What most ADHD entrepreneurs forget to do!

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. 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, 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. You're showing up on social media. That's a great start. But are you showing up in the right way when it comes to striking the right balance between chasing likes and chasing leads? Squirrel, in this episode, I'm going to talk you through how you can get engagement on selfies, but also also ensure you're getting money in your bank. Squirrel Squirrel Hi, I'm Katie McManus, and this is business strategy for Weenie ADHDpreneurs. Squirrel. Marketing your business is a challenge for any business owner, but is particularly challenging in some specific ways for those with adhd. Now, if you have adhd, you know what I'm talking about, because there's this element of marketing where you're just putting something out there and you just have to trust that people are going to see it, be inspired by it, and take action on it. And what can happen when you have ADHD is you get addicted to the immediate feedback. For instance, posting to LinkedIn, I sometimes fall into this cycle of posting things that I know are going to get a ton of comments or likes, things that are completely irrelevant to my business, but it gives me that immediate feel. Feedback of people liked this. This is a great strength to have because if you are that receptive to immediate feedback, what you're going to do subconsciously is you're actually going to become a better content creator because you're going to notice, oh wow, they really responded when I told the story in this way. Interesting. I'm going to note that in the back of my mind. And you may not even be conscious that your brain is doing this. Your brain could note that when you post a selfie of you smiling versus you frowning, you get more friendly feedback. You may notice that if you do a live or if you share video content, and then you naturally gear towards doing more of that. So there are a few particular challenges that people with ADHD who also own businesses run into when they're faced with marketing their services. Now, the first one is there's no immediate feedback when you're marketing your services. Or if there is, it's very minimal. Because for instance, when I post something on LinkedIn that's about my dog and it's general and it's a crowd pleasing post and everyone likes dogs, so they can all comment on it, they can all like it, they can share pictures or stories about their own dog's back. Those kinds of posts get a ton of engagement. But if I'm posting, say, about my byob, build your own business group program that's geared towards people who are just starting their businesses and don't know what they don't know, that's a much smaller audience. Those posts get far less engagement unless they're incredibly written, which I'll give myself some credit here. I'm a good writer. I don't know if I'm an incredible writer, but what can be really challenging to the business owner with ADHD is that that immediate feedback, that blast of dopamine that you get from getting all the comments and getting all the likes, you can get a little addicted to it. When you do post about your business and you don't get as many comments and you don't get as many likes, what can happen is you think, oh, well, this just isn't good. Meanwhile, you're not paying attention to the most important metric, which is are you getting clients out of it? Because you can post something that gets two comments, three likes, and get three clients out of it. And depending on how much you charge like that could be $45,000 in the bank versus a hundred likes and 75 comments on a post post about your dog. She waited. She waited. That was great. Luna, are you done? What's cool about this though, is that you don't have to pick one or the other. What I always tell my clients is that you have to chase likes and you have to chase leads, right? And so when you're chasing likes, you are posting those high engagement style posts that are relevant to everyone. So stories about your childhood, stories about a bad boss, pictures and videos of your dog doing something funny, those are the crowd pleasers that everyone can engage on because it's relevant to them in some way, shape or form. We've all been a child, we've all had a bad boss. Unfortunately, many of us have had multiple bad bosses. If you don't have a dog, you probably like dogs. And if you don't like dogs, you're probably a sociopath. So whatever you don't like, forget you. We don't need you commenting on our posts anyway. But it's really important to remember to not get stuck in chasing likes. So you have to alternate between chasing likes and chasing leads. And when you chase leads, your posts are going to be about your ideal clients. You're going to be focusing on what their frustrations and what their struggles are in the here and now before they start working with you. You're going to share client testimonials that highlight the results that you get for your clients. You're going to talk about your programs, you're going to talk about the things that you're proud of in your work. And you're going to have a call to action to invite people to sign up for your shit or to become your client. So you have to chase likes that grows your network. Right? Because if I see a post by someone who's a second or third connection that I think is funny or endearing or relevant to me, I'm going to go and comment on it. And I'm probably also going to go and connect with that person, which means I'm going to start building a relationship with this person online. And because I'm building this relationship, I'm going to start commenting on their stuff more and more often because I'm starting to build this friendship with this person. And because I'm commenting, my network is going to start seeing their posts because I'm engaging and the algorithm is going to read. Wow. People like Katie McManus like this post. Great, let's show this to more people who are in her network and so on and so forth. So you do this and you grow your network. People want to connect with you on that stuff. And then because you've built this network and you're building all these relationships, you share something that's super relevant to your business and you invite people to become a client and it gets far more reach than if you were just sharing that. And I know some of you are hearing this and thinking, but Katie, someone told me I have to share value and I have to share opinions and lessons and how tos. And it's like, okay, yes, you can do that. But let me tell you the story of the two old men. So I want you to imagine there's this park and there's this young mom who has a three year old daughter and the daughter isn't ready to go to preschool yet. So they go to the park every day around the same time, mid morning because the daughter is really intent on checking in on the koi fish in this fountain, right? She's just obsessed with these fish. And so she convinces her mom, like, to bring some bread. And she goes and she checks on the fish and she talks them and she feeds them the bread. And every day the mom notices there's two old men that sit on either side of the fountain. And she sees them often enough that one day she goes up to the first one and says hi and introduces herself and hears his name and he invites her to sit down. And she has this conversation with him and he's just giving her all this random advice. You know, if you have a squeaky door, you have to use WD40. If you have a leaky faucet and you can't fix it, you have to yourself. And the plumber's busy. You want to tie a string around it and you want to, like, have the string dangle down to the bottom so you don't have that drip, drip, drip, that'll drive you crazy all night long and this and that. He has all this helpful advice and she's smiling and she's nodding like, oh, okay, thank you, thank you. Yeah, thank you for that advice. And then of course, her daughter finishes with the fish because three year olds have very short attention spans and they head home for lunch. And so the next day she comes back to the fountain and she goes up to the second old man and she says again, hi, and she introduces herself and he invites her to sit down and he starts asking her questions about her daughter and about herself. And he starts sharing about his own children when they were young and the struggles he had with them. And he mentions, you know, your daughter had that temper tantrum the other day. And my heart went out to you because I remember those days. It's a really hard time to be a parent. And he shares some stories and asks some questions and they have a really great chat. And again, the three year old is done with the fish at that point and it's time to go home to lunch. On day three, who is she going back to? Who has she built a relationship with and felt heard by and seen? And there's this massive bridge of empathy. And I know you're thinking, the second old man, first old man was perfectly nice. He was giving value. You know, he was throwing value right in her face. But that was the thing. He was throwing value right in her face, not acknowledging where she was in the moment. It wasn't the right moment for him to give advice about a drippy faucet. It wasn't the right moment for him to give advice about a squeaky door. When you show up on social media and you're just shoving advice in people's faces, that's essentially what you're doing. You're not building that bridge of empathy. It's one of the reasons when I train marketing for my one on one clients and in my group program, I call it empathetic marketing because you really are empathizing with them in their situation and what they're frustrated with and what they want. Ultimately, that is also giving value. And I would argue the value people get from, from coming across your social media posts when you're empathizing with them is far more valuable than them coming across advice you're giving. When someone comes across your posts on social media, what you want them to experience is, oh my God, this person gets me. I need to reach out to them right now. What you don't want them to experience is, oh, that's a good piece of information. I'll have to remember that for when I come across that situation, because they're going to remember the advice and they're not going to remember you. And this goes into my main point of this episode is people want you. We're going to be talking about outsourcing later, but there are going to be elements of showing up and marketing your services that you're not going to be able to outsource. Unless you have an identical twin or you've cracked the code on creating a clone of yourself who can do TikToks and, and Instagrams and LinkedIn lives and do video and speak in your voice, you are always going to have to have a hand in your marketing. Another element that people with adhd who own their businesses really struggle with is remembering to talk about their services. Now the reason for this is that we have this natural drive for variety. And so ad if we're told that we have to post about the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, we're going to get so bored with it. And the key here is if you get bored with posting about the same thing over and over again, you can create variety in other ways. You can create variety in the modality in which you talk about it. So you could do a few written posts about your services. You could then do a few videos about your services. You could do a podcast about what you do with clients. That's a plug for Neil Valeo, who's my producer, to hire him. He's incredible. But not too many people because he still needs to have time for me. You could also have modality in platforms that you show up on, because how you show up on LinkedIn is very different from how you'd show up on Instagram, which is still different from how you'd show up on TikTok. You could even create characters and act them out in a scene and just have lots and lots of fun with it. Join the weeniecast hyperfocus 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 so we're talking about variety and modality. Another thing that you can create variety in is where you create your content. I know it sounds super basic, but changing up your workspace really does infuse a new element into your marketing. Going to a coffee shop and writing out a ton of LinkedIn posts, or going to a local park dressed as a hot dog and having a friend film you, that also inspires a whole bunch of content. And yes, I say that from experience. And to be clear, you don't have to go dress as a hot dog. You can dress up as any, any kind of food that you want. A carrot, a pickle, a hamburger. Although they're very big, they're kind of inconvenient to get in and out of doors. Okay, so you're getting immediate feedback. You're also being okay with the occasional post where you don't get immediate feedback, but you may get a client out of it. You're creating a lot of variety in your social media content and you're having a lot of fun with it. Next, I want to talk about how. How do you make this a daily, non negotiable. Now, the number one most impactful thing that I'm convinced changed the course of my business was making a rule for myself to post on LinkedIn every day for a hundred days. This is bright smack dab in the pandemic. I'd had a session with Leah Turner, who I have recommended before on this podcast and I will recommend again. She's absolutely incredible. Side note, she has done so much fundraising for this organization called Hope4. She actually literally just went to Moldova and was working with refugees from the Ukraine and giving them food and nappies. Actually she calls them nappies. In America we call them diapers. But she is talking about it so much that I've adopted that British word. Anyway, also giving them money so that they can afford to live for the next few months. She she's doing some amazing work here and I point to this a to tell you to go work with her. She's incredible. Support her causes. But I also want to highlight that if there's a cause that you care about, there's nothing wrong with you incorporating that in what you post about. Because I want to highlight what she has shared about her work with this organization has obviously had an impact on me and it's obviously had an impact on her whole audience. And even if that is not their cause, even if it's not the thing that they care the most about, they're going to see the passion behind it. They're going to see that she cares about other humans. It tells you a great deal when you learn about the organizations and causes that someone supports. I have a former client who is in the BYOB program. Her main goal in building her business is is to be able to have a rescue dog sanctuary. She wants to be able to afford to house any rescue dog that's too difficult to be housed by a family. She talks about it a lot and guess who she attracts? She attracts clients and people into her world who also love dogs, who also care about dogs, who also care about rescue dogs. It's also a great conversation starter for people to start building that relationship with you. You Hey, I saw your post about donating X, Y and Z dollars to this organization and how you do all this fundraising in your business. That's incredible. You know what got you started with that? So don't shy away from creating variety we're jumping back into the variety talk. Don't shy away from creating variety in what you talk about because you're allowed to share who you are and what you give a about. Anyway, back to my point about posting on LinkedIn. So I had this appointment with Leah Turner. I was one of her very first clients in May of 2020 and I made this commitment that I was going to post every Damn Day on LinkedIn and I literally gave myself in the beginning a two hour block every morning because I wasn't in the habit of writing something long form every single day. And in the beginning, I will be honest, sometimes it took me three hours. Sometimes I would spend an hour and a half agonizing and tormenting myself over one post. And then in a split second, I'd get an idea for another post and I'd write it in five minutes. This didn't last forever, okay? This lasted for maybe a month. And then it became easier. I was able to do my writing in about an hour. And then it got easier. 45 minutes. And now I can spit out a post in anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. When business owners start posting on social media to market their businesses, that's a really hard thing to do. And it's harder still when you're not confident in your writing, when you don't have the time carved out in your day, when you feel all this pressure that this one post has to do all the marketing for you in a single week, when you make it a daily non negotiable, you force yourself into this writing workshop or this filming workshop, depending on which social media platform you're showing up on. That forces you to practice it to get better. Because the only way to get better is to do it. And the only way you're going to see what works in your marketing is to share it and see what resonates. One thing that I wish I had tracked this whole time, I wish I had tracked every single LinkedIn post that I had done the three days prior to a client booking a sales call with me. If you're in the beginning of your journey, I urge you to start tracking that data. Anytime you get a notification in your email that someone booked a sales call with you, I want you to go into your social media platforms and I want you to save the three posts that were the most recent because that's more than likely the thing that pushed them over the edge to book a call with you. Another part of posting every single day is also going on and engaging every day, commenting on other people's posts. And not just people who you think are your ideal client, other creators, other people who are posting every day because let me tell you, you're a creator now. If you're posting every damn day, you're in the creator club. These are your people. And let me tell you, becoming one of these people is the most fun thing in the world because these are the best people. These are the people who believe in themselves and put themselves out there and are brave and vulnerable and they make the best friends. They really do. I've made so many friends through social media, I Just, I never anticipated that as a child. Obviously social media didn't exist when I was a child, but. Which makes me feel super old. But if someone told me that there would be a little rectangular screen thing that I would carry around every single day and I would meet people through this device that lived all over the world, did all different kinds of jobs, had all different kinds of backgrounds, I would have called you a crazy person. I would've thought you were delusional. Cause what the are you talking about? But guys, we live in this magical world where that actually happens. I had, I have this friend who lives in Malaysia. His name is Ruben Miranda. He's so funny. He posts the funniest things on LinkedIn. And we're friends now. We're on WhatsApp together. And I went to message him and I realized that I had missed his Merry Christmas text message to me over the holidays. And I sent him a video. I'm like walking the dog and I'm like, ruben, I'm so sorry I missed your Christmas message. I'm just sending this video to say, hi, I hope you're doing great, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he sends me all these snarky messages back about me being on the street at night. What am I doing there? But that's the power of social media. You can grow your business and you can grow your life. And for people with adhd, one of the things that we have struggled with our whole lives is this idea of compartmentalization. We don't understand how someone can go into work and just be their work self with their work personality and their work responsibilities, and then go outside of work and have all different interests. I bet if you were to go and interview any coworkers of someone with adhd, they would be able to tell you all the hobbies that person has. They'd be able to tell you pretty much everything that's going on in that person's life. Because we don't know how to compartmentalize. It's not our strength. When we're passionate about something or someone or something cool is coming up, we are consumed by it. What's funny though is that it actually doesn't detract from our work. It actually, when we have that passion for something, it actually makes us so much more productive in any work that we set forth on. But when you make something a daily non negotiable, what you're doing is you're, you're working out all the barriers that would be there if it weren't a daily non negotiable. Right? So, like writing for me, when I first started, it took two hours a day. That's not realistic to spend two hours a day forever. It just wouldn't be a good return on investment. However, the fact that I made it a daily non negotiable, I was able to shave that time down because over time I got faster. And the only way you're going to get faster at something is if you do it. Imagine if you were to ask Usain Bolt how he got so fast. He's going to tell you, well, I ran a lot, I trained a lot. He didn't become fast really, you know, overnight. He had to work at it. I love the show West Wing and it's like this idyllic political drama and you watch these characters who have to be under incredible pressure all the time. You think, how are they dealing with this? And it's like, well, I think that's the magic of our electoral process, is that they are under scrutiny 24 7. Anything they've ever done is under scrutiny. They have to answer to absolutely everything. Going through a process. Process like that really would prepare you to be in a high pressure role like that. Like, if you were to throw me into the Oval Office right now, I would probably crumble in about five minutes. So you want to do this every day. You want to build that muscle, you want to make it fun for yourself and build this community around you. And you want to learn to show up as yourself without hiding yourself, without putting on pretension, without putting on a mask, without trying to be someone else. You want to show up because the only way people can hire you is if they know that you exist. And we all need someone like Leah Turner. We all need someone who's going to show us how we can use something to make it most effective for us. Now, next, let's talk about outsourcing, because this is one of the biggest questions I get from my clients when they first start with me. They've struggled for a really long time to promote their businesses online and it's just not going well. And when can I outsource this? Good news and bad news. You can outsource it either right now, but it's going to cost you a lot of money. And you're still going to have to put a lot of work in because it's still going to have to be in your voice. It's still going to have to be about you. Before I worked with Leah, there was this copywriter who sold this packet of templates for LinkedIn. And I bought them and I went through them and some of them were okay, but some of them would be completely nuts for me to share. I mean, there was one template in there where she talked about breaking her leg. I've never broken my leg. My leg bones are still in the same factory configuration as they were when I came out of the uterus. Me going on social media and posting about how I broke my leg and how it's affected my business and all this stuff is not going to be helpful to my marketing. Because could you imagine the comment section like, oh my God, Katie, you broke your leg. You never told me that. And then me saying, well, no, I never actually broke my leg. This was just a template that I got from a lady who's a copywriter and she said that this would get me clients. And like I said before, unless you have a really convincing doppelganger, an identical twin who has the same hairstyle and fashion style as you, or you've managed to figure out how to clone yourself, you are still going to have to show up in pictures, in video, in lives. You can't outsource that shit. And hopefully, yes, one day let's cross our fingers that you're gonna be as wealthy as Gary Vaynerchuk, who just gets to hire a bunch of people to walk around with him and film him, as he says, semi smart shit, who then take it back to the studio and work it into 17 different kinds of social media posts. But for now, with your just starting a business budget, the best thing you can do is to learn how to show up every damn day as yourself. And let's be real, you have adhd, you have so many interests, you have so many things to talk about. It's going to be so much more interesting if you're out there posting yourself. So one of the things that I work on with my clients quite often is this fear of, well, Katie, I'm not interesting enough. Like, I've lived a very typical life. I went to high school, went to college, got a job, maybe got married. Like, there's nothing exciting in there. I've never done an Eat Pray Love year, never gone skydiving. The list goes on and on and on and on. Because, yes, we're bombarded by all these super interesting stories that are really dramatic. So one of the things I work on with my clients is really showing them how the regular everyday moments that they experience can also be interesting. I had this one client who shared this post that I remember to this day, and to this day, it is his highest performing post that he's ever had. So he, like most of us, was getting into his car one morning. He'd put his. His child in the backseat and he's gonna take her to preschool. And he, while he was putting her in the car, put his coffee on the roof of the. The car. And you know where I'm going with this. He then proceeded to get in the car himself and started to back out of his driveway and he heard that plop. And we all know that plop because it's just like we've all done it. We've all put our coffee on the top of our car and forgotten it and then started driving. And then we don't have coffee anymore. Just all over the road. He stopped and he was really bummed out and he got out of his car and he looked and it had landed right side up. It did not spill. And in this post, he. He writes about how he's convinced that God intervened in this moment and didn't want him to be not caffeinated that day. It's such a normal moment that so many of us have experienced. And yet it was his top performing post of all time. And he's a great writer. He's an incredible writer. He is a litigation attorney, so he has interesting stories to talk about. And this post, this. This post talking about just a small, insignificant moment that most of us have experienced and we can empathize with, that was one of his top liked posts. So if you're worried that you're not going to be able to chase likes because you have a boring life, so do I. So do I. So do most of my clients. There's nothing wrong with that. And you're actually just not giving yourself credit for all the tiny, interesting moments that you live every single day. And so when I work with a client, what we do often the first few months is we pinpoint what those moments are and which moments are going to be most interesting to your ideal clients. I hope you're enjoying listening to the Weeniecast, as we affectionately are calling it these days. I'd love to take our podcast and listener relationship to the next level. Join my ADHD community where you'll find people just like you ready to help you overcome any business challenges that you have. You'll find it@weenicast.com members and so the next day, she comes back to the fountain and she goes up to the second old man and she says again, hi. And she introduces herself. And so, fucking hell. Seriously, Luna, join the Weenacast hyper focused 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 sponsors, 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.