Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

methodology

Nine tips for greater energy, output, and income

There’s a good chance you’ll run out of energy today before you run out of time to get everything done.

And because of that, we need to manage our energy as or more closely than our time.

The better you do that, the more successful you’ll be.

So how do you manage your energy so you don’t deplete yourself and stunt your growth?

We’ll start with the obvious ones:

  1. We know good sleep is important. If you can get eight hours with no alcohol in your system, you’re golden. Nap if and when you need to as well.
  2. Exercise also helps—a LOT. I aim for 20 minutes per day which usually turns into 40 minutes once I get going. Big energy boosts and mental clarity.
  3. Diet is critical. I try to avoid a lot of carbs that might spike and then crash my blood sugar during the day. I also avoid big meals before dinner if I can.
  4. Meditation helps a lot. Using the Calm app for 20 minutes a day can give you a massive boost to your energy and focus.

These are the obvious ones (but important to work on).

So what else can you do in your businesses specifically to manage and enhance our energy?

For me, these are the big ones.

  1. Remove toxic clients. They’ll drain your energy, cause you stress, and reduce your ability to focus on the things that matter most. Stress is an energy drain that costs you money.
  2. Do work that lights you up. If you can find a way to spend most of your time doing work that actually gives you energy, you’ll be a lot more productive. That’s a choice you can make.
  3. Hire support. The more you can offload admin support and task work, the more time and energy you will have to do the work that matters most. Outsource the stuff you do often that anyone can do.
  4. Work with fewer clients. Sure, you might want to be booked completely solid, but without margin in your day, you’ll burn out. Doing higher value work for fewer clients frees up your time to create assets you can sell at scale and the bandwidth to do your own marketing. Don’t over-book your client work.
  5. Leave time to tinker. You’ll be a better consultant and human if you give yourself time to explore your interests, both professional and personal. Keep tinkering, learning, and exploring in your calendar.

Those are my biggest tips to help you gain more energy and be more productive.

The biggest is keeping room to think and breathe. It helps a lot to have buffer in your day.

So what’s your biggest tip for maximizing your energy and getting more done?

Hit reply and let me know!

How Tim Ferris does his year-end review

I took the entire week off last week to relax and enjoy the holidays. It was the first vacation time I took in a while. Much needed.

I plan to take a few spread out weeks this upcoming year to relax and think. I’m much more productive and have more perspective on things after a week or two off.

Anyway, during the week I did spend time listening to podcasts and thinking about how I want my 2022 to look.

One of the podcasts I listened to was on just this topic by Tim Ferris. It was a short but insightful one.

His approach is to look back at your past year’s calendar, week by week, and see what was things were a net positive or negative in terms of how it made you feel.

Using two columns, one for positive and one for negative, he lists the highs and lows of the year as a way to eliminate the things that he shouldn’t continue into the new year and focus more on the areas that were a net positive.

I’m paraphrasing, but sounded like a helpful approach to review your past year and plan for the new one.

So, I plan to do the same process next week when I get back into work mode. I’ll report back on how it worked.

Give it a listen if it sounds interesting to you: https://tim.blog/2021/12/27/past-year-review/

Was this year a success?

Chances are, you accomplished a lot more this past year that you think.

You never realize it until you stop and reflect.

Look at where you were in January of this year. Now look back two years. Five years. Ten years.

How far have you come? Are you happy with the direction you’re going or do you need to make some changes?

A lot can happen over a decade. It’s hard to think that far into the future, but doing so keeps your direction in line with your values and interests.

Think about what business you want to run for the next ten years. Now’s the time to dream it up in vivid detail.

You can accomplish far more than you think with some longterm thinking and consistent effort towards your goals.

Happy New Year.

Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself

Most of us need to hear new ideas a few times before they sink in.

Sometimes we’re ready for new ideas and sometimes we’re not. Timing is everything.

Even your most read books have new ideas every time you read them.

So if your goal is to help your clients create new ways of thinking, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.

Tell new stories that make the same point. Say things a different way. Come back to your core ideas often.

That’s the best way to make them stick, whether in your content marketing or your advisory work. People do appreciate it, even if they’ve already internalized and implemented your idea.

Repeat yourself as often as it takes. We all need reminders.

How to be hired faster and paid more to do better work

I see a lot of shoddy marketing work out there.

People are offering too many services, not doing what they promised, not actually getting results, and then obfuscating the entire situation.

I’m not saying it’s intentional or malicious, but it happens a lot. Here’s a recent example, and I’ve seen far worse.

Marketing, like many industries, is unregulated. Which means anybody can do it. Which means finding quality work out there is not easy.

So when I say it’s good to specialize, I mean finding an industry and/or a small set of core services to offer that you can do excellent work at.

Sure, you can branch out to other industries. You can offer tangential services. I understand the need to do that and it can be done well sometimes.

In fact, I did that for a long time with my agency before I specialized. But looking back, my agency work wasn’t always great, either.

At least, not the stuff outside of my core competency that I should have never offered.

As an advisor, I sit on the client side of a lot of work product. I can tell you first-hand that those who specialize tend to be hired faster, paid more, and do better work.

If you’re reading this, you’re already delivering great work for your clients. This isn’t about you.

It’s about the industry. It’s about striving for excellence.

It’s your reminder that success comes from doing less, not more.

Loyalty, acquisition, programs, and campaigns

I stumbled upon an interesting Twitter thread yesterday that brought up a couple concepts worth sharing.

I highly recommend you read the entire thread, but I’ll share my main takeaways below as well.

Here are the highlights of my takeaways:

  • There are two primary kinds of marketing: loyalty and acquisition
  • Loyalty marketing is all about focusing your efforts on repeat purchases (i.e. frequency, transaction value, etc.)
  • Acquisition marketing is all about acquiring new customers to survive.
  • He argues companies who have 40% or less of their customers repurchase in the next year should focus their strategy on acquisition, not loyalty. Makes sense.
  • He argues in a subsequent thread that you usually cant fix those repurchase rates without a shift in what you sell (think a gift shop). So that’s not really a viable solution in most cases.
  • The second big ideas were his view that there are two core ways to approach marketing: campaigns and programs.
  • “A program is a comprehensive strategy to find new customers across all aspects of the business.”
  • “When I worked at Eddie Bauer, we flushed $15,000,000 of television advertising during a few months to generate $15,000,000 in sales (hint – that’s a profit loss of about $9,000,000 … oh my goodness). That was a campaign. But it wasn’t a program.”
  • “Well, “commerce television” is a customer acquisition program … a TV program, sure, but a program. That’s what a program is. All day. Every day. Relentless.”
  • “So I’m beggin’ y’all to give customer acquisition efforts another look. Please. Build a program. Dedicate real resources to the effort. You’re smart enough, talented enough, resourceful enough to be successful!”

Not sure why these ideas clicked with me, but thinking in terms of whether you should be helping your clients with loyalty, acquisition (or both)—and when to do each—was a lightbulb for me. Especially the 40% or less idea.

And then thinking in terms of a program, being an ongoing, ever-present, relentless system that is always working for you—it’s a foundation of what I do with my clients but I never thought of it as distinct from campaigns per se.

But distinguishing that from a campaign, which is more like an event or finite series of events, really shaped how I mentally organize the initiatives we marketers undertake.

Go back and read the full thread. This is the stuff strategy is made of. How you organize and name ideas also matters.

Hope this clicks for you, too.

Actual expertise vs. marketing yourself well

There are two important skills you need to master as an advisor:

  1. Getting business results for your clients
  2. Being able to market yourself well

So which is more important to your long-term success as a consultant?

The truth is, you won’t succeed on the merits of your expertise alone.

People are not lining up to give their business to the smartest consultants on their merits alone. They need to discover them first.

And that means, you need to invest considerable time into marketing yourself if you want to see the fruits of success.

Marketing yourself should be a little hard—at least until you have momentum. It takes work, there’s no ways around that.

But here’s the thing: you won’t be able to market yourself well if you don’t also have deep expertise at what you do.

The same way having expertise alone won’t solve your client attraction problems, neither will good marketing.

You can’t do good marketing as a consultant without some level of true expertise at your craft.

That’s because much of marketing as a consultant is sharing what you know with the world for free. If what you know isn’t valuable enough, it won’t attract many buyers.

So the answer to succeeding as a marketing isn’t one or the other. It takes true expertise and a lot of marketing to be successful.

There is no fast-tracking true expertise nor the good marketing that stems from it.

Keep putting in the work and good things will happen.

Is it fear or a desire to do things right?

Sometimes, the right approach is to wait until your ideas are perfect before you share them with the world.

But more often, the better approach is to run with your best ideas, see how they perform, then iterate until you find the traction you need.

Ideas need oxygen to thrive. Maybe not at first, but they need it sooner than later.

The oxygen gives your ideas life. It gives you feedback. Your ideas need feedback to be successful in the same way plants need sunlight.

The key is knowing whether your need for perfection is based on fear or wanting to do things right the first time.

There’s a difference. Only you can know for sure what is driving you.

Either way, don’t suffocate your ideas.

Make time for tinkering

The other day, I made an argument about why you should only chase one shiny object at a time.

My point was that when you pursue too many business ideas, you end up succeeding only partially at any of them… if you’re lucky.

And while that’s true from my experience, I think there’s an important distinction to make: tinkering.

My entire life, I’ve been a tinkerer. Mostly as it relates to technology.

It’s this curiosity and explorative nature that led to the career I have today.

Some 20+ years later, I still find myself tinkering with technology and getting a lot of benefit from it.

These days, I explore everything from web3 to photography, video and audio production, web development, new software, hardware devices, and a lot more.

I’m not yet sure what benefits these explorations will have yet, but I do know it will lead somewhere. It always has.

So don’t be afraid to tinker. Make time to explore your interests. It can be good for business.

But when it comes to the business ideas you decide to run with, choose wisely. Build one thing at a time.

Not because it’s a forever decision, but because you don’t go far without focus.

Chase one shiny object at a time

Last week, several members of Mindshare got together for our monthly community coffee meetup.

The meetups are a chance for us to talk shop and get feedback on our immediate situations from others in the group.

One of the trends I noticed on this call—and in other contexts before this—was people wanting to do multiple things at once.

Multiple businesses, multiple target markets, and multiple value propositions across each.

There’s no shame in any of this. Literally all of us fall into this trap at some point. Including me.

That’s because as marketers, we have the skills to launch a number of ideas quickly and fairly easily.

We can help all kinds of businesses. We can do all kinds of things for people. And there are tons of opportunities everywhere.

But the problem is, when you chase too many things, it becomes hard to succeed at any one thing.

Our attention gets diluted, our energy is dispersed, and our time is always scarce. Our work suffers as a result.

And that doesn’t even take into account how the market perceives you.

When you confuse the market with mixed messages about various projects, markets, and claims of expertise, they begin to wonder what—if anything—you’re truly expert in.

It’s hard enough to get one idea off the ground, let alone multiple.

Better to get one thing going successfully first. Then, if you aren’t happy, consider trying something new.

Chase one shiny object at a time.