Janet Bartoli - Bartoli Consulting Group

Just like that, as we always do, we ended up just where we're supposed to be. Hey everyone, welcome to Creative on Purpose Live, conversations about making a better living and a bigger impact by defining, developing, and delivering the difference only you can make. I'm Scott Perry, Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose, with a really bad cold. My apologies. If you're looking to get clearer about who you really are so you can get closer to what you really want in life, visit Creative on Purpose today to get started playing your game on your terms without compromise. Let's meet today's guest, Janet. Welcome to the broadcast. Please tell our viewers who you are, what you're up to these days, and where can people go to learn more about you and the difference you're making?

Thanks, Scott. I'm Janet Bartoli. And what I've been up to, I would say it's sort of a two-part. I've been entrenched in search engine marketing for the last 20 years. Um, what I've been up to lately, I've been really focused heavily on a specific audience who seems to have been forgotten when it comes to digital marketing, which is the staffing and recruiting industry. So I've been working with them on, uh, really developing and crafting an inbound marketing strategy. They're really geniuses when it comes to outbound, but when it comes to the inbound, that's really where they need the help. So, um, I've been, uh, really supporting them there.

Awesome. And you can learn more about what Janet is up to on her website, mycandidatepipeline.com. Janet, I'm always curious about how people came to be doing the work that they're doing. I doubt that 9-year-old Janet woke up one morning and said, you know what I want to be when I grow up? So give us a little sense of how you came to be doing what you're doing today.

Well, you're right, because there, there was mainframe computers, I think, when I was 9, but maybe not where we are now. True. Um, I think the biggest way to say it is I've always really appreciated technology, even back, you know, if you go even back in the '80s, um, Atari was a piece of technology that was a lot of fun. Um, you know, any kind of anything like that was always of interest to me. Um, I did do, you know, high school, I did go into computers. Science, you know, computer science. I did have a tech support background, so I do have sort of that IT background. So back in the early 2000s, I started a business, a consultancy, where I was just building websites for small business owners, and I niched it to women small business owners in particular, because at the time— and, and I don't know how much of it is true now— but at the time, there were a lot of women business owners who weren't really trusting of the typical maybe 20-something-year-old dude who, you know, was probably trying to sell them on some maintenance package or a website build. So I thought that would be the best way to kind of say, hey, as a woman business owner, I can help you. And so we would do, you know, we would work together from there. I created workshops where I would sort of like do presentations and teach them. Um, it then really snowballed from there. I then decided to broaden my reach. So I worked within digital marketing agency to get a lot more experience with a lot bigger brands over the course of years. One fun fact, when I was at Accenture for 5 years, I got to live and work in Italy for 9 months helping Fiat build out their, their search marketing platform across 8 different countries. So it's, as I said, it really has snowballed and it's been a lot of fun. I can definitely say in my industry is definitely— it's ever-evolving and challenging. Um, Google search is not the same as it is, you know, today as it was 20 years ago, for sure.

Yeah, well, what I love about that story is that you, you saw an audience that had a problem that you could help them solve, and you simply decided to help them, and you kind of figured it out As you went, and, you know, our mutual friend Laurel Portier was on a call, uh, on this broadcast yesterday or the day before, and we were talking about this very thing. Like, you know, what you have to do as a consultant or a coach is not help people solve situations, because a situation— solving a situation is a side effect of solving the next necessary problem that needs to be solved. And so I love— and I also love the way that you started niching down right away, you know, helping women business owners, an underserved market, I'm sure, at that time. So that's really fascinating. And what you're doing now, if I was hearing it right, is you're helping businesses build better teams. Is that fair?

Yeah, absolutely. Building better teams, better strategies, all with the goal of, you know, and for this, it's always been when I'm working with, with clients is how do we improve your business over time? And then after having that experience with the large brands, I always come back to the smaller business. I just, I have a special soft spot in my heart for the small business who is really just trying to make things work. And they don't necessarily have a goal of becoming a multibillion-dollar corporation, but they're just trying to make something happen. And that's really why I've taken all of those, that experience come back full circle, back to working with them again. But it's now taking all those experiences and helping them. So yes, building, building strategic teams internally. Also, my agency, we have people that if they don't want to build an internal team, we can basically become their fractional team and then just kind of build in alongside them, building different digital marketing programs. Whether it's paid or organic and anything having to do with inbound. So adding a live chat feature to their website or email marketing or anything that's gonna help reach their prospective clients and then engage them through conversions.

Nice. Well, so what I'm hearing is that you have two ways they can go. They can do a Done With You program where you're a trusted guide helping them put things in place that they need, or a done-for-you where they could just hire you and your team and you can work that part of their business that maybe allows them to put more of their energy and effort and attention into doing what they do best. When you're working with, you know, when, when you are starting to negotiate and connect with and have conversations with the businesses that you work with, what do you see as the primary— like, are there— is there a theme or a repeated pattern of the kind of situations, problems that they have that you see kind of happening over and over again?

Yeah. And I would say that really pretty much blanket across the board, whether it's a very large corporation like Verizon, for example, or a very small, you know, locally owned business, the same problem is we don't have a strategy and we don't know where to start from. And we don't know, you know, being everywhere, is that really something we should be doing? Where should we start from? So that's, that, as I said, it's across the board. It doesn't matter the size of the company. That's always the number one problem. Then it's just a matter of having the conversation almost, it's overwhelming to them, which it certainly is. And then it's just having a conversation with them about, Here's what we can do. What ultimately is your goals and objectives for the business? That's really what it comes down to. Um, there are so many SEO freelancers that are talking about keywords or the backlinks. Like, they don't— no business owner cares about the number of backlinks they ever acquire, because what is that at the end of the day from a revenue perspective? You know, um, mostly it's not. So it may be vanity stuff, but we want to get to that, to sales and, and leads, is really what every business needs.

Yeah, well, I love that you shared that oftentimes businesses don't know where they're starting from, because literally just an hour ago I posted on my social media this idea of, you know, if— how can you get where you really want to go if you don't know where you're really starting from? How can you become the person you want to be if you don't know who you are right now? A Google Map requires a specific destination, but it also has to have a clearly defined starting point in order to create that vector and then troubleshoot, iterate, and strategize your way from where you are to where you want to be. And I think that humans are, you know, it doesn't matter if it's business or in your personal life or your family life, we are aiming creatures. We love to put a, you know, point on the horizon and say, that's where I'm going to go. But if, but we're not as good at, in fact, we're often complicit in getting in our own way, because we don't see where we are really starting from. But also, we are not really good at seeing all of the biases, the beliefs, false beliefs that, that, you know, impede our ability to even start. So how do you help? How do you help this, you know, how do you help navigate that in the businesses that you work with in terms of how do you help them see, hey, I get that you want to be here, but let's find out where you are now so we can chart that course.

Again, if there's a difference in the size of the business in terms of the response you're going to get. I mean, if you're talking about a very large corporation, the response is, we have some historical data we can share with you. They don't necessarily have understood it or looked at it. And so I will then always come back to them. What does this mean to you? There's this conversation. If it's the other end, a smaller business, let's say, trying to get to the 7 figures, then there could be other things like limited beliefs around who they think that they can be. Oh, there's no way I could possibly be a 7-plus-figure you know, you know, a business owner. Um, there's no way that I can do that, or I don't, I don't necessarily— I'm not interested in growth, which is always an interesting, um, statement as a business. Um, so maybe they're just happy with getting referrals. It just says to me that there's— they're not thinking of themselves as what they could potentially become. Just like, as you were saying, you know, really it's, it's a matter of just stop, take a break, and figure out you know, what is it, the purpose of this business? Like, who are you really trying to— what are you trying to achieve ultimately? And if you put a timeline on it, it may not be fair to say in the next 5 or 10 years it should look like this. Just how about the next year, you know, or the next, you know, quarter? You know, what is it that I'm trying to accomplish? And then work up to that. But you're right, there are, there are many times they don't know You know, if you're going to get to, you know, if you're going to start, you know, looking at a map, you have to know where your destination is. You don't go to an airport and just get a ticket to anywhere, although that might be a fun thing to do.

Yeah, there's, there's, there's always a time and a place for a little serendipity. I just want to give a shout out to my friend Cato, who's watching and appreciates this. You know what, what, what contributes to missing seeing where you are or where that is. And I think you really addressed that beautifully and You know, one of the things I loved about the way you started that answer is you gave the answer to every complicated question. It depends, right? It's so, you know, what I love about the way that you approach this, you know, where a big box agency might say, here is the solution. We have a bespoke system, a signature framework. We're going to, cram you through it, um, and, you know, and get— you'll get out the other side where you want to be. And if you don't, it's probably your fault for not having the right mindset or not following directions or whatever. But what you're saying is, um, you know, the needs, wants, dreams, and desires of a small business are different than a, than a big business. And the other thing that, um, you were speaking to, uh, is an idea that, that, um, we call microstepping. It's like Yes, we want to have a vision for where we want to be 5, 10, 20 years from now. But the most important thing is what's the micro, like what's the next thing, like right, do the right things in the right order, in the right sequence or at the right time. And you will make progress. And if you're, and I love also that you talked about pausing, zooming out and like, let's. Let's collect the data, let's analyze, and then strategize and execute the next best step based on, you know, the information, the logic, reasoning, etc., that we have. So I think that's, that's all really powerful. What do you, what do you find? Is it, is it frequent that there's some resistance to this kind of slow is smooth, but smooth is fast approach that you're advocating with the people you work with?

Not really. Well, again, you know, thinking about who is that person, I will— I love working with clients that are very open-minded in terms of like, I have no idea what to expect. That's great because I can— now your expectations are set so low. Now let's kind of build from there, um, and, and what, what we can accomplish together, rather than, um, maybe a prospective client who comes at me and says, I want this, this and in, in this way. So you're basically telling, you know, somebody to, you know, it, it's different if you want somebody to build you a house. You have an architect. This is how many bedrooms I need. This is, this is the, the square footage. That's one thing. But when you're talking about customizing a digital marketing strategy, it, again, there's a lot of other knowledge that you, you should have, um, in terms of what it is that that you should expect. You know, are you going to have this? You know, if you, if you start anything like social media, I mean, if you just get on a platform, you don't— you shouldn't expect to get on TikTok, although maybe you could, and then in 3 days get, you know, 1,000 followers, perhaps. But again, that's such a new platform with a new, relatively new algorithm. But if you're, if you're on any other platform, you have to understand what the expectations are. But even pull back from that. Where are the people that you're wanting to work with? I mean, are they hanging out there? And if so, go for it. I'm predominantly in LinkedIn because the people I speak to are staffing and recruiting. Those people live in, in LinkedIn. So that's where I am most of my time.

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate that. It, it actually speaks to the book I just published, um, The Coaching Business Prescription, which is like, and it's really, you know, even though the book targets coaches, the fundamental principles apply to any business. What do you need first? Well, you need to have an offer that is irresistible enough that you can put in front of an audience that's eager enough. And then you have to have the strategy for how are you going to put that offer in front of that audience? And if you're not clear enough on those three things, You can, you can waste a lot of time and burn out very quickly trying to be on TikTok and Instagram and all the places that maybe you don't belong, or your audience doesn't even exist. And it's, you know, what I hear you advocating is let's, let's dial in these, you know, let's dial in the fundamentals and reason from first principles and figure out like what, what has to be put into place. And then what's the next step for each of those things? And I love that reference you made to the business that says, "Well, here's what I want." And it's like, OK, why are you hiring me? Well, like, why don't you just, why don't you just do that? And I imagine that that's, you know, human beings are fascinating creatures. We love our beliefs and our biases. And we like to think that we know ourselves much better than we do. How do you, how do you navigate that conversation where someone's saying, I want this, this, and this, and you're saying that actually you don't need that, that, that, you need to collect some data here, here, and here?

Well, so way back when I did get started, I would let the client pretty much lead me. And that's a mistake that I was making at the time, thinking they know their business best. This is what they said they wanted. Now I'm going to try and shoehorn something into creating some kind of a Frankenstein strategy plan for them and hope it works, you know. Um, now, and, and, you know, in the recent years, it's pretty much this is— I will interview them and have a discovery call to really understand a lot and then construct a strategy that's not a cookie cutter, you know, just like you were saying before. I'm just gonna, you know, crank this out. This is going to work for you. But every business is unique and every business is different. What you specialize in, what your unique value proposition is, all of those things requires a specific unique plan. So after I interview them and then say, well, you know, basically if I heard you correctly, this is what you're looking for, and this is, here's the, this is, uh, the strategy that we've developed. Tactically, this is what we're gonna do to make sure that we can kind of meet or exceed all of your KPIs or the, the success metrics that you shared with me. And then we'll just keep tracking that. Then it's important to have an ongoing monthly measurement call where we're talking about, again, here's the strategy, this is what we, what we agreed on, and this is how we're tracking. And then when they start seeing it working, you know, then they really pull back and then say, okay, I guess, you know, I guess she knows what she's talking about. So let me just like get my— I'll take my hands off the steering wheel and then just, you know, just let us go. So that's— that always works the best.

Yeah, I love that. I was just having a conversation with my friend Vivica, who's a data analyst. And, you know, I know how important data is. And I know that you should be making data-driven decisions. I freaking hate collecting data, analyzing data, and planning around data. But, um, you know, like, like most coaches and consultants, I get really enamored of the tactical things and the tools. Like, oh, this person says that if I get on, like, execute this Instagram strategy, I'll get more calls. Or this person says if I, um, I'm only one funnel away from getting, you know, The, the Business of My Dreams. And, um, the thing that I notice, and I'm curious about your perspective on this, is again, human beings are— have a default programming for collecting more. We like to collect stuff. We like to collect dots. And the problem with collecting dots is if you are creating a system to help you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, everything that you add to that system is decreasing the effectiveness and efficiency of that system. Because system reliability theory says that when you multiply the percentage of effectiveness, efficiency of each component, you're going to drive it down. So oftentimes what I find is I have to help clients see all the things that we actually need to prune. Like we need to take this, this, this, this, this, and this out. And here are the 3 things that if we get right enough, will start to get us some traction, and then we can work on raising the floor. But again, human beings, we, we like our shiny things. We like to chase the next shiny object. So is that something that you find true with the people you're working with? And how do you help them? If so, how do you help them stop chasing impressions and instead do the thing they need to do to make an impact?

Well, so one of the things I tell them to do is stop using tools you shouldn't be using. For example, if you, you know, if you're an accountant, why are, why are you, would you have an SEMrush account or an Ahrefs account and you're tracking your keywords? Like, what is that really doing? Um, and do you even know what you're doing? Well, just, I mean, you're looking at keywords to see where, where you're ranking is completely meaningless, especially in 2023. So what I tell them is just stop all— they'll tell me, oh, I have a subscription to these. I'm like, well, we do too. That's what, you know, you don't basically, you know, I like to use different metaphors or analogies. And it's kind of like, you know, if you have, um, you know, let's say, um, an HVAC system issue in your home, do you go get your toolbox out and start hacking through things trying to figure it out? Or do you just call up that person and say, hey, can you come on over and take a look? Uh, I'm having some issues with my heating system. You know, it's, it is like that. Or, you know, you know, like a doctor. I mean, if you, you have a pain, do you immediately start surgery on yourself? I mean, you have to go see specialists and say, hey, is there, this is kind of what I'm noticing. Is there, are there any, you know, anything you can do to help me out? Um, then we have to do diagnostics and understand what's the root cause of this and prescribe a specific solution to, to remedy that. And that's no matter what business you're in, it's like, if, if that's not your specialty or your core competence, why are you involving yourself into it? So back off, find a subject matter expert, hire them in and have them take it over. And then that's how you're going to grow your business faster by just leveraging other people's, uh, you know, more genius and, and getting them to take those tasks off your plate. So it's a number of things. It helps me with my team be able to help my client, but it also helps them as a business owner just to, you know, relax. We got this. You go do something else.

Right. Yeah. Well, you know, as a dude, of course I'm going to grab the tools and rip right into the HVAC system. Not a good idea. I don't recommend it. But yeah, I really appreciate that analogy because you had— that's the, the beauty of working with a small agency or, or, um, you know, a coaching consultant that is looking for to create a bespoke prescription for your unique situation, um, and the unique problems that you need to solve so that as a side effect of addressing those, your situation, uh, will be solved. Um, and whereas most of the, the gurus in the digital marketing space or The big box companies, consultancies, they're just going to cram you through a system that works for them and a couple of their clients, thinking that, you know, so that becomes a prescriptive solution. What every client needs is a prescription. Well, as our time is winding up here, Janet, I always, the last question is, and you've delivered a ton of wisdom and some golden nuggets of insight that will help anybody that is seeking to fly a little bit higher in the difference only they can make. But if you were to share just one final, it could be a principle, a lesson, a maxim that would help, help someone actually take the next best step into their potential and possibility to make the difference only they can make, what would you share with them?

Well, just as we were saying, I think really focusing in on what it is. If you look at a 90-day, which yes, our friend Laurel has taught, taught us that as well, just looking at 90 days and focusing only in on what those core goals are, uh, then even the podcasts you listen to, if they're talking about things that have nothing to do with what you're trying to focus on for that quarter, I usually just stop. I pause those and then focus in only on the content that I need at that time. Anytime a new offer or something comes your way, if it has nothing to do with your core goals for that quarter, push it off to the side. And I think that helps keep you on track and on your target for, for that 90-day period of time. And also step away. I like to get out, go for a long run. You have some of the best ideas that help that you just come up with when you're outside and just getting away from, from your office. So, um, so hopefully that, that helps.

Yeah, well, no, I think it really does because our, uh, again, a lot of the gurus are telling us it's all about the hustle and grind. Uh, probably not. So I appreciate that. Well, we thank you all for tuning in. Janet and I really appreciate the gift of your time and attention, and we hope that today's broadcast motivates you to take a bolder step into possibility, to keep go-go going with the Defining, Developing, and Delivering the Difference Only You Can Make, go to creativeonpurpose.com. If you're watching on social media or YouTube, please leave a question or drop your biggest aha lesson or takeaway from this conversation. If you're listening as a podcast, please give us a 5-star rating and a review. It really helps more of the right people connect with the wisdom being shared by my guests. Now, take the insight and inspiration from this conversation and play your game all in and full out. Janet, thank you so much for sharing some of your time, experience, and wisdom with us today.

Thanks so much, Scott Perry. It was really fun to be here.