Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

Build your wings before you jump

It’s scary leaving a full-time job to start freelancing or consulting.

Someone asked me recently how I overcame my fear when I made the leap.

My answer? I did freelancing on nights and weekends, saved as much as possible, and designed my business for recurring revenue.

It’s hard to survive as a new freelancer or consultant without cash in the bank and some predictable revenue.

Hell, it’s hard to run even a mature freelance or consulting business without recurring revenue.

You need money to give you peace of mind and time to build the business properly. And it does take time.

Nobody hires a desperate consultant.

No matter what, it’s going to be scary to go all-in on self-employment. And it won’t be easy to juggle a full-time job while doing freelance/consulting work on the side.

But this approach is a lot less risky than building your wings after you jump.

Build your wings before you jump

Using focus to your advantage

Over time, your business will accrue “things”.

Projects, products, services, clients, team members, domains, subscriptions, commitments, promised deliverables—all kinds of things.

Each “thing” represents some degree of resources and/or mental overhead. And there’s only so much to go around.

Remember to keep stripping out the things in your business that no longer serve you.

Use focus to your advantage.

The smallest possible step

We all get stuck sometimes. We want to do something but for some reason we don’t act on it.

So instead, we dance around it. We procrastinate. We ponder. We ask a few people what they think.

Their positive assurances gives us some relief from the tension. It feels like progress has been made.

But then nothing happens. The idea fades away. We lose interest, and tomorrow it’s something else.

Repeat the process all over again.

What’s really happening?

Fear is happening. Whether you call it that or not, that’s what it is.

And we all experience it—especially with the ideas most dear to our hearts. Which is all the more reason we shouldn’t give into it.

If you want to see if an idea will work, take the smallest possible step.

You don’t know if something will work—or even if you’ll like it—unless you try. Take the smallest possible step.

Fall in love with the process—not your products

It’s okay to fall in love with your products and services.

The details of what you do, how you package and price it, your business model or the delivery mechanism you use, the craftsmanship… everything.

That’s all fine and well.

But if you want to be in business a long time, it’s a lot better to fall in love with the process of finding solutions to the challenges your ideal clients care about solving.

So yes, fall in love with your craft. But stay flexible about how you solve problems until you find what works—and then keep innovating forever.

170. Building around your super-consumers

Super-consumers are the 10% of your customers who account for upwards of 50% of your profit.

All industries have them. All of us are super-consumers of at least something. It’s true. And for very logical reasons.

In this episode, I break down the concept as coined by Eddie Yoon in his book, Superconsumers—and why it matters to your both business and the clients you serve at a strategic level.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

Why your new products or services don’t sell

The longer I do education and advisory work, the more I notice how hard—if not impossible—it is to create and sell a new product or service based solely on my own imagination.

And the closer I am to my ideal target market, the easier it is for me to know what to offer.

Why? Because I talk to them. There’s no magic secret there.

If you’re just getting started, optimize for conversations. Reach out to people. See what they are working on. Build or join a community with them.

Try to observe what challenges they have without imposing your ideas on them.

Start with the ideal target market, actually speak to them, deliver a custom solution, then figure out how to productize and communicate it later on.

No matter how smart you are, it rarely works any other way. Not for something new, at least.

Write for the platform

I write differently on LinkedIn than I do on Twitter or email.

That’s because each channel is different. The audience is different. The context and expectations are different.

And so my writing naturally is different, too.

For example, I am writing this in my actual email client because I know most people will read this via email. It naturally helps me write for an email audience.

It’s a weird hack, but it’s true.

When I open LinkedIn, I naturally say and write different things. It’s not super conscious, either. It just happens.

The platform we write for shapes the form and style of our writing.

You can see an example of that in my post on LinkedIn today. I don’t typically post stuff like that.

It’s fine to cross-post your ideas on other platforms, but it’s even better if you can write for each platform in the way they’re uniquely designed.

Thinking like an agency

There’s a common misconception that marketing advisors don’t execute.

The reality is, we do execute. We just don’t use our hands nor do we manage the day-to-day tasks.

In this episode, I talk about how to think like an agency (even if you’re doing advisory work).

At the end of the day, you’re still responsible for execution. You just do it differently than a typical agency.

Listen in and use this way of thinking in your own business—and during sales conversations when delivering this idea matters most.

Click to listen if you’re receiving this by email/RSS.

Finding your thing

About five years ago, I met Gary Vaynerchuk briefly after a conference.

I asked him whether he thought it was possible to build a business doing pure strategy/advisory work.

I told him it was what I liked and was best at, but I wasn’t sure if it was a sustainable idea in the marketing field.

Gary has a several-hundred-person marketing agency. Love him or hate him, he knows a few things.

He told me I should do it if that was my thing. He made it sound obvious, as in, “if it’s your thing, you have to do it”.

While that’s typical Gary advice, it gave me a nudge to keep pursing this line of work.

As the years go by, his advice was not only good, it really was the obvious thing for me to do. I’m glad I listened.

Now I ask you, what is your “thing”? Are you doing it yet?

This is your nudge to lean into it.

—kevin

P.S. Just for fun, here’s photo evidence of the encounter:

Kevin x Gary Vaynerchuk

Why the best marketing KPI dashboard is a spreadsheet

There are a lot of tools you can use to show your sales and marketing data.

I’ve tried plenty. And while they all have a place, the one I like best is a simple spreadsheet.

Why? Because I can easily see major activities and results over long periods of time—allowing my clients and I to make informed decisions.

With one spreadsheet, I can track inputs (i.e. number of blog posts published) and outcomes (i.e. sales close ratios).

I can combine financial performance with several marketing channel analytics in one view.

I can see how one thing impacts the others at a glance. Like dials on a control board, I can make tweaks to our approach with relative ease.

I even can use mathematical formulas to surface other insightful data, such as repeat purchase rates, marketing efficiency ratios, or payback periods.

I also can quickly add and remove rows depending on what questions we’re asking, making it a fluid and customizable experience.

Most importantly, it’s the place where results can’t hide. It gives total transparency on what’s working or not. 

As an advisor, it’s your ethical duty to provide visibility into everything you do. Too much of the industry lives in obfuscation.

If you need a KPI template, I share mine (and many more templates) with members of Mindshare Pro.

Whether you use mine or not, I highly recommend instituting a similar practice.

Your clients will also love it, and that’s just good for business.