. It's much more challenging writing with a traditional publisher. There's so many people involved, and it isn't just your choice anymore. Right. It's so different. However, you know, the proof will be in the pudding. We'll see when it comes out. Hopefully having 200 points of distribution and experts on your team will make it more valuable than the first.

Well, it has to, in a way. But I mean, I've done it the complete opposite. You know, I've bootstrapped both my books. And there's some value to that because of the control. But then there's a lot of not so much good value. Cause you're the one who has to put it out. You are the marketing team. Which, by the way, I have a marketing agency, so it kind of works for me. But that's a hard thing, you know. And you know the funny thing, Tucker? Max told me this. He said 99.9999% of all books sell less than a thousand copies. And it's just crazy if you think about that. Right?

Here's what I like about this is my whole career was spent in sales and sales leadership. And when I was becoming an author, everyone's saying, you have no business being an author. And I thought really? Maybe the authors don't have business being an author because none of them are selling the books. They don't know how to sell. I thought, I don't know if I can write. We're going to rol and find out. But I know I can sell. And that's where that mismatch is in this business, I think very often.

So tell me about the book.

So the book is a powerful and proven three step process to overcome any adversity that you face in business or life. And it's essentially written from. Each chapter represents a different time in my business career or in my life where I share a story, what I learned from it, and then we dive into the takeaway for the reader so they can apply it back to their life.

Oh, that's awesome. All right, so I want to hear some stories then. You got some stories locked and loaded. I'm sure they're really good. Obviously your story is very public in the way you've told it about losing your job as being a C suite executive. So tell me, let's go to that story and then what did you learn from it?

Yeah, that's actually the first chapter of this book. Right. So a lot of people, and this is super interesting, I was on a podcast the other day and they said, I think it's so incredible how you never name the woman, you never call her out in your first book.

And.

And I started laughing. I said, well, that's because I was scared back then, right? You start doing something new, talking about something, you kind of dip a toe in the water first to say, am I going to get sued here or what's going to happen? Well, fast forward, you know, I gave my TedX talk, I. My book came out and now I'm working on the new book. I thought I'm going to get into a lot more of what really happened because I think people need to know it wasn't just this kind of no big deal, high level thing. So that's my first chapter in the book is getting into more of the detail of what went down when I very unexpectedly got fired. I was named one of the most influential women in radio. And a couple of weeks later I was told my position was eliminated and the company no longer needed me and.

Find out what the real reason was.

Well, I know I have my opinion, right? You're never going to know. No one's ever going to share that. My opinion is one year before I was fired, I launched a personal brand and I invested heavily in myself and I had a Great marketing team and strategy and social media team. And it looked great. And it looked so great that the CFO and GC I worked with threatened me and said, you shut that down. You're trying to be bigger than the company and that's not going to work for us. And I had spoken to a lawyer, so I said I can put whatever verbiage on my site, whatever verbiage on my post to say that this is my own entity and separate from my day to day job. And you know, I showed them I'm outsourcing everything. Don't worry, it doesn't take away from work. And it became a personal, very emotional attack and didn't stop. But luckily I really stood strong. Even though at night I'd go home and cry, but I would stand strong at work and say, you know what, what I'm creating is an investment in myself to make the world a better place and share with others. And I'm not doing anything wrong and I'm not shutting it down. And the minute that woman became my boss, she fired me.

So I'm very fascinated by a topic right now and it plays into that, which is the labor market has been massively disrupted because of COVID but actually it just accelerated what probably was already going to happen, which is that the team that works for your companies, they don't really want to work in the same office 50 hours a week for your crappy company. They just don't like even my company. They really don't want to be in the office. They don't want to sit here and be next to the boss all day long and feel that energy and all that. And we're seeing this everywhere right now. And not only that, they want a diverse portfolio where they're doing many things, not one thing. And I'm trying to get my head around this because I think the companies that innovate in this space are going to be the ones that explode over the next 10 years. I really think it's understanding and innovating the labor market is going to be the key to everything. And the first thing when you tell me the story is, do you know how dumb it is to tell a team member that is doing a great job? You can't have your own brand or you can't do something that gives you juice and energy. What did they think? Is it one of those things where, hey, we're the bosses, we get to control you? Or what do you think it was that made them go? You know, my thing is this. If I had an employee that wanted to do something like this. And the first thing I'd say is, okay, well, if you can do your job, you're good. I don't care. Because if I'm like, no, you can't do that, they're going to leave. It's 100% chance that they will absolutely walk out the door. So the question is, how can I keep serving that person as long as they do their job? Go do what you get to do. And that's what we've all got to adapt to. Did these people not see the fact that by just that, I understand you lost your job, but there was a timetable on that anyway, if they were going to cut off you after you spent all that money and invested all of that and you represented this company through your brand. So does this make sense at all?

It doesn't. And that's why I think this was a highly emotional decision. Because if this had been a business decision, it would have been handled very differently. Right there. They would sat down with me and said, okay, what can. Let's come to the table. All parties involved. We're threatened by this. We think that you're gonna leave, and we don't want you to leave. How can we together work this out? But that wasn't it. It was a highly emotional decision. My opinion is that woman saw me as a threat. You know, she saw me as a competitor, as someone who might take that CEO position, and she thought she was protecting herself by getting rid of me. And it definitely was an emotional decision that I don't regret. I'm so grateful for today. I was in an industry in decline, and now I'm in an industry that's in a growth phase. So I feel very lucky now. But it was definitely a hard transition.

There's silver linings in everything. And I always say when you're in the most painful moment of whatever you're experiencing, there's a breakthrough that's about to happen. And obviously you look back on that and say, greatest thing that ever happened to me.

But I'm glad that the last couple of years have passed. I wouldn't want to have to go through trying to figure out, you know, it's really. It's scary at that moment when you don't know what you're going to do. You don't see what that next step is. You don't see what that future is, and. And you feel like you had everything taken away from you. However, as you start to take small steps and start moving forward, it all comes together. But it does take. It takes some time.

So overcoming your villains, like what are some of the solutions that you lay out in the book and how did you experience those?

So it's a three step process which is around beliefs, actions and knowledge. And ultimately I sat down and was thinking about how do I keep overcoming adversity? Whether it was leading through 0809 recession, or getting divorced and being a single mom, you know, running a major company, or whether it be when I was sexually harassed when I was younger or getting fired, whatever it was, I've always found ways to overcome adversity and people would always point that out to me. So I thought, well, there's got to be some recipe I have here. I've got to sit down and be thoughtful about what are the steps that I put in place? And it came to me that it's this very simple three step process and it does not fail you. And number one, you have to get really clear on the belief that you're holding. Right? So let's use the getting fired. The belief I held when I walked out of there was that my life was over, that there was, what is next? What if I can't get another job? Well, here's the thing. You want to break that belief down to what is fact? And when you break it down, there was no fact there. What fact says that I can't get another job or that I can't reinvent myself? That was just a negative thought, right? So I had to go to the belief. The belief is I'm currently out of work. However, that does not mean anything for tomorrow or the next day, right? So, okay, I had to debunk that myth that I was telling myself and that negative story because it wasn't real. Next, I have to take massive action. I look back across my life. This is always step two, I take massive action. The massive action I took in this instance was I put a post up on social media that said, I've just been fired. If I've ever done anything to help you, I need to hear from you today.

You did?

I did.

And that post went viral. I had so many people reach out to me wanting to help me. It was crazy.

Oh, that was brilliant. That could be the marketing tip of the week. Holy cow. I love that. Good for you.

Well, it does a couple different things. One, it shines a light on shame, right? People want you to feel shame that you were fired. I chose to reframe it and say, in good company, Oprah's been fired. Steve Jobs has been fired. J.K. rowling and now Heather Monahan. Let's go. I'm with the right crew. I'm running with the right people now. And so I also asked for help. And then another tip that I'll give is when you ask for help and someone offers it, convert in the moment because people get so busy that two weeks later they're going to forget and say, I don't have time. So Froggy from the Elvis Duran show tweeted at me, hey, if I can help in any way, let me know. I tweeted right back, get me on the Elvis Duran show. And he did. And that really changed the trajectory of my business career because Elvis is the one who halfway through the interview said, well obviously you're writing a book, Heather. And I said obviously, but I really wasn't.

So I'm taking notes because the you said some stuff that I want to write down.

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What was it like in that transitionary period from when you left to going all in on your brand and then building that out?

It was super scary because I went from being an expert in an industry and I had a lot of clout. I had people that I could tap for anything. I knew where to go for any. I had been in that business for 20 years and done a really great job and suddenly I lost that and I was starting over at zero. I didn't even know what to call myself at First, Right. Just unemployed. I didn't know it was such a new experience that it felt really scary at first. It was really hard.

So let me get off of the book for one second. I want to hear about. You've taught at Harvard University, was at.

Harvard Business School, Harvard Extension School, and it's all. It's all graduates of college who are out working in big companies, coming back looking to get a degree.

Tell me how you came about. I think there's such a prestige to that and it's so cool. And I mean, again, I went through it, but again, from being fired, to writing two books, to being signed by Harper Collins, to being one of the top females speakers in the world, to teaching at Harvard. Tell me about your Harvard experience.

So this was yet again another example of taking action. Right. I have been very committed to LinkedIn specifically for social media. I show up every day.

You do a great job there. Right?

I'm there all the time. And so I had created a video about some sales tips I was sharing. Right. This is two years ago. And a Harvard professor saw the video and sent me a DM and said, I think you'd be a great guest professor for a day. Would you entertain the idea of teaching my class? We jumped on a call. He explained why he saw value in me. I'm not a white old man. He said, listen, the majority of professors here are white old men. You actually were in a C suite. You're a single mom. You're different than what my students hear from every day. I think your real life spin on class would be really beneficial to them. And it went great. And then fast forward a year later, he got a call from the school saying, we're going to give you additional budget. You can bring a second teacher on for your first semester in 2021 for professional sales, sales leadership. And so he called me and he said, you did such a great job on the guest appearance. Would you like to apply to the school to see if they'll consider you? And I did. And they gave me the green light and we taught in 2021 together. It was crazy.

That's amazing. So you've worked with a lot of business owners, right? What are most business owners getting wrong right now?

People get in the weeds. I think when there's so much adversity out there, there's so much change. Do I force people to get the vaccine and come back to work? Because a lot of people are doing that, a lot of employees are getting pissed. Right. Or do I stay focused on trying to keep People happy or should we be looking at new product launches? How are we going to innovate? They get so in the weeds and so focused on minutia that they're not picking their head up at a bigger scale and saying, where are the trends happening right now? Who's doing well and who can I learn from in different industries and really trying to be more of a visionary versus just, let's put a fire out. Let's just get through this moment. I see a lot of people reacting to things right now.

How are you handling, like, with your own business coaches, what are you focused on more than anything right now?

I mean, the biggest issue that we're hearing is lack of motivation with sales teams. Lack of motivation and lack of.

This is deliberate, right?

Yes, definitely is. Yeah. There's a shortage on talent out there.

How are these business owners adapting and like, with. With the way you're working with them and how are they kind of seeing the light?

Well, I feel. I feel like everybody responds very differently. Right. As I mentioned, I have some clients that forced employees to get vaccines, to come back to work or they're losing their job. And so you're seeing some of these things. You can advise people on what you think is right or wrong. I don't think, you know, as an employee that I'm going to want to run through walls if people tell me I have to do certain things like that. Right. So you're going to lose people. I can tell them that over and over again, but they're not going to believe it until they see it. Also, people don't realize if they haven't been recruiting or they don't have a recruiting plan and process and a pipeline full of people that they've been pulling towards them. They don't realize how difficult that marketplace is until they're thrust into it when people start walking out.

So I assume that the book is overcoming your villains. Is it focused mainly for the entrepreneur or the C suite executive? Who's your ideal audience for the book?

I hate that Harper Collins says that all the time. I'm like, this book is for anyone that wants to overcome adversity. Anyone that's faced with adversity in business or life will benefit immensely from this book. That is a guarantee. This could be read for an entrepreneur. It could be read for someone in corporate America. Right. Because I've walked both of those sides now in Corporate America for 20 years and an entrepreneur now for four. I have really good perspective and can relate to both sides as well as I've Learned great things from both sides. And I think there are great companies out there in the world, in corporate America you can work for and be happy. And I'm not suggesting everyone be an entrepreneur, but I also want to show that you have choices. There are options out there, and there's knowledge that you can access. It's going to show you which path is probably the right one for you.

So this is a marketing podcast, so let's. Let's get to some marketing. How do you market your brand? How have you figured that out over the years? I'd love to know. Like, tell me something like, oh, my God, I did this and I totally screwed it up. I always like to talk about where we screw up our marketing. You figured it out over time that LinkedIn is what crushed for you. You do a great job on Instagram as well. But it feels like for you, LinkedIn is the place where you've built a lot of your marketing and your brand out of it. So, like, everybody's different. So tell me how you built it and then what kind of lessons you learn along the way.

You know, when I first started with this, I would overthink things. Oh, I should trademark this or I shouldn't use that hashtag if I didn't research it. That's the wrong answer. What I've learned is test, try, messy test, try, messy, test, try. Keep showing up and look at the data and it's going to keep changing, right? As I mentioned earlier, everything changed when the pandemic hit in regards to marketing. So don't get so consumed with, I have to have this perfect strategy in place, and this is how it's going to work. It won't work that way, but what you will find is taking action and showing up with consistency will give you the information to allow you to make better informed decisions and adjust your marketing moving forward. You know, a year ago, these DM campaigns were really working incredibly well. Now they're not. People hate getting the generic. Now, if you can personalize it or if you actually want to do it by hand, okay, then it does work. Well, that's a completely different campaign. A lot more time and effort goes into it. So there's short windows where things can work. You want to capitalize on them, but then you have to be willing to let it go and say, I'm not going to just keep trying to do this when my audience is telling me.

It no longer works, but for your brand. Where are you seeing the most ROI right now? And how do you play in that game? How do you play into the platforms? What is your routine?

So I have a monthly content calendar, and then each week I get a week in advance, my team submits a plan to me, and then I go through and I make changes. One of the things that I do before I go into my content content calendar, I have a photo album on my phone. If I'm scrolling through something and I see a post that's going viral, I take a screenshot of that and I put it in my folder. I want to know what's happening. I'm on Buzzsumo looking at what's trending. I'm on Twitter seeing what's trending. And so I take all those things into consideration. It doesn't mean that if Afghanistan is trending, I'm going to post about Afghanistan, but it does mean that maybe I open up the Wall Street Journal that morning and there's an article about how that's impacting the U.S. and business. And I can give my perspective. Perspective on that. Right? So it's not like a. You have to do it this way, but it's going to open your mind to. Is there a way I could add value to this? If this is a trending topic, there's something I could probably suggest or offer that might be helpful to others. So I do a lot of that. I reinvent the wheel, right? So if I see a post that's trending on Instagram around, I don't. I don't even know, like, not apologizing. That's easy. I say to myself, okay, let's test it on LinkedIn and I'll put my own spin on it. Or I'll do a video on it that's a little different, but same topic. Because if it's doing well, there's something out there that tells me it might do really well in my feed, too.

Are you having fun?

I mean, some days are more fun than others. As we were discussing, you know, it's been challenging because a lot of the live events that I have are canceling now. And I didn't anticipate that in my mind last year. I said, okay, come Q4 of 2021, we're going to be back. We're going to be everywhere. And I kept telling myself that. And now that it's not happening, it's, you know, it's a little disappointing because I am anxious to get out of the whole Zoom world.

Right. What are you most anxious about with the book?

Oh, gosh. I reveal a really, the most personal secret or personal moment that I've kept my entire life. You know, people in my inner circle know about this, but I've never gone public about it. So that's. Anytime you offer up something really emotional like that, there's just, you know, the haters are going to come. I have haters that come at me every day online, and that doesn't bother me. But when you really open yourself up to that vulnerability, it's like you're kind of just waiting, like, oh, let's get this over with. Okay, I'm ready.

I get it. Well, I'm super excited for the book. It's called overcoming your villains. Here's what we're going to do now. You are now in the Undefeated Marking podcast, and we are about to do the Undefeated Markings tip of the week. Are you ready, Heather?

Ready.

All right, I'm going to start out, and then if you've got one, but by the way, you've dropped, like six bombs on this already. That could be the tip of the week. So I think you've served your purpose, but if you've got another one, awesome. I'll come to you on a. Done. Okay. So Heather knows how much I appreciate customer and consumer data. She had me speak on it. She's actually undergone her own customer insights report. And the power of that data. Well, one of the things that we are now seeing in all the data reports for almost every every single business out there is the power of Pinterest, especially when targeting females, whether it's with a product or even a service. But why is that? Well, because what we're seeing today. So we're talking about 2021. Well, what we're seeing today is that Facebook has gradually deteriorated in effectiveness. Not only is there the iOS update, which has allowed Facebook to not be able to target like they used to be, so the targeting capabilities have gone down. But the other is two other factors. One, I think there were like 3 million advertisers on Facebook in, like, 2015. Now there are 10 million advertisers on Facebook. Plus there are 200 million businesses that are using their free tools. So you're just competing against a massive market. And by the way, they really haven't grown that many more new people on Facebook. So you're talking about a massive. And then with all of the cancellations and the politics and everything, people just go, you know, if I buy this product on Facebook, I feel like I may get canceled. And so people have just stopped buying on Facebook for the most part. There's always differences, but we just see that trend across the board and we are seeing the trend move over to Pinterest, especially with females. And so if you have a female demographic in your database, then I would consider trying to figure out having your marketing agency look into Pinterest and building out a Pinterest platform strategy. I think it could be really effective. So that's my marketing tip of the week. I hope you can use it. It's free. Heather, do you have anything?

Yeah, I'll say to your Pinterest example. Two months ago I had a pin go viral and I'm not active on there, but I put content up there. So I'm not on there multiple times a day. And I think you can have a presence there, have some success, create some reach and expose your brand to the audience you're going after just by showing up. Even if it's just a few times a week, I think it's worthwhile. So that's a great point for me. I want to share that, you know, I'm always learning and learning from different people. Harper Collins felt really strongly that to promote the book they felt a quiz would be the right strategy. I knew nothing about quizzes. I, I don't take, I personally don't take quizzes. Right. I don't know. I don't. I guess people do. But the more that they expose me to it and why they want to invest in that for my book. Apparently a lot of people on social media share quizzes. So you can actually have content go viral and the content is the quiz. And when what the quiz is doing is it's either converting the potential customer into a paid client or you're getting, or you're getting the email address. Right. So either way, and that's. Oh my gosh. This is another great tip. Whether you have an audience on Pinterest, LinkedIn or I don't care where, get their email address because you never know. Tomorrow you can get kicked off your account. Happens to me, happens to everybody. Don't lose that point of communication. Get their text number, get their email, get something so you own it and LinkedIn doesn't.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a big preacher of this. By the way, like I told this story before, I'll tell it again to you, but there was a guy selling baby toys on Amazon, built it to about a $10 million business. So he was doing about 900,000 in sales a month. And his cheaper competitors ganged up and started one starring reviewing him on Amazon. And then they started upvoting the one star reviews so they Started voting helpful on all the one star reviews and his sales went from about 900,000amonth to $80,000 a month. And he came to me and was like, I need help. And I'm like, well, how much are you selling on your website? And he said, I'm not selling anything on my website. And I go, well, when you rent your customers from a platform, ultimately you're going to be in deep trouble if that's the only place that you're getting your money from. And I'm not saying you ignore Amazon or you ignore Facebook or any of these platforms. You can't. You got to play. But you have to be diversified, just like your, your financial portfolio should be diversified. It's the same thing here. And you've got to try to own the data. I mean, you really do have to own your own data. So I appreciate that. Those are awesome. Heather, where can people find you?

So I'm Heather Monahan on all social media. My website's heathermonahan.com if you want to check out the book, go to Overcome your villains dot com. I'm offering major bonus bundles for anyone that buys the book and enters your order number there. You're gonna get a bunch of free downloads.

Cool.

I guess I'm going to do that now. No, you have a great brand and your podcast is amazing. It is an amazing podcast. Really is. I listen to it all the time and then I text you and say, great guest. Or I like this one.

Well, thank you for coming on because we always get great people.

I'm not the great guest, but like Zach Nadler, who's been on this podcast, has been a great guest too. So I appreciate that. Also, for everybody out there, I would really appreciate a five star review of this podcast. And also if you want to learn more about my stuff, you can also go to philipstutz.com and subscribe to my bi weekly blog. With that, we are out of here. Heather, thanks for showing up today.

Thanks so much for having me.

All right.

I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear. Start learning and growing.

Inevitably something will happen.

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You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.