The ROI on cold DMs!

Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to ask you, are you a shark or are you smart enough to be a humpback whale? Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. One of the core tenets of successful manifestation is knowing that you don't chase, you attract. And I would argue one of the core tenets of building a successful business that supports you living your ideal life is that you do not chase, you attract. There's so much noise online for chasing methodologies. And this is really at its heart, hustle culture. And I want to name right off the bat because I know some of you are going to be like, but Katie, like, I work hard and I do hustle. Like, what's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with that. I hustle as well. I work very hard in my business and I train my clients. I don't even have to train them on this. They work very hard in their business as well. One of the things that I have to work on with them is gets them to work a little less honestly because they burn themselves out. I attract a lot of workaholics in my business. But when we think about hustle culture and what is being taught to new business owners and to business owners who want to scale into seven figures is there's this idea that if you just work harder, if you just work an extra five hours a day, if you just kill yourself a little bit more, then you're gonna be more successful. And, and I think that's bullshit. And actually I don't think it's bullshit. I know it's bullshit because it's not sustainable. If you build a business where you are working 12 hour days, cold dming people, chasing people down, being really aggressive in order to get clients, guess what? Your business is always going to require you to work 12 hour days where you cold DM people and, and chase them down and be really aggressive to get clients, it's never going to get easier. And while sure, like you might get some clients who are really happy, who may give you some referrals, you can't count on referrals to build your business. One of the things I always tell my clients is you want to have the ball in your court. Okay? And this is a tennis metaphor. I actually do know a little bit about tennis, okay. I played it for a very short time in high school. I quit the team, however, because my partner didn't like that I was playing to have fun and not playing to win. Jackie Blute, I didn't understand you back then. I still don't really understand you now. But I, I kind of get it. Actually. There was one moment during a tennis tournament that I realized, like, I was not meant to be in team sports. And it was when the. One of our best players, she was playing singles and she lost a game. She was crying and I'm like, why is she crying? I don't understand. What's the big deal? Like, our school had, my graduating class had 79 people in it. It's not like our school was getting visits from people who are going to give scholarships out for tennis playing. We barely had enough people for a team. So here's the thing about tennis. When you have the ball in your court, you're able to hit it back. You're able to score. When you're building a business, if you're trying to build a business around getting referrals, the ball is always in the other person's court. It requires them to do something. They have the power and they can either hit it back or not. It's kind of like playing fetch with Luna. She doesn't understand the concept. She thinks the concept is you throw the ball, I go catch the ball, I go get other balls, I cram them all in my mouth and I hold them and I try to keep them away from you, which makes it really hard to like continue to throw because she has all of them. Anyway, we're not building a business that requires you to work 12 hours a day. If that's your dream. If you love work so much that you've always dreamed of working 12 hour days and burning yourself the f ck out and always being exhausted, I'm not here to take that away from you. Go do your thing. However, if your dream is to have some freedom and flexibility, and by that I mean you want to be able to wake up at a reasonable hour, like 7am in the morning and have a healthy breakfast and maybe work out and have time to meditate or do whatever it is that gets you on the right foot to have the perfect day and then log into work for a couple hours, meet with clients, have a nice lunch where you get to sit outside and Maybe play fetch with your dog if they actually know how to play fetch, go back and do a few more hours of work and then maybe go for a walk with a friend if you feel like it, and actually be able to plan life in a way that you get to enjoy it, rather than what can I fit into my workday? If you want to follow the advice of the Hustle Bros and you want to hustle and grind, as they call it, be my guest. But if you want freedom and flexibility, then you need to invest your time in developing an attraction culture in your business. Attraction culture means you do the least amount of work that gets you the most amount of results, and you set up systems so that once you do the initial groundwork, you don't have to do it again and you let people come to you. This is also called inbound marketing, and this is exactly how I've built my business to multiple six figures. By creating content, sharing it on LinkedIn and now TikTok and Instagram. And I create this content, speaking to my ideal clients, talking about their problems, the things that are really going on for them, the fears they have, the frustrations they're experiencing in starting or growing their businesses by creating content, talking about what they want more than anything that maybe they haven't even told their best friend about because they don't think it's actually a realistic desire. And by sharing my own story, sharing the struggles that I overcome, sharing how I designed my approach to running my business that makes the way I live my life possible. Not that I'm hopping on private jets or driving a fancy car. I drive a 2012 Fiat 500. Okay, not fancy, but I get to live life on my terms. I get to spend time with the people that I love. I get to play fetch with my dog, who doesn't understand fetch, whenever I want. And because I've designed my business in this way, the more work I put in, the less work I'll have to do in the future. And this is possible for you, too. So let's break down some of the shitty advice the Hustle Bros are giving you, and then let's talk about what the alternative is. How you can lean more into attraction culture in your business and inbound marketing so that you can get more results in less time. So I recently did a test about how long it actually takes to cold DM people. And so, ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. The hyperfocus community is the inner sanctum of the Weeniecast. It's a club that's designed just for you, where you'll learn how to leverage your ADHD to grow your business. In the Hyper Focus community, we are realistic about the challenges that face ADHD business owners and we don't believe in one size fits all solutions. We believe in creating strategies that fit you. On day one of signing up, you'll experience that deep sigh of relief that comes from walking into a room full of people like you who you do not need to mask your quirks in front of in order to fit in because they get you in the membership. Every single month you'll get two group calls. One is an ADHD group coaching call and the other is a networking call with fellow ADHD business owners. We will also have coworking sessions designed for the ADHD mind. Monday get organized Sprint calls to keep you out of overwhelm. Access to weekly Brave BizLab calls where I will give you practical advice to grow your business. We'll also have the occasional expert training which are absolutely ADHD vetted and of course, community support by folks like you. And those who pay for the year up front get a surprise bonus visit weenicast.com hyperfocused and stop procrastinating the things that will grow your business. That's weeniecast.com hyperfocus or click the link in the episode description so I recently did a test about how long it actually takes to cold DM people. And so I scripted out a cold DM that made it very clear this was an experiment that I was not actually trying to sell anything. And and as a proof, do not buy anything. That's one of the instructions I gave to everyone I cold DMed and then I made an ask. If you wanna respond, just send me a picture of your pet or your favorite animal. I got so many pictures of people's pets I was delighted. It made my day. But I set a stopwatch and my goal was to cold DM this message, this cut and paste message to 20 people as fast as possible. And I was gonna customize just a little bit. So instead of just having it be a cold message with no name, I needed to go in and type out manually hi and then enter their first name. Bare minimum of work. It took me 9 minutes to cold DM 20 people without any further customization. Now these cold DMs were so basic when, when you're cold dming you like you have to know that you're not going to get a response if it's obviously a cut and paste message, and if you're not investigating their profile and seeing what's relevant to them, they're not going to buy. So what I did was never going to be effective, even if I was trying to sell something. I did the math and it took me minimum of 2 minutes to go and examine someone's profile and get the general gist of what they care about, what they talk about, what their focus is, and to then put in like a simple little sentence that kind of makes the thing sound like I'm directing it towards them specifically. Still not great. Still not a specific message to them and what their pain points might be. So if it took nine minutes for me to actually copy and paste and put their name in, and let's just say I'm really efficient, two minutes per person to scan their profile, see their content and customize that message a little further, that means to reach 20 people, it would take me 49 minutes. Okay, I have ADHD, so we know that. Just trying to gear myself up to sit at my computer and do something that's that boring and that repetitive. Let's add another 30 minutes just to get into the flow of that. Now, I looked up the return on investment of cold DMing and typically to get one appointment you need to cold DM 100 people, which means that 20 people is not going to get me an appointment. Maybe If I did 20 people a day for one week, I might expect to get one sales call. But that's five hours just for one sales call. If your closing percentage is 25%, which is a good closing percentage, that's one client a month. For some people, that might be good enough. But if you're trying to ramp up to full time and you want to have a full book of business as fast as possible, that's not enough. Which means you're going to have to do 100 people a day, which means that's close to four hours of cold DMing. And that's all only if you are your most efficient. If you are just focusing and not getting distracted, and that's not even counting the angry messages you're going to get back with people being pissed off that you're cold DMing them. That's not factoring in the Dave Harlands of the world who are going to try to with you. If you don't know who Dave Harland is, you have to go and look him up on LinkedIn. He's hysterical. He messes with scammers all the time. It is so entertaining. And because this is what you're spending time on, this is how you're going to get clients forever. There's never going to be a time where you don't have to do this. Now imagine also, instead, you were invested in doing an attraction marketing method. And let's just say to write a Sales post for LinkedIn, it takes you an hour, you know, because you're starting and you're not a good writer yet, and you really have to think things through and you have to edit as you go, it takes a little longer. So let's say instead of using four hours a day, four for a week, to just cold DM a bunch of people who are mostly gonna be annoyed with you and then vow to never, ever work with you, and they block you. Let's say you devoted four hours a day to writing posts for LinkedIn. Posts that speak to your ideal client, that name what they're struggling with, that talk about what they want more than anything, that invites them to book a call with you. And let's say each day you're doing four hours. And in those four hours, you're just writing four posts because it takes you a while. You realize that's a month of content, right? If you were to write four posts a day for five days in a row, that's a month of content. And as you continuously post to social media, it could be LinkedIn, it could be TikTok, it could be Instagram. You're building your audience, you're building credibility with people because you are being consistent. So you might not get a ton of sales calls in the first month you post these. You might not get a ton of sales calls in the second month you post these. But people are watching. Thousands of people are watching, not just a measly hundred people a day who are getting your cold dm. And your clients, they may not be the ones who comment, they may not be the ones who like that post. Actually, they're probably not. Because oftentimes our clients don't want anyone else to see that they need this help. They have some shame around having this problem, but they're paying attention. And every single time your name pops up, their brain will light up and think, oh, my gosh, this is the person I think I want to work with. Let me see their post. And even if the post doesn't resonate with them, even if it's not about what they're struggling with, you've still reminded them that you exist. So let's weigh the impact here. Okay, so if you want to cold DM 100 people a day for a week, you'll reach 500 people, most of which will vow to never work with you. A good chunk will probably block you. Some people will be rude to you, others will f with you. And probably one, two, five people will book a sales call so you might get a client. Or you could do four hours of work a day for five days. Create 20 pieces of content. Those 20 pieces of content will each get thousands of views and they will be repurposable so you won't have to ever write them again. You'll just have to do a quick little update, make it relevant to the moment. Which would you prefer? If you prefer to only reach 500 people by cold dming and having all that bad juju, then you need to stop listening to my podcast right now. I cannot help you. But if you want to work smart, not hard, you have found your people. Hey, quick question. Did you follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app yet? It takes just a few seconds. I personally love Apple podcasts, but you can find us anywhere, even on YouTube. So as the kids say, smash that button and make sure you never miss an episode. When you have adhd, you know that what you're interested in right now will not last. How many times have you gotten a new hobby, found a new hyperfocus, and then gotten bored of it two months later? Unfortunately for my little stint as a screen printer, it's not like the screen printing could just be forever generating after I did it once. But with content. When you create attraction content to get new clients, it can work for you forever. Until you want to update it, until you want to evolve it. And then you just have to do it one more time. The Hustle bros don't know how to do this. They know how to work hard, not smart. They're also going to tell you you need to get up at 5am you need to get up before anyone else is up because your competition's out there and you need to beat them to the punch. When you're focused on an attraction methodology for getting clients, you're not worried about the competition. In fact, they're not even competition. They're your colleagues. When someone books a sales call with you, if they're not the right fit, you have all these incredible humans that you can say, hey, you know what? I know and trust and like this person and I think they'll be a better fit for what you're needing. That's the beauty. It's not an ocean full of Sharks. It's a beautiful symbiotic environment where everyone kind of supports everyone else. Fun fact. Did you know that humpback whales will actually protect gray whales and their babies from killer whales on the coast of California? Like, literally, they will intervene and they will protect these pods of whales from other whales. And also, humpback whales are the only mammal that we have identified that will organize across species to go hunting. They will get dolphins and seals and elephant seals and all other kinds of mammals who eat sardines, and they will organize them to swirl around these massive schools of sardines off the coast of Monterey, California, and they will all just be able to pass through with their mouths open and get a full belly full. Like, how incredible is that? Wouldn't you prefer to be a humpback whale to a shark? Wouldn't you prefer to have, like, dolphin friends and elephant seal friends and, like, little harbor seal friends than be the kind of animal that, when you swim through, everyone skedaddles and gets out of your way? Who's constantly looking over your shoulder? Well, I don't know if sharks can actually look over their shoulder. I don't think their necks work that way. But I imagine if you're a shark and you understand your job as a shark, you're aware that there are other sharks who might be bigger than you, who might see you and think, that looks tasty. This is what I spend a lot of time thinking about. If you're listening to this and you're like, okay, cool, Katie, that is obviously your Roman Empire. I have a different Roman Empire. Please perplex everyone and put that in a review for this podcast. Just share the random shit you think about. That would be hysterical. And it will confuse everyone on Apple podcasts, Spotify, what have you. They'll think, what the fuck is this person talking about? It will make my day. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have the humpback whale vibe than the shark vibe. Some other bad advice that the Hustle bros will tell you is to go and, like, comment for hours on other people's content, because then they owe you. And they will comment on your stuff back. They'll tell you all these strategies to get thousands of followers, which, by the way, those thousands of followers are usually fake. They'll get you joining their group to increase your followership, increase engagement. These are called pods, and over time, they actually hurt you. And actually, when you're involved in pod behavior, you're not getting your ideal clients seeing your content. You're only getting other people who are also desperate for clients, seeing your content versus if you're just creating content that's specifically geared to your ideal clients to build trust and empathy and a relationship, who's going to see that your ideal clients, people who are desperate for clients, probably aren't going to be commenting on your stuff because it's not going to be relevant to them. Unless of course you're a business coach and you help people get clients than they might be a client who entered my world just by seeing my content and she joined a challenge in December and has just been in the periphery circling and circling and circling. She just joined byob, my build your own business beginner program last month and right away she feels more focused. Right away she is hitting the ground running. She's having incredible conversations with her ideal client, she's sending out proposals and she's getting super hyper clear about what she's been doing that's been ineffective in the last year. This beautiful human Dean of Ince just this morning sent me an AI generated song about me. It actually made me highly uncomfortable because when people do thoughtful and nice things for me, I get uncomfortable. And when I get uncomfortable I laugh. But it was genuinely a really sweet gesture for her to do. But this is the kind of client that you attract when you are invested in attraction culture in your business. So here's a little snippet now.

Katie Winklemanage, she's a strategist queen, knows how to make that money machine. With her business mindset. She is on top, teaching us all. Never gonna stop, stop being a weenie. Take control. Katie's here to help body and soul. No more excuses, just take the leave. Start your business. Don't go to sleep.

Squirrel and music about you aside, don't you want to have people in your business who are so excited to work with you that they do thoughtful things like this? The Hustle bros. I promise you they don't have people who are working for them that are doing this kind of stuff anyway. The point of this is work smart, not hard. If you like the idea of this, if you're like, yeah, absolutely, I don't want to work 4 to 12 hours a day dming people who don't want to hear from me. And I want to do the work once and I want it to be able to attract high paying clients who are perfect for me, who might serenade me with some music at one point. Know that this is what I develop with my clients. I literally have a whole framework that walks you through step by step how you develop a good four months worth of content that's designed to attract your ideal high paying client that you can write once and every four months you just go and reschedule it. I even have a whole ClickUp template that you can store everything in that will automatically remind you when a piece of content has had enough time to be reposted again. And if you're curious about how you can get access to this framework, then I urge you to book a Generate Income strategy call with me where we can talk through if one of my programs might be a good fit for you and your business. And if you want to book that, then go to weeniecast.com forward/strategy call. But for now, remember to be a humpback whale and not a shark. Oh my God. I saw the funniest TikTok the other night about how hip hop stars and like rap artists, you know, grown ass men will have these rivalries and they'll make songs about each other like tearing the other person down. And someone pointed out that it's basically grown men writing mean poems to each other. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Join the Weenacast Hyper Focus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses, and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month. It's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast. Com Hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast. Com Hyperfocus.